As much as the media like to make fun of President Trump, the easiest target ever born, they’re depressingly bad at it.
How do you fail at mocking someone with that hair, that high-cholesterol Burger King diet and that offensively excessive tie length?
Start by asking the producers at NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.”
If the show weren’t already a well-known institution, viewers would have no idea they were watching a comedy program just based on the skits featuring Alec Baldwin’s Trump impersonations.
The segments effectively amount to Baldwin squinting his eyes, pouting his lips and bobbing his head in a way that’s more reminiscent of Hillary Clinton when she’s forcing a smile.
The show’s writers take for granted that watchers will find that funny in itself, just as “SNL” thought it was amusing decades ago to merely mention Dan Quayle’s name. It’s not funny and Baldwin’s own admitted inspiration for the impersonation is nonsensical.
“People ask me, ‘What is your whole gag?’ And I tell them, ‘You can suggest the voice or the way a person looks, but to be successful you have to think of who that person is,” he told Vanity Fair this month. “To me Trump is someone who is always searching for a stronger, better word, but he never finds it. Whenever I play him, I make a long pause to find that word, and then I just repeat the word I started with.”
This is what passes in the media now as the standard for “successful” political humor.
Displaying an equal capacity for imagination, the Washington Post’s editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes spends her days sketching up caricatures of Trump as an obese, scowling orange.
Get it? Trump is angry and fat, and look at that skin color!
(Curiously, Telnaes’ sketches of President Barack Obama were almost always inexplicably colorless.)
Chelsea Handler was once a refreshing and wry comedian with a late-night talk show on the E! network. Now on Netflix, her most viral moments are when she’s literally crying about the election.
News reporters aren’t paid to write one-liners, but that hasn’t stopped them from trying to get in on the fun we’re all not having.
Among their favorite ways to mock Trump is to trade lines back and forth with the word “bigly.” After Trump’s executive order limiting travel in some Muslim-majority countries was stayed by courts in February, the Washington Post ran the headline, “Donald Trump just lost, bigly.” In September, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni used “bigly” to make fun of the way Trump talks. In January, Bruni’s colleague Paul Krugman wrote that if Trump’s trade policies are enacted, many people “will be hurt, bigly…”
Readers failing to see the humor probably aren’t aware that “bigly” is a reference to something Trump never actually says but that the media insist on pretending he does anyway. Trump often says “big league” to emphasize a point. But that doesn’t make him look stupid, so disregard.
The most honest assessment on political humor in the era of Trump came from the satirical Onion website. “Stay away from low-hanging fruit,” Ben Berkley, the site’s managing editor, told the New Yorker in March. “We don’t do ‘The Angry Orange Wind Bag’-type stuff.”
Somebody tell Ann Telnaes.
Satire works when it’s thoughtful and clever, both of which preclude the national media’s obviously raw and personal dislike for Trump.
In any event, Trump has entirely neutralized any mockery that would have stung someone else.
In 2015, during the early days of the campaign, NBC’s “Meet the Press” moderator Chuck Todd asked Trump about women he had publicly insulted.
“I was attacked viciously by those women,” Trump said. “Of course, it’s very hard for them to attack me on looks, because I’m so good-looking.”
For years, Trump has made fun of his own hair and during the campaign he would occasionally call up a supporter on stage at his rallies to pull on it.
Trump has a sense of humor about himself. And it’s better than the media’s.
Eddie Scarry is a media reporter for the Washington Examiner.
