If you are shocked, dismayed and off-balance by President Trump’s blunderbuss approach to public policy in his first week, and you don’t know whether to laugh or cry, I suggest laughter.
There is comedy in the blizzard of B.S. that has come out of the new administration. It’s been a sitcom.
Bullying our way into annexing Greenland has got to be a joke. So does forcibly taking over the Panama Canal. Both trial balloons have to be attempts at humor since Trump kept us out of foreign wars in his first term and had promised to do so in his second term. He’s clearly pulling our legs.
Did you get the joke when his new buddy Elon Musk did an Adolph Hitler salute after the inauguration? The punch line was the second salute. The third was that Trumpers tried to say that a Hitler salute was not really a Hitler salute.
Standup comedy is often insulting of traditional norms. It’s hard-edged as a genre. Surely our president was joking when he said children born in America are not really American citizens.
It’s gotta be a gag that he’s putting a drunk and a female abuser into the top job at the Pentagon. There will be even more gags as Peter Hegseth tries to run a military that oversees more than two million Americans and where many of us served. It’s Bozo the Clown running a circus.
Did you get the memo about Elon Musk running our foreign policy? I didn’t get it. Did you? It’s hilarious that Musk is lining up with right-wing extremists in Germany, one of our staunch allies in NATO. Did Musk ever serve?
We were silly, of course, to not recognize that Trump was only kidding when he said he would end Russia’s war on Ukraine even before he took office. It was, wink, wink, just a one-liner not to be taken seriously. Vlad is now applauding Trump’s air ball. The charm of standup comics is that they will say anything for a laugh. Vlad is laughing.
We all get the humor of the president promising to deport “millions” of immigrant criminals, while actually granting pardons to hundreds of criminals who violently attacked the police protecting our capitol. Heh, heh. That’s a good one.
You get how funny it is to be cutting back on vaccination initiatives just as bird flu is closing down poultry farms, and the result is the price of eggs rising to 70 cents apiece? Rising beef prices will add to the fun.
I was hopeful that this MAGA thing would show some serious substance out of the chute. But, The Joker is having a knee-slapper in Washington D.C.
My guess is that The Joker will run out of gags in 2026 when Republican congressmen have to defend the not-so-funny-consequences of a president who has no guardrails on his comic routines.
Saying, “You’re fired,” over and over again to people and hard-won institutions soon runs out of chuckles. The final joke will be when the standup comedian isn’t seen as funny anymore by American voters.
Meanwhile, I will be enjoying the gaffes and guffaws coming out of the White House on an almost daily basis. It’s better than crying.
