Why Are We Humoring Them?
8 min read
In September, Secret Service agents apprehended a man carrying an AK-47-style gun near Donald Trump’s Palm Beach golf course—in an apparent attempt, the FBI concluded, to assassinate the former president. To some, the thwarted violence was a bleak testament to the times: one more reminder that politics, when approached as an endless war, will come with collateral damage. To Elon Musk, however, it was an opportunity. The billionaire, treating his control of X as a means of owning the libs, gave the Palm Beach news a MAGA-friendly twist. “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” Musk wrote on the platform, punctuating the line with a thinking-face emoji.
Musk was wrong—authorities have arrested several people for death threats made against the president and vice president—and he eventually deleted the post. But he did not apologize for the mistake. Instead, earlier this month, Musk used an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s X-based show as a chance to workshop the line. “Nobody’s even bothering to try to kill Kamala,” Musk told Carlson, “because it’s pointless. What do you achieve?”
At this, both men guffawed. Musk, having found an appreciative audience, kept going, finding new ways to suggest that the vice president was not worth the trouble of assassinating. Carlson’s reply: “That’s hilarious.”
First as tragedy, then as farce, the adage goes. If only the old order still applied. Not that long ago, public figures such as Carlson and Musk might have been embarrassed to be seen using political violence as a punch line. But embarrassment, these days, is a partisan affliction. It can ail only the soft, the sincere—the people willing to be caught caring in public. The brand of politics that Musk and Carlson practice is swaggering and provocative and, as a result, entirely devoid of shame. And so the two men, wielding their mockery, make a show of each chortle and smirk. They may consider their delight to be defiant—a rebuke to the humorless masses who see the violence and not the lol—but it is not defiant. It is dull. This is the way of things now. The tragedy and the farce, the menace that winks, the joke that threatens, the emoji that cries with joy and the one that simply cries: They bleed together, all of them. Irony storms the Capitol. Cynicism reigns.
Trump, that louche comedian, is partially to blame. His humor—some of it crude, some of it cruel, most of it treating politics and the people who engage in them as the butt of an endless joke—is more than a performance. It is also permission. Musk and Carlson laughed at the thought of Harris’s death both because they wanted to and because they knew they could. Trump and his crowbar will come for every Overton window. Now no claim is too much. No joke is too soon. Deportations, assassinations, the casual suggestion that America is due for its own version of Kristallnacht: Invoked as ideas and implications, they might be threats. They might be omens. For Trump and the many who humor him, though, they’re simply material—fodder for jokes in a set that never ends.
“Not The Onion,” people might warn one another on social media, as they share the video of Trump’s nearly 40-minute attempt to turn a town hall into a one-man dance party. “Beyond parody,” they might moan, as J. D. Vance spreads racist lies about immigrants snatching and eating their neighbors’ pets. The disclaimers are hardly necessary. Americans, whatever their political convictions, have become accustomed to politics that read as dark comedy—and to politicians who commit fully to the bit. These leaders don’t merely lie or misspeak or make light of life and death. To them, leadership itself is a joke. They’re trolling one another. They’re trolling us. They’ve made mischief a mandate.
Call it the trolligarchy—and have no doubt that its regime is inescapable. Trump says that if reelected he’ll be a dictator on “day one” and then insists that he’s only joking. Under Musk, X’s email for press inquiries auto-responds to reporters’ questions with a poop emoji. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who won a congressional seat in Georgia by turning trolling into a campaign strategy, has been using the House bill-amendment process as an opportunity for cheap acts of score-settling. In a proposed amendment to a bill meant to allocate funding to aid Ukraine as it defends itself against Russia’s invasion, she stipulated, among other things, that any colleague who voted for it would be conscripted into Ukraine’s military.
“Messaging bills” may be fairly common among politicians seeking new ways to rack up political points. And Greene’s amendment was roundly defeated. Her stunt, though, wrote tragedy and farce into the congressional record. Roll Call, reporting on it, quoted social-media posts from Matt Glassman, an analyst at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute. There have “always been chucklehead Members of the House,” Glassman wrote of Greene’s antics. “But the prominence of many of the chuckleheads in the GOP and the ever-increasing general level of chucklehead behavior worries me.”
