Donald Trump: Joking His Way to a Dictatorship

 Fintan O’Toole is one of the most incisive and entertaining observers of the US pollical scene.  In a recent article for the New York Review of Books, Laugh Riot, he turns his sights on Donald Trump and his use of large rallies to fire up his believers.

Large rallies were a standard tool of the twentieth century fascists.  O’Toole points out that a nasty form of humor was common at these events.

“Racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, xenophobic, antidisabled, and antiqueer jokes have always been used to dehumanize those who are being victimized…as Sigmund Freud pointed out, jokes can also be a way of shutting down pity itself by identifying those who are being laughed at as the ones not worthy of it…”

O’Toole quotes Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer who analyzed the relationship between Nazi rallies and degrading humor. 

“The rally, they suggested, was an arena in which a release that was otherwise forbidden was officially permitted:

The anti-Semites gather to celebrate the moment when authority lifts the ban; that moment alone makes them a collective, constituting the community of kindred spirits. Their ranting is organized laughter. The more dreadful the accusations and threats, the greater the fury, the more withering is the scorn. Rage, mockery, and poisoned imitation are fundamentally the same thing.”

Trump plays the same game at his rallies, but the implementation in the current century is different: bombastic rage is replaced by ugly humor in the form of “jokes.” 

“This is not the 1930s or the 1940s, and we should not expect this toxic laughter to be organized quite as it was then. Trump functions in a culture supersaturated with knowingness and irony. In twentieth-century European fascism, the relationship between words and actions was clear: the end point of mockery was annihilation. Now, the joke is ‘only a joke.’ Populist politics exploits the doubleness of comedy—the way that ‘only a joke’ can so easily become ‘no joke’—to create a relationship of active connivance between the leader and his followers in which everything is permissible because nothing is serious.”

“It requires the lifting of taboos to create a community of kindred spirits. It depends on Trump’s ability to be pitiless in his ridicule of the targets of his contempt while allowing his audience to feel deeply sorry for itself. (If tragedy, as Aristotle claimed, involves terror and pity, Trump’s tragicomedy deals in terror and self-pity.)”

This approach of saying outrageous things implying that they are being said in jest is an effective but terrifying practice.

“Violent words and violent actions are all covered by the same disclaimer—one that Trump’s apologists use to blur the relationship between his words and his followers’ actions in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. In the Trumpian twilight zone where democracy is dying but not yet dead, the connection between words (‘fight like hell’) and deeds (the armed invasion of the Capitol) must be both strong and weak, sufficiently ‘no joke’ to be understood by the faithful yet sufficiently ‘only a joke’ to be deniable to the infidels. The comic mode is what creates the plausible deniability that in turn allows what used to be mainstream Republicans (and some Democrats) to remain in denial about what Trumpism really means.”

Just as the twentieth century fascists used violent words to obtain violent actions, Trump has demonstrated the same power over his followers.

“This is the thing about Trump’s form of organized laughter, in which the idea of humor obscures the distinction between outlandish words and real-life actions. Sooner or later, the first becomes the second. The in-joke becomes the killer line.”