Donald Trump’s quest to become president of the United States as a stepping-stone to emperorship and eventual godhood is clearly a new viral strain of performance art, a vanity production with innovative, popular appeal, so let’s examine its tooth marks. It feeds off too many swamp-brain paranoias and bigotries to qualify as a lightweight satirical put-on, like the 1968 candidacy of TV’s Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour cast member Pat Paulsen, whose slogan was “We Cannot Stand Pat” and whose oratory drooped with deadpan malaprops and double-talk delivered with a Bob Newhart-ish stammer. Paulsen’s joke campaign had a kind of dumb innocence to it, a benign contrast to the raw furies of 1968. But after David Letterman, Robert Altman’s Tanner ‘88, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and The Onion, the put-on as a political specialty became so all-pervasive that it’s lost its potency and diffused. It can barely keep pace with the hyper-unrealism that has become a pop addiction on both sides of the Atlantic. The plump, hedonistic sugar-daddiness of trophy wives and Miss Universe pageantry that give Donald Trump’s features their glazed indulgence mirror the moist sheen of Italy’s former prime minister, media mogul, and ringmaster of bunga-bunga bacchanal, Silvio Berlusconi. It was Berlusconi who made Reality TV and its soap-opera paroxysms the template of political life in Italy, and as the former star, host, and boardroom executioner of NBC’s The Apprentice, Trump received an invaluable education in the immersive bubble of bogus posturing that has become his spaceship.
An orange Elvis squirted from a can of Cheez Whiz, the Trump of The Apprentice bent the distortion field of Reality TV until it fit him like a girdle. But Reality TV is an ensemble genre, and The Apprentice depended on the variety pack of prime-time has-beens and discount divas to draw viewers until its formula got stale. What’s distinctive about Trump’s campaign so far is that it reads strictly as a solo act. He doesn’t seem to tote the retinue of consultants and advisers that most campaigns lavish lousy money on, has few allies, and his wife, Melania, is a murmur in the breeze, seldom seen and even less heard. It is his weaponized mouth that has gotten Trump where he is. The performance art that has loogied him to the top of the Republican polls is insult comedy, and an insult comic as presidential timber is not something the Founders anticipated, judging from the screams resonating from the Hereafter.
I am a student, nay, a scholar, of insult comedy, and you can be, too. Watch Trump on the televised stump or during debates with the sound off (your blood pressure will thank you) and observe how he grips the lectern, employing a battery of shrugs, hand jive, and staccato phrase blurts—it’s like being teleported back to an old Dean Martin roast, those medieval days of yore when Foster Brooks hiccuped through his drunk act, Phyllis Diller cackled, and Orson Welles shook from underground rumbles of Falstaffian mirth. The main macher of the Dean Martin roasts was Don Rickles, “Mr. Warmth,” a snapping turtle in a tux who knocked the starch out of showbiz sentimentality as he mowed down the other roasters, informing talk-show king Johnny Carson, “Johnny, I’d like to say, from the bottom of my heart, nobody likes you.” Rickles was the successor to Jack E. Leonard, the pioneer of insult comedy in the black-and-white infancy of TV variety and talk shows, a rotund nightclub comic who rat-a-tatted his put-downs with the perforating rhythm of a used-car salesman making a dodgy pitch; he claimed that Rickles had stolen his act, but the race belongs not to the swift but to the last one still chugging along, and nearly nonagenarian Rickles is an institution, a living landmark with a documentary in his honor, while Leonard’s name (he died in 1973) has faded into the clipping files.
Unlike Leonard, Rickles found the perfect boxing ring for his jabbing routine—the celebrity roast—and the insult comics who have followed in his grandpa footsteps have also earned their scalp-hunter reputations and nicknames as roasters. Jeffrey Ross, a debauched cherub who presides over the Friars Roasts as “the Roastmaster General” and is the distinguished author of I Only Roast the Ones I Love: How to Bust Balls Without Burning Bridges, and Lisa Lampanelli, “the Queen of Mean” (you’re not an insult comic until you earn a nickname), are far more profane, transgressive, unsparing, and gasp-inducing with their inspired low blows than Rickles, whose nervous laugh and incipient flow of flop sweat have always been an implicit plea for leniency. A softy underneath, Rickles takes his subjects down a notch, then applies the schmaltz. Ross and Lampanelli go for the groin shot.
