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With 18 months to go before the 2024 election, a Trump-Biden rematch seems imminent, a sharp reversal of expectation from as recently as this March. Trump’s resurgence is a reminder of what has become a nonnegotiable trait for presidential contenders—and the electorate’s Achilles’ heel.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
A country governed by fear
The only way out of the child-gender culture war
Ted Lasso has lost its way.
The outer limits of liberalism
A Good Show
Donald Trump becoming the 2024 Republican front-runner wasn’t always a foregone conclusion. When various Trump-endorsed candidates lost their races in November’s midterms, it appeared that the stench of MAGA had putrefied into surefire voter repellant. But by spring, something had changed. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, briefly the heir presumptive of Trump’s GOP, came under new scrutiny. Once again, this would be Trump’s nomination to lose.
Set aside that he has achieved the dubious distinction of becoming the first former U.S. president to be indicted on criminal charges (a hiccup that, some polling has shown, may have actually boosted his electoral prospects among Republicans). Forget the fact that this particular milestone landed amid a tangle of legal challenges so numerous that Trump himself appears barely able to keep track of them. Forget his tacit endorsement of incarcerated January 6 seditionists, or that he is currently standing trial in a federal civil court over a rape accusation by the writer E. Jean Carroll. Trump has something going for him that DeSantis and other would-be leaders of his party simply don’t: The man is very funny.
Worse, he knows it. Whether or not the 45th president has ever believed himself to be a “very stable genius,” for instance, that now notorious 2018 soundbite is just one of a bottomless supply of examples suggesting the reflexive hijinks of a practiced class clown (consider, also, “covfefe”).
Some critics of the former president might be disinclined to agree with this point, which is their prerogative. But my observation is hardly original. In 2018, Damian Reilly argued in The Spectator that even the then-president’s “most ardent detractors” would have to admit that Trump is not just funny; he’s funny on purpose. And, Reilly added, it was specifically in the humor department that Trump had incontrovertibly bested his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton.
The question Is Trump funny? was, by the time of Reilly’s writing, an established soul-searching prompt for pundits across the ideological spectrum. That there would be any hand-wringing or hesitation, on the part of Trump’s many critics, to acknowledge the possibility reveals much about the outsize role of humor in politics. Which is to say: It plays a perhaps larger role than many of us would care to acknowledge.
Wariness at this state of affairs is not unwarranted. After all, the ability to elicit chuckles from a crowd has no bearing on a person’s fitness to lead. Being funny has, nevertheless, become a necessary virtue for those seeking the highest elected office of the land. It cannot be the only virtue a candidate possesses, but it’s a nonnegotiable one.
The NPR correspondent Ari Shapiro noted as much ahead of the 2012 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, when President Barack Obama was vying for his own reelection against Republican challenger Mitt Romney. Shapiro also narrowed in on why humor is so nonnegotiable. “Humor is an essential tool in any politician’s kit—all the more so in an age of instant, constant media,” he explained. “It can disarm an opponent, woo a skeptical voter or pierce an argument.”
Shapiro pointed out that although both candidates had been “the butt of a lot more jokes” than they’d made, it was Romney who faced the steeper uphill trek of “trying to reverse his reputation as a humorless aristocrat.” (Romney’s insistence, in a CNN news hit, that he “live[s] for laughter” did not exactly help his cause.)
My colleague Megan Garber made a similar observation in her March cover story, in which she argued that American politics has come to resemble a kind of 24-hour reality-television feed, accentuating the ever-blurrier boundary between life and fiction. Recounting some constituents’ blasé responses to last fall’s news of New York Representative George Santos’s many biographical fabrications, Megan noticed echoes of an earlier political moment. “Their reactions,” she wrote, “are reminiscent of the Obama voter who explained to Politico, in 2016, why he would be switching his allegiances: ‘At least Trump is fun to watch.’”
Comedic timing is no measure of moral standing, judgment, or intelligence. Most of us would never flex the skill of “clownery” on a job résumé, and for very good reasons—reasons that likewise apply to public-office aspirants. But, as bygone election seasons have shown time and time again, the thrall of a good show can eclipse better judgment. Let the circus begin.
Related:
Is Ron DeSantis flaming out?
We’ve lost the plot.
Today’s News
Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and three other members of the group were
convicted of seditious conspiracy for their role in the January 6 Capitol attack.
Russia
claimed that the United States was behind a drone attack on the Kremlin.
A jury found that Ed Sheeran
did not infringe on the copyright of Marvin Gaye’s song “Let’s Get It On.”
Dispatches
Up for Debate: Tucker Carlson was wrong in his analysis of the media,
Conor Friedersdorf argues.
Explore all of our newsletters here.
Evening Read
Phyllis B. Dooney for The Atlantic
The Future of Policing Is a ‘Little Gay Woman’ Named Terry Cherry
By David A. Graham
One Tuesday this past fall, Senior Police Officer Terry Cherry was struggling to connect with some 75 bleary Clemson University students doing their best to stay awake and not make eye contact with the day’s guest speaker. Cherry, who packs a lot of ebullience and authority into a short frame, was deploying nearly all of it to get their attention.
“Who here wants to be a police officer?” she asked. A few tentative hands went up. “Raise your hand if you want to be an FBI agent.” Twenty-some hands went up.
Read the full article.
More From The Atlantic
Republicans’ big rich-city problem
This debt crisis is not like 2011’s. It’s worse.
What the drone strikes on the Kremlin reveal about the war in Ukraine
Culture Break
Illustration by Jan Buchczik
Read. Han Kang’s Greek Lessons, a novel in which language hits its limit—and keeps on going.
Watch. A rerun of The Office (streaming on Peacock). Then learn what Rainn Wilson knows about God.
Play our daily crossword.
P.S.
Speaking of “covfefe,” I recommend revisiting that typo turned meme—and what it meant—in this brief yet incisive 2019 salvo by Atlantic executive editor Adrienne LaFrance: “Long after the president’s tweets are stripped of meaning by the passage of time and the rotting of the internet, his severest critics will still have to grapple with the short distance between politics and entertainment in America, and the man who for years toyed so masterfully with a nation’s attention.”
— Kelli
Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.