The Democratic Candidates Need Natural Reactions, Not Joke Writers
Kamala Harris’ and Liz Warren’s recent attempts at insult comedy may not point to the best way to counter Trump’s lowbrow jokes and the Republicans’ meme army
On October 11th, there was a brief Twitter exchange between Donald Trump Jr. and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Commenting on a short video that showed Harris laughing gleefully while answering a question during a podium moment, Trump Jr. tweeted:
In my view, the obvious one-line retort for Harris would have been to mock Junior’s apparently still having been in the process of trying to decide on the correct spelling of “too” when he tapped “Tweet.” Instead, Harris replied with something that could easily have been written by one of Trevor Noah’s joke writers:
Ba-da-dum.
I don’t know about you, but I fear Harris may have more room-temperature zingers in store. In fact, there’s a good chance that she may have taken the advice of Washington Post writer Richard Zoglin and decided that it might be time to “follow the lead” of late-night talk show hosts and take a shot at becoming an amateur comic. Maybe she even hired one of Colbert’s or Conan’s comedy writers.
I wouldn’t put it past Harris to hire a joke writer. She’s a moderate Clintonite, and thus could always use an edge over Beto O’Rourke and Pete Buttigieg and… well, everyone else in the crowded Democratic field, aside from, of course, the three serious-change candidates, Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard and Liz Warren.
Speaking of Liz, she tried some insult comedy herself on October 10th, during a CNN town hall gathering focused on equality. There, Warren was asked what she would say to someone who told her that they believe marriage is between one man and one woman. “Well, I’m going to assume it’s a guy who said that,” Warren answered. “And I’m going to say, then just marry one woman.” Long beat. “Assuming you can find one.”
Great, I thought, that’ll learn ’em! Way to solidify Trump’s incel base, alienate swing-voters who suffer from male pattern baldness, and (God help us all) further inflame the culture war, all with one strawman.
Fine, it’s a step in the right direction, I’ll admit. At least the Democratic candidates are trying to close the comedy ammunition gap they have with the more show-biz-savvy Trump. But a few mildly clever bons mots and divisive “basket of deplorables”-reminiscent put-downs won’t make people believe a candidate is equipped with the sort of funnybone needed for the job.
A sense of humor is a necessary intangible that does matter in our modern, hi-def era. Unlike the hilariously regressive, constantly bullshitting Republicans, the college-smart, technocratic Democrats seem cursed with a genetic inability to make Everymen laugh. In fact, aside from backing humorless greed-zombie Mitt Romney, this epoch’s Republicans have consistently run approachable candidates whose general demeanor is that of the casual Three Stooges fan. McCain, Dubya and Reagan always looked like they were just waiting for an excuse to make a poop joke. Trump is a walking, tweeting cream-pie-fight. They are/were stupidly funny people. And like it or not, that sort of thing does have its appeal to low-information voters, which, let’s face it, most are.
The Democrats don’t play that. They tend to prop up folks who seem like the type to chuckle politely for hours over a “Woody Allen’s Most Tedious Examinations of Neuroses” film festival on AMC. Aside from Obama’s “proceed, Governor,” I can’t think of one decent Democratic line.
Whatever, you might not think politicians need to be funny, but I do. The Republicans are perpetually ahead of the curve based on the strength of the spittle-flecked ridiculousness of their platform alone — Bomb Korea! The Deep State! Our badly underfunded military! Somehow, the Democrats are going to have to top that stuff. It’s their job not to overlook any aspect of politics, including humor.
Sure, it’s understandable that the Democrats aren’t too concerned about having a knack for saying funny things. The polls look good for them at this early phase, so — like everyone thought in 2016 — 2020 should be an easy win for any political party that doesn’t have Trump as its front-man. Whether or not Trump’s supporters would vote for him even if he literally did kill someone in broad daylight, the Undecideds have to be pretty near Decided by now. Between the climate crisis, a doom-scented economy, Trump’s never-ending series of ideological taserings (the internment camps, the “both sides” faux pas, etc.), and the specter of World War III materializing every time he toilet-tweets, anyone who values humanity can plainly see that Trump, his party and his media hitpeople need to have a really bad day on November 3rd of next year.
But in a post-mainstream world where most voters refuse (or don’t have time) to investigate nuanced positions regardless of how much it might help them decide, the Democrats aren’t just any political party. Apart from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ generally pitch-perfect outrage, the Democrats’ sum vibe all too often evokes a no-attention-span circus of impotent indignation, the party’s front-line of fortunate sons and daughters busily rushing at the speed of a herd of Ambien-popping tortoises to put out too many fires at once, all while being hampered by near-Red Scare levels of political correctness. Worst of all, the ever-widening (and easily troll-exploitable) split between party moderates and progressives makes the Tea Party-vs-vanilla-Republican tussle of the late Aughts look like a tee-ball exhibition game. The Democrats bum people out, man.
