A Bitter Pill for the Resistance to Swallow About Trump

Welcome to How Bad Is This, Really?, a recurring feature in which we take the temperature of how things are looking in the presidential election and what seems likely to happen in November.

This weekend, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump delivered remarks in Las Vegas about electric boat batteries and sharks. Out of respect for the democratic process, I ask that you watch and consider them in full before reading the rest of this article.

Context: Trump was recapping a conversation he had supposedly had with the proprietor of a company that makes boats. This person, in the former president’s account, is being forced to outfit the boats he manufactures with electric batteries and doesn’t like it. Neither does Trump:

Thank you. (Here is what the MIT thing is about.) Now ask yourself, and be honest: Did that make sense?

Many liberal writers and commentators said that it did not. “Cognitive Decline? Trump Short-Circuits During Bonkers Rant,” wrote the New Republic, which despite its history of contrarianism seems to have lately taken a turn toward trying to please the hypothetical median Democrat. “I dare you to try to make sense of this,” said viral clip-account proprietor Aaron Rupar (which is something he says a lot). An MSNBC blogger wrote, “It’s difficult to know not only what he’s talking about, but why in the world he said it in the first place.” The official Joe Biden–Kamala Harris campaign Twitter account posted a video of another MSNBC host who cited the shark monologue as an example of Trump’s being “untethered to reality.”

But is it really impossible to understand? Trump may be wrong about the science involved, but his point seems clear enough, which is that liberals are scolds who lack common sense. They want to equip boats with renewable batteries even though water and electricity don’t mix, and they care more about the feelings of sharks than the people sharks attack. (Soft on shark crime, soft on the causes of shark crime.) The premise of an electrocution/biting-death binary is far-fetched, but he obviously knows that. It’s an allegory, you might say, for Biden’s leadership turning the U.S. into a sinking ship circled by scavengers.

Also, his delivery is funny, as this seemingly left-leaning British reporter seems to understand:

Anecdotally, I had already suspected that semi-ironic Trump appreciation was common among left-leaning people who are young enough to be participating in multiple ongoing group chats, where his comedic work can be appreciated in semi-private. The shark incident presented the opportunity to do further research.

Posing a question on Twitter and in Slate’s workplace Slack chat provided some confirmation of the theory. Followers and colleagues attested (or admitted) to regularly enjoying and using Trump riffs in their social circles, from classics like “many such cases” and “Wow—I didn’t know that, you’re telling me that for the first time” (his over-the-top reaction to a reporter’s question about Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, which he had almost certainly just been told about by advisers) to deep cuts, like his repeated invocation of the word routers after the 2020 election. One brought up the death of Harambe the gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo, which is how the phrase “Trump weighs in on gorilla zoo shooting” has been permanently etched into my memory. Another reminded me that Trump responded to his impending arrest by posting a message that said, “WOW, they are going to ARREST ME.”

The “routers” clip was actually sent to me by Slate’s Nitish Pahwa, who, despite reporting professionally on the dangers of ethnonationalism, confided that he often repeats Trump’s pronunciation of the word to himself. (Nitish also said that he mimics Trump saying the word waffles but can’t locate the clip that made him start doing it in the first place. I am concerned about Nitish’s well-being.) Which raises two questions—what’s going on here, and is it a problem that establishment Democrats don’t seem to “get it”?

Part of it is probably the timeless tendency to console oneself with gallows humor. (Basically the entire purpose of a second Trump administration would be to repress the kind of people being discussed in this article.) Part of it is the forbidden appeal of unspoken truths. And part of it is the modern phenomenon of using technology to expose yourself to something stupid or absurd so many times that it becomes intrusively hilarious. (See: “its time to drink precisely one beer and call 911.”)

And although Trump comedy is not the biggest issue Joe Biden’s reelection campaign faces, it might be a problem that the current president’s team believes that it can undermine concerns about its candidate’s age by pointing to purportedly nonsensical Trump clips in which Trump is actually doing an easily parsed riff about how liberals are idiots. If a significant portion of people who despise Trump understand what is funny about him, amplifying his more appealing moments to voters who are on the fence might not be advisable.

Anyway, it’s our custom to conclude this column with a rating on the patented Shovel Meter—a measure of exactly how sedated you might want to be at the moment, on a scale of one to five shovel blows to the head, if you’re concerned about Trump’s reelection and the potential end of democracy.

This week, it’s four shovels. When you’re discussing exactly how funny it is that a revenge-obsessed felon is currently favored to become the next president, things are not going well. But that’s OK—we’ll still keep drinking that garbage.