Menon Comics cut to the chase,
It’s a miracle the late night comedians are not dropping from exhaustion. Trying to keep up with the plot twists on The Trump Show is like trying to decipher Kafka’s The Metamorphosis by reading snippets on random pages: something strange is happening, nothing makes sense and it’s emotionally draining.
Luckily, amid the page-flipping chaos, the comedians have not lost the plot.
On Tuesday night, not long after Trump stunned even his own aides by drawing a false moral equivalency between the violent white supremacists who descended on Virginia this weekend and the counterprotesters who flanked out to condemn this jarring spectacle of organized bigotry, the court jesters were once again forced to tear up planned monologues to ridicule America’s mad king.
“President Trump this afternoon gave a press conference that can only be described as clinically insane,” said Seth Meyers, who for months has used his platform on NBC’s Late Night to hammer the U.S. president.
“You know that list of side effects at the end of a pharmaceutical ad?
“He apparently has all of them. He said among other things that, ‘There were very fine people on both sides’ of the events in Charlottesville.”
This repulsive notion — that a torch-bearing mob of heavily armed Nazis marching, chanting and attacking counterprotesters, including murdering one and injuring 19 others, might include some good apples — animated the ripe punch lines.
“What the hell are you talking about?” asked Stephen Colbert on CBS, lurching into his Trump voice impersonation: “You know, one side hates minorities. The other side hates people who hate minorities. OK, two sides. It’s just like D-Day. Remember D-Day, two sides, Allies and the Nazis? There was a lot of violence on both sides. Ruined a beautiful beach. And it could have been a golf course.” Or as ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel observed: “If you’re with a group of people and they’re chanting things like, ‘Jews will not replace us,’ and you don’t immediately leave that group, you are not a ‘very fine’ person.
“It was supposed to be a press conference about infrastructure and it ended with our president making an angry and passionate defence of white supremacists . . . I feel like I can say this with reasonable certainty: the president is completely unhinged.”
The contrasting reaction on late night and cable news was fascinating.
The comedians, perhaps more attuned to Trump’s profound character failings from his days as a reality TV charlatan, long ago dispensed with any benefit of doubt. They see Trump for what he’s always been: a bumbling and incompetent narcissist who possesses the moral compass of a barracuda. If Trump could make a quick buck harvesting your grandmother’s organs, she’d now be playing Bingo with one kidney. Once you accept that Trump is not just a failure as president, but that he’s a failure as a human being, it becomes easy for the comedians to say his news conference unfolded in “the 7th circle of hell” (Colbert) or that he is “fully out of his mind” (Meyers). Because: a) it did and, b) he is.
But on cable news, where anchors and pundits still cling to the fantasy Trump may yet change and start behaving presidential — or that the office warrants a traditional deference regardless of the occupant — moments of acute lunacy still produce disbelief instead of what is badly needed, which is disrespect.
On CNN after the news conference, Wolf Blitzer said he’d never seen anything like that in all his years of covering Washington. This was a popular sentiment across the dial as anchors shook their heads and gazed into the cameras with traumatized eyes.
“What I just saw gave me the wrong kind of chills,” said MSNBC’s Chuck Todd. “Honestly, I’m a bit shaken by what I just heard.”
The search for motivation, for a deeper meaning, was on. Citing inside sources, NBC reported that Trump “went rogue.” But this explanation gets really old really fast when it’s trotted out once a week. Here, I’m reminded of an old Chris Rock bit after that tiger attacked during a Siegfried & Roy show and people wondered about the animal’s state of mind.
As Rock joked: “That tiger ain’t go crazy! That tiger went tiger!” And on Tuesday, Trump went Trump.
At this point, cable news should learn from late night comedy and not expect better. Every anchor should realize this broader narrative is about one wackadoodle with too much power and too little decency.
It’s about the impact this conman can have on social norms and oddly vulnerable democratic institutions when, as Kimmel noted, he is “completely unhinged.”
This should be the starting point for every news story. Trump is not screwing up. He’s just revealing who he is. Tuesday was not an anomaly. That was just Trump being Trump. Day after day, night after night, no amount of analytic light can penetrate this heart of darkness.
You can turn to any page and this story will not change. vmenon@thestar.ca