Maybe it’s because today’s Democratic candidates don’t actually seem to share a consensus on priorities. Maybe it’s because they often appear to prioritize cart-before-horse culture-war issues over things that matter to everyone. Maybe the candidates are depressed themselves (was I the only one thinking of the 1909–2015 Chicago Cubs after the party achieved the impossible and lost more Senate seats in 2018?).
Granted, their base doesn’t help much. Too many militant lefties have lost the capacity to see any humor whatsoever in their various plights, preferring instead to focus on growing their Twitter followings by racking their brains thirty times a day for clever (if redundant and largely unfunny) versions of “Trump is a poopyhead.” We’re all pissed, but seriously, the signal-to-noise ratio couldn’t be more off. Trump may suck, but he and his handlers do know how to bonk the collective funnybone of the country’s hyper-entertained majority, a species whose intellectual diet consists of sitcoms, vine videos and serialized plot-lines in TV commercials.
2020 is coming, and with it the final desperate charge of the Republican Party, which is in real danger of becoming a historical footnote owing to its incurable fetish for trickle-down economics. Whether Trump survives the Ukraine fiasco or not, the party will pull out all the stops in an effort to appeal to the tastes of everyday citizens, including their collective sense of humor. During the presidential debates, when Trump starts interrupting Liz or Bernie or Joe with his proven-effective Freddy Blassie-style quips, how will the Democratic candidate respond?
Obviously, Democrats need to start countering Trump’s barbs with humor of their own. But I don’t agree that their presidential candidates should ape mainstream comics. Their voters are already quite familiar with the lukewarm, choir-preaching puns and gags typically rattled off by John Oliver, Stephen Colbert, et al, and besides, as Zoglin noted in his WaPo piece, those faux-pundits often lose their cool, which is exactly what the Republican troll corps wants them to do. As well, a lot of the jokes liberal comic-pundits come up with just aren’t that funny, much less informative (on that score, aside from Bill Maher, Samantha Bee is easily the best of the lot, even if the vagina jokes have been stale for a while now).
No, I wouldn’t advise candidates to make a habit of repeating liberal-begging jokes, or hire writers to come up with new ones, simply because it wouldn’t work at the debates, or, for that matter, during the campaign. Aside from Sanders’ stubbornly po-faced delivery, which automatically makes it hilarious whenever he goes off-script, none of the candidates has an instantly identifiable shtick.
Poor Bernie. Owing to his recent heart issue, his campaign is, I fear, pretty much done, and that sucks. But if he does somehow convince Ma and Pa Meatloaf he’s still viable and wins the nomination, he’s a comedic grand slam waiting to happen. His Gandhi-esque “ignore the trolls”-based approach wouldn’t suffer much if he blurted a quick “Take my Republican opponent. Please.” at the debates. In fact, I think it’d be a smash hit. If the neoliberal mandarins at the DNC were ever forced to anoint Bernie, a series of Trump-Sanders debates would be absolutely priceless, in the vein of those Matthau-Lemmon grumpy old man movies.
That’s not to say that I’m a Bernie-or-bust guy, much as I’ve been accused of it by Trump-obsessed moderates. In all honesty, I think Warren is the slam-dunk candidate for Democrats in 2020. She offers progressive ideas that sit well with Bernie voters, lucid eloquence for New York Times-goggling liberals, and her very gender for social justice identitarians. As well, she’s thus far avoided the “socialist” bugaboo (her “I’m a capitalist, but markets need rules” plays better in general than Bernie’s expecting American voters to read up on the difference between democratic socialists and Stalinist death squads). If anything, the 4channer in me wishes Warren would commission some intern to hijack the “Pocahontas” meme and make it hers, maybe photoshop her head onto the body of a Comanche warrior princess who’s holding a ratty orange pelt in one hand and a bloody knife in the other.
Of course, that would never happen in our current sociological climate, so we’re left with Bernie’s lack of humor as the most humorous thing about the Democrats. That’s not to say that the Democrats are completely hopeless; in private, I’ll bet Corey Brooker slays his posse with off-color jokes. But that’s about it for Team Blue, really. Cringe-ometers would spike worldwide if O’Rourke or Klobuchar or Buttigieg rattled off a microwaved Kimmel gag and wound up looking like a funeral parlor accountant working the crowd at a comedy roast. And regardless, if voters were to become accustomed to a series of thoughtfully crafted but disposable put-downs, they’d expect it at the debates, and to my knowledge, no Democratic candidate has any experience slugging it out at a mostly empty comedy club.