Ross and Lampanelli dominated the Comedy Central roast of Donald Trump in 2011, hosted by Seth MacFarlane, a sophisticated affair which found Trump enthroned onstage as Lampanelli indicated the lovely Melania in the audience and said her name is Slovenian for “get that wrinkled penis off of me.” Jeffrey Ross, taking note of Lampanelli’s predilection for black men, mused, “Lisa’s vagina is so big and full of black dudes Trump’s turning it into a housing project. Good idea, right, buddy?” To which Trump conceded with an affable nod, “Not bad.” From such lofty exchanges, true leadership is forged. Hazed about his hair, his narcissism (shouting out his own name during sex), his presidential ambitions (Whitney Cummings: “If I wanted to support a greedy whore who’s pretending to run for president just to get on TV, I’d vote for Sarah Palin”), Trump remained a good sport, his ego baked in batter under the hot lights.
His ability to laugh at himself abandoned him a month later at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner when a train of pain rolled over him, driven first by President Obama and then by M.C. Seth Meyers. Exacting payback over Trump’s racially tinged conspiracy mongering and Inspector Clouseau investigation of Obama’s birth records, the president ridiculed Trump’s rinky-dink executive decision-making on The Apprentice and pip-squeak grandiosity. Obama’s takedown was so cool, methodical, and magisterially droll, and Trump’s humiliation so complete, that those of us affixed to C-SPAN at home assumed that this pouter pigeon wouldn’t be poking his head up in the political arena anytime soon. How naïve we were. Of some nuisances, the world will never be rid. Trump not only returned to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in subsequent years (“And Donald Trump is here … still,” Obama dryly commented at the W.H.C.D. in 2015) but nursed his pride at being the butt of ridicule into a personal crusade and perhaps revenge fantasy, as if determined to have the last jeering laugh. He first improbably declared for the presidency, a possibility he had teased in the past only to hype some half-baked book, but, even more improbably, he proceeded to chew up the track and leave everyone behind. Understanding social media better than any of the chumps eating corn dogs in Iowa or tramping through New Hampshire, Trump turned Twitter into his comedy-roast dais. Unable to top or topple Obama, he has been giving his Republican rivals the business like Al Capone going around the dinner table with a baseball bat.
No one has been a more sneering serial violator of Ronald Reagan’s 11th Commandment (“Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican”) than Trump. From his early salvo at John McCain (“He’s a war hero ‘cause he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured”), which shocked the punditry but did him no harm with conservatives, he has extended the perimeter of attack, going after Carly Fiorina for her face and voice, saying that Rand Paul inherited a bad gene from his libertarian father, dumping on pollster Frank Luntz as a “low-class slob,” and the hits just keep on coming. Yes, he has slagged entire peoples (Mexicans, Muslims), but such broad stereotyping is becoming standard Republican Party sheet music. It is the bitching contempt with which he treats anyone on his own partisan side who vexes his prickly highness, such as Fox News’s Megyn Kelly, that is without parallel in politics. That he not only has gotten away with it but has become emboldened with each flare-up attests to the intestinal rot of discipline and cohesion in the G.O.P. ever since the Tea Party boarded ship. The lack of respect Trump has for the party reflects the lack of respect it has for itself, and there’s no referee to stop this free-for-all. Never mind that the majority of Trump’s schoolyard taunts aren’t witty or funny and often border on the subliterate, they succeed in delivering electric shocks and uncovering weak spots, occasionally hitting on something so obvious that it somehow managed to be overlooked by our overpaid Beltway soothsayers.
When Trump derided Jeb Bush’s “low energy,” it left a bruise because there is a logy quality to Bush, despite the pounds shed through the Paleo Diet intended to get him into fighting trim. Realizing that he had found a soft spot, Trump razzed him even harder, posting an Instagram video recommending Bush’s low energy as the perfect insomnia remedy. “Having trouble sleeping at night? Too much energy? Need some low energy? … Jeb, for all your sleeping needs.” Bush attempted to take the high road out of the land of Nod, telling CNN’s Jake Tapper that he has presented a positive vision of the future, unlike Trump: “I don’t see how over the long haul that you can insult your way to the nomination or the [presidency].” But to get to the long haul a candidate has to survive the short haul, and Trump’s persistent whacks have been a one-man gauntlet that has lamed up one seemingly sturdy contender after another, exposing their hollow casings. He revealed the touted “bench strength” of the Republican field as a bunch of unripe bananas. A Great White Hope such as Chris Christie found himself flailing at the bottom of a well, and Rick Perry and Scott Walker barely hung around long enough to get their windshields wiped. Can Donald Trump, running on a platform of free-floating hostility, possibly win the nomination and then usher in the End of Days by taking the presidency? Reason and precedent would argue no, but we are in uncharted postmodern territory now. If nothing else, Trump will almost certainly carve himself a prime speaking slot at the Republican National Convention in 2016. There he will have the opportunity to set aside the insults and slurs and rise to statesman-like stature, show a little class. That’s a scenario I can definitely picture happening, if I hallucinate hard enough.
