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| Photo credit: Source unspecified |
The urge to laugh at whatever threatens or upsets us is a natural one for the majority of human beings. It's a healthy way to display our contempt for the person or idea that's making us uncomfortable while denying that person or idea the ability to do so. If we refuse to take X, Y or Z seriously, keep telling ourselves that he, she or it is intrinsically ridiculous and therefore poses no threat to our way of life or personal well-being, then logic suggests that we simultaneously rid ourselves of any need to fear it.
That, at least, is the theory. In practice, however, the technique of humor-fueled denial doesn't always work.
In common with much of the non-American world, I found it hilarious that someone as consistently risible as Donald Trump planned to run for President back in 2016. How could this orange-haired buffoon — a third-rate television celebrity whose greatest claim to fame prior to announcing his candidacy was hosting a reality show which made his weekly bleating of the words 'You're fired!' an internationally recognized catchphrase — have any chance of being elected leader of the planet's largest and, at that time, most powerful democracy? It seemed not only hilarious but unthinkable, as did the election result which saw Trump catapulted into the White House despite the claims of many political analysts that such an outcome was 'impossible.'
'How the hell could he have won?' I often asked myself in the days following what, for me and millions of other people, was a deeply disturbing turn of events. Even more disturbingly, how could he have been perceived by predominantly low income, rural-based voters as the candidate capable of making the United States 'great' again? Were these people living in a bubble? Did they not realize that Trump was a child of privilege whose wealth was largely inherited from his father, a New York City real estate developer? Did they not see where and how he lived, how many oversized monuments he'd erected to himself merely to gratify his equally oversized ego?
My fear in 2016 was that Trump's election slogan — 'Make America Great Again!' — would become the rallying cry of every gun-toting right-wing looney looking to justify their white supremacist, Christian fundamentalist, anti-inclusivist agenda. Which specific period of American 'greatness,' I burned to ask his more rabid supporters, was Trump planning to restore? The colonial period which saw rapacious white settlers steal land from First Nations people before, in many cases, consciously and methodically exterminating them? The era which saw a coalition of southern states break away from the Union and go to war over their so-called 'God given right' to perpetuate the barbaric practice of slavery?
That, at least, is the theory. In practice, however, the technique of humor-fueled denial doesn't always work.
In common with much of the non-American world, I found it hilarious that someone as consistently risible as Donald Trump planned to run for President back in 2016. How could this orange-haired buffoon — a third-rate television celebrity whose greatest claim to fame prior to announcing his candidacy was hosting a reality show which made his weekly bleating of the words 'You're fired!' an internationally recognized catchphrase — have any chance of being elected leader of the planet's largest and, at that time, most powerful democracy? It seemed not only hilarious but unthinkable, as did the election result which saw Trump catapulted into the White House despite the claims of many political analysts that such an outcome was 'impossible.'
'How the hell could he have won?' I often asked myself in the days following what, for me and millions of other people, was a deeply disturbing turn of events. Even more disturbingly, how could he have been perceived by predominantly low income, rural-based voters as the candidate capable of making the United States 'great' again? Were these people living in a bubble? Did they not realize that Trump was a child of privilege whose wealth was largely inherited from his father, a New York City real estate developer? Did they not see where and how he lived, how many oversized monuments he'd erected to himself merely to gratify his equally oversized ego?
My fear in 2016 was that Trump's election slogan — 'Make America Great Again!' — would become the rallying cry of every gun-toting right-wing looney looking to justify their white supremacist, Christian fundamentalist, anti-inclusivist agenda. Which specific period of American 'greatness,' I burned to ask his more rabid supporters, was Trump planning to restore? The colonial period which saw rapacious white settlers steal land from First Nations people before, in many cases, consciously and methodically exterminating them? The era which saw a coalition of southern states break away from the Union and go to war over their so-called 'God given right' to perpetuate the barbaric practice of slavery?
Or was it the more recent Reagan years that Trump proposed to lead his country back to (he had, after all, shrewdly appropriated Reagan's 1980 election slogan for his own campaign), when greed was all but mandated by the government and low to middle income earners were abandoned by a Republican party more concerned with smoothing the way for major corporations to post record annual profits while offering significant tax cuts to the 1% of the US population who already owned and controlled 99% of the nation's wealth?
None of it made sense. And when something makes no sense the first response of the human brain is to deny it by writing it off as absurd or, at best, comical. Time, I told myself with a not altogether convincing smile, would show these deluded individuals that Trump was on nobody's side but his own. The wool would not and could not remain pulled over everybody's eyes forever. Sooner or later, the truth would emerge and send him scuttling back to Trump Tower where he belonged.