No, if we’re going to Make Politics Normal Again, Democrats need to stop reacting to Trump & Co.’s stinky troll bait every time it’s chummed and rudely dismiss him as nothing more than a lost, party crashing nuisance whenever he’s brought up. Aside from the odd impatiently delivered one-liner that offers maximum knee-slap factor, Democratic candidates should ignore Trump the man. Democrats could pattern their attack after the strategy used by trolling insult-comic “flamers” during the early days of the internet. Back then, the most effective way to defeat a blabbering dingbat like Trump was by taking a rope-a-doping approach, allowing one’s opponent to hurl insults at will and dig their own grave before suddenly swooping down with an epic observation that revealed their adversary’s true buffoonery for all the world to see (think of Tomi Lahren’s “I’m not much of a reader.” That one should have become a meme for the ages, the caption under her Wiki photo).
It’s something the Democrats could think about anyway. Their “adults in the-room” approach has gone on way too long and led to disaster on occasion. The precise moment at which George Bush clinched the 2000 election over Gore was during the third debate, when Bush shot Gore a “they’re letting in homeless guys now?” look, the one shown 27 seconds into this video.
Taking Trump seriously simply doesn’t work either, as everyone should know by now. “Deeply problematic” and “troubling” are the wrong adjectives for Democrats to use when Trump’s hi-jinks are so consistently “what the fuck”-worthy.
Either way, the Democrats need to gear up. In 2020, the Republicans will pollute the internet with vicious memes (including the Honkler, which deserves an essay all its own, owing, like its much less accessible prototype Pepe the Frog, to its spurious “appropriation by white supremacists”). As well, Milo Yiannopolous is busily on the comeback trail, and then there are all the other operatives, big and small, many of whom had a chance to whiteboard new brain-fritzing bullshit stories and memes at the White House-held “Social Media Summit” of July 2019. Be assured that in 2020, like Epsteingate and QAnon before it, tons of pro-Trump conspiracy memes will come out of nowhere, grow quickly, and confuse low-information voters, but this time it’ll be a monsoon. Oh, and naturally, the murky waters of the internet will be swimming with bots and trolls from Russia, North Korea, Macedonia, and so on.
It’s beyond the scope of this piece to offer snappy answers to everything Trump’s propaganda team will throw out, but I suppose some basics could be covered, at least for the 2020 Presidential debate stage, which will be the biggest public fight since Ali/Frazier 3.
If a moderate — Biden or Harris — gets the nod, they’ll get tagged early and often by the Grifter-in-Chief. If it’s Harris, she’ll certainly have at least one gone-to-screensaver moment that reveals her as not the best friend of identity politics types. “I actually agree with the Senator,” Trump will blab, “that parents of kids who skip school should go straight to jail.” (In a perfect world, her response to that would be, “Sir, I’d ask you to have your dog read you my complete record on criminal justice, but since you don’t seem to like animals, I’d assume that’s not an option, right?”)
If it’s Biden, Trump may very well try to troll him into a no-shitting-around come-at-me-bro outburst, live, on national television. That’s not completely out of the realm of possibility with a corporate-owned tackling dummy like Biden, but as long as he can keep himself from scowling and his pupils from dilating, he should be okay.
Regardless, though, what the Democratic nominee will need in his or her arsenal is an ability to react to absurdity like any normal person would.
Really, where’s the revulsion, the mind-blown reaction not to Trump’s cockamamie, xenophobe-pandering policies but to the very inconvenience of having to deal with such a sociopathic imbecile in the first place? How about hitting the brakes after one of Trump’s “nasty woman”-style ripostes to walk to the front of the stage, smile at the curiousness of it all, jerk a thumb backward and let loose with a street-smart-accented “What is with this guy, seriously? Does he really get something out of stuff like that? Really?” Expressing natural, bemused mirth over Trump’s very presence in the political arena is the key to out-Trumping him. Democrats need to understand that people aren’t so stupid that they can’t recognize desperate idiocy when they see it.
No matter which Democrat ends up challenging him, Trump needs to know that he isn’t taken seriously, that he is shunned and disdained by everyone who understands the genuine need for politics in society. No mercy rule either, especially this time around; Trump won’t be the pitiable long-shot he was in 2016. In fact, when the debates roll around, the lower he’s polling compared to his Democratic opponent, the more he’ll behave like a baiting swine.
Whatever’s in store, keep the Cheetos handy.