Life under the trolligarchy requires constant acts of micro-translation: Did she mean it? Was he joking? Were they lying? The lulz, as a result, can be exhausting. The scholar Dannagal Goldthwaite Young, analyzing fMRI studies that illustrate how the brain processes jokes, argues that humor can impose a cognitive tax. Jokes, for all their delights, ask more of their audiences than other forms of discourse do: They require more split-second parsing, more energy, more work. And a troll is a joke unhinged—which makes it extra taxing. Its terms are particularly murky. Its claims are especially suspect. Under its influence, the old categories fail. Nihilism takes over. Fatigue sets in. Sincerity and irony, like stars whose centers cannot hold, collapse into each other.
Humor is an age-old political tradition—Common Sense, the pamphlet that persuaded many Americans to become revolutionaries, was powerful in part because it was often quite funny—but trolling, as a mode of political engagement, is not comedy. It is its antithesis. Nazis of both the past and present have tried to hide in plain sight by characterizing their racism as merely ironic. As The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum wrote in a 2017 essay, jokes deployed as rhetoric played a crucial role in helping Trump win the presidency.
Since then, the trolling has only intensified. But it has also become—in a twist that can read as a cosmic kind of troll—ever more banal. In 2008, The New York Times published “The Trolls Among Us,” a lengthy introduction to a subculture that was then emerging from the dark recesses of the internet. The article is remarkably prescient. It treats trolling as a novelty but frames it as a new moral problem. It parses the cruelty that has become a standard feature of online engagement. But it was also written when trolls’ power was relatively contained. Trolling, today, having slipped the surly bonds of 4chan, is no longer subculture. It is culture.
Many trolls of the early internet hid behind pseudonyms and anonymity; they largely performed for one another rather than for a mass audience. But trolling, as a political style, demands credit for the chaos it sows. Trump, the “troll in chief,” channels that status as brand identity. He will happily lie, his followers know; maybe he’ll lie on their behalf. He will trick his opponents. He will set traps. He will reveal his rivals’ foolishness. He will humiliate them. That old Times article captured one of the abiding ironies of this brave new mode of digital engagement. Trolling may manifest as pranks. But many practitioners insist that their hijinks have ethical ends. Trolls claim to be puncturing pieties, saving the sanctimonious from themselves. They’re righting social wrongs as they subject “elites” to a barrage of corrective humiliations meant to reveal empathy and equality and other such values as nothing more than smug little lies.
Trolling, in that way, can be self-rationalizing, and therefore particularly powerful when its logic comes for our politics. Trump once gave a speech in the rain and then bragged about the sun shining down on his performance. His bravado was propaganda in its most basic and recognizable form—overt, insistent, blunt. It did what propaganda typically will, imposing its preferred reality onto the one that actually exists. But the lie was also so casual, so basic, so fundamentally absurd—even the heavens, Trump says, will do his bidding—that it barely registered as propaganda at all.
Trump came of age as a public figure in the 1980s, long before irony was alleged to have died—a time, on the contrary, when cynicism had become cultural currency. It was a period when earnestness, or at least the appearance of it, was curdling into a liability. Trump has taken the irony-infused assumptions of those years and used them as tools of power. His lies invade and destroy, trampling the truths that stand in their way with casual, cunning brutality. But Trump’s jokes can be similarly, if more subtly, ruinous. A troll reserves the right, always, to be kidding—even about matters of life and death.
That attitude, once it takes hold of the body politic, spreads rapidly. People talk about “irony poisoning” because irony, in the end, has so few antidotes. Greene’s attempt to troll her colleagues as they determined aid to Ukraine led to several more proposed amendments—this time from Jared Moskowitz, a Democratic representative from Florida. One proposed to appoint Greene as “Vladimir Putin’s Special Envoy to the United States Congress.” Another suggested renaming Greene’s office for Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who is widely denigrated for his appeasement of Hitler.
Recommending that a congressional office be called the Neville Chamberlain Room may not be a great joke; it’s even worse, though, as a mode of government. Democracy is an earnest enterprise: It requires us—challenges us—to care. It assumes that people will disagree, about the small things and the big ones. It further assumes that they will settle differences through acts of debate. But cynicism makes argument impossible. “How do you fight an enemy who’s just kidding?” Nussbaum asked in her 2017 essay, and the question still has no good answer. The old insult comic remains onstage, serving up the same routine to a crowd that cackles and roars. He’ll roast anyone in his path. He’ll soak up the applause. He’ll trust that, in all the levity, people will miss the obvious: When the comedy keeps punching down, anyone can become the butt of the joke.