And then his Presidency began, with each day offering a new chapter in what quickly came to feel like some bizarre political farce. He ranted daily via Twitter, eventually gaining somewhere in the region of 80 million followers. He fired key staff on a semi-regular basis, sometimes for no better reason than that their consciences refused to allow them to accede to some of his wackier demands. He told the media he'd be trying to date his own daughter if she wasn't his own daughter. (That was a real rib-tickler, that was.) He was assigned a nickname — 'The Donald' — in the hope of further diminishing his claims to any kind of political legitimacy while they lampooned him on South Park and made him the star of his own weekly animated show called Our Cartoon President in an effort to remind the country and the world that his antics were those of an ineffective, blustering, out-of-touch narcissist. Here in Australia we had Planet America, our own tongue-in-cheek analysis of the more nonsensical aspects of his administration and the compromised US political system that remains on air and popular to this day.
But as time went on the jokes became less and less funny. In early 2020 coronavirus tightened its grip on a scared and exhausted world and suddenly everything became less funny, not just in the United States but everywhere else on earth as well. Trump's response to the pandemic was initially bewildering and then infuriating, with him characteristically taking every opportunity to lie to the American public about its severity while portraying himself as some kind of crisis-defying medical expert.
None of it made sense. And when something makes no sense the first response of the human brain is to deny it by writing it off as absurd or, at best, comical. Time, I told myself with a not altogether convincing smile, would show these deluded individuals that Trump was on nobody's side but his own. The wool would not and could not remain pulled over everybody's eyes forever. Sooner or later, the truth would emerge and send him scuttling back to Trump Tower where he belonged.
And then his Presidency began, with each day offering a new chapter in what quickly came to feel like some bizarre political farce. He ranted daily via Twitter, eventually gaining somewhere in the region of 80 million followers. He fired key staff on a semi-regular basis, sometimes for no better reason than that their consciences refused to allow them to accede to some of his wackier demands. He told the media he'd be trying to date his own daughter if she wasn't his own daughter. (That was a real rib-tickler, that was.) He was assigned a nickname — 'The Donald' — in the hope of further diminishing his claims to any kind of political legitimacy while they lampooned him on South Park and made him the star of his own weekly animated show called Our Cartoon President in an effort to remind the country and the world that his antics were those of an ineffective, blustering, out-of-touch narcissist. Here in Australia we had Planet America, our own tongue-in-cheek analysis of the more nonsensical aspects of his administration and the compromised US political system that remains on air and popular to this day.
But as time went on the jokes became less and less funny. In early 2020 coronavirus tightened its grip on a scared and exhausted world and suddenly everything became less funny, not just in the United States but everywhere else on earth as well. Trump's response to the pandemic was initially bewildering and then infuriating, with him characteristically taking every opportunity to lie to the American public about its severity while portraying himself as some kind of crisis-defying medical expert.
In January he promised his fellow Americans that 'We have it totally under control. It's one person coming in from China. It's going to be fine.' By March he was asking them to remain calm, declaring that the virus would '…go away' of its own accord despite a marked lack of evidence to support this outrageously unscientific claim, a claim he happily repeated at the end of April when the combined US death toll stood at close to 70,000 people. By October, with the number of deaths now in excess of 210,000 people, he was still stating that his administration had done a '…phenomenal job' of confronting the virus and that it was '…going to disappear' before blaming China for its worldwide proliferation. 'They allowed this to happen,' he pontificated, directly contradicting a statement he'd made on January 24 in which he'd praised the Chinese government's handling of the crisis and personally thanked President Xi for his actions '…on behalf of the American people.'
It would have been hysterical if so many human beings hadn't been dropping like flies while he stood there like some excuse-spouting automaton, insisting there was no cause for alarm.
It would have been hysterical if so many human beings hadn't been dropping like flies while he stood there like some excuse-spouting automaton, insisting there was no cause for alarm.
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| Photo credit: Leah Millis/Reuters |
As the 2020 election loomed into view his rhetoric began to change. The focus shifted from issues like vaccination and keeping the schools open to criticizing the media and its understandably extensive coverage of the pandemic. (More than 8 million Americans had tested positive to the virus by then while more than 220,000 had died after becoming infected with it. What was the media supposed to do? Ignore that? File stories about bake sales or cuddly kittens being rescued from trees?) Case numbers were rising, Trump insisted in a typically accusative tweet, only '…because we TEST, TEST, TEST. A Fake News Media Conspiracy. Many young people who heal very fast. 99.9%. Corrupt Media conspiracy at all time high. On November 4th, the topic will totally change. VOTE!'
Then in November, with the US death toll steadily climbing toward 300,000, he was finally voted out of office, the unprecedented voter turn-out causing many a naïve soul to believe we wouldn't be forced to listen to any more of his evasive, divisive, self-aggrandizing bullshit.
Sadly, this was never going to be the case. On January 6th 2021 a group of right-wing, pro-Trump agitators and disaffected so-called 'ordinary citizens' — all of whom accepted his unproven claim that the election had been 'stolen' from him (the same unproven claim was made by his opponent Hillary Clinton following his 2016 victory) and he was still rightfully the President — forcibly entered the Capitol building in Washington DC with the intention of overthrowing the elected US Government. And Trump, it soon emerged, had deliberately spurred this rabble on, telling his supporters at the rally which preceded what was now being described as 'a riot' that 'We fight like hell and if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.'
That was the day Donald Trump and everything he represents stopped being a joke to me and why he can never again be treated as an object of ridicule by anyone who cares about the future of democracy and, indeed, the future of life on this planet. Trump hasn't been abandoned by his supporter base, which has expanded rather than contracted since the election of his ever more unpopular successor Joe Biden. Banning him from Twitter hasn't silenced him and nor have any of the investigations into his actions undertaken by his fellow politicians or the lawsuits filed by individuals who were prevented from suing him while he occupied the Oval Office. For some inexplicable reason he continues to symbolize the hope of change to millions of angry and alienated Americans, propping up the increasingly accepted myth that they're an ignored and marginalized 'white minority' within their own country despite the overwhelming amount of cultural, socio-political and economic evidence which confirms the opposite is true.
Of course, the events of January 6th are currently being investigated by a 13 member US Congressional Committee but it remains highly unlikely that Trump will ever be prosecuted for his role in inciting what was tantamount to a coup planned and put into effect by him and his advisors for the specific purpose of illegally restoring him to power. He'll get away with it — just as Richard Nixon got away with playing the leading role he played in the Watergate scandal — because, in the midst of new COVID-19 strains wreaking havoc on a broken health system and the ongoing polarization of US politics thanks to social media, the Democrats are reluctant to push for a conviction so as not to further weaken their own shaky grip on power.
It seems unnecessary to remind anyone that people also laughed at Hitler and his fellow dictator Benito Mussolini during their respective rises to power, confidently dismissing them as clowns or, at best, reactionary upstarts who would soon be shown the door. Yet the similarities remain too numerous to ignore. Like Hitler and Mussolini, Trump has grass roots support, the confidence of the business sector and plenty of money with which to fund his 2024 re-election campaign. He's gradually winning the support of the more moderate members of his own party while voter apathy climbs to an all-time high as many Americans on both sides of politics yearn for the problems that are Donald Trump and the issue of rigged elections to somehow magically disappear, paving the way for him (or his hand-picked successor) to become their nation's forty-seventh President.
A Trump (or Trump-sanctioned) victory in 2024 has disturbing implications not only for the United States but for every democratic government in the world, including ours here in Australia. If a politician can knowingly and consistently break the law and get away with it — and, more significantly, be publicly seen to be getting away it by millions of their disgruntled and well-armed followers — then that has serious ramifications for everyone, particularly in terms of making politicians accountable for their statements and the actions, treasonous or otherwise, those statements may go on to inspire. Democracy, as we've been reminded almost daily since the 2020 election, is an extremely fragile entity, maintained by the willingness of all parties who subscribe to its principles to accept 'the will of the people' as expressed in a federal ballot and abide by the result of that ballot and the rule of law. Trump and his allies have knowingly conspired to destroy the faith that makes that people-powered system of government viable. Thanks to him, the United States has become disunited and destabilized to an alarming degree and is now closer to the possibility of civil war than it has been at any time since 1861.
If you find any of that funny then I both envy you and pity you. The storming of the Capitol building one year ago today was the beginning of what promises to be a long and bitter struggle to salvage not just the idea of democracy but its continuing existence in a world teetering on the brink of political, social and environmental collapse. Donald Trump may be many things — a neo-fascist demagogue-in-the-making among them — but a clown is the one thing you can be certain he is not. The job of a clown is to make us laugh. Trump, on the other hand, sees it as his job to bring the country he led for four disastrous years to its knees while guaranteeing that ours becomes a more intolerant, violent and dangerous civilization in the process.
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| Photo credit: redbubble |
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