John Irvine

I watched Trump’s speech at the Correspondents’ Dinner last night. It’s hard to articulate how sad it made me. Sad and embarrassed and exhausted. Here is the thing about a man who is a joke. He can’t tell one. People think humor is a talent. It isn’t. It’s a capacity. To make someone laugh you have to be able to laugh at yourself, and to laugh at yourself you have to step outside of yourself and see what everyone else sees. For one second you have to be just another person in the room. Most people can do this by the time they are nine years old. He has never once managed it. Not in fifty years of cameras. Not for a second. That is not a quirk. It is a symptom. The muscle that lets you tell a joke is the same one that lets you feel what another person feels. A man who cannot survive being laughed at cannot imagine being anyone but himself. He will only ever be generous when it is photographed. He will only ever be kind when it is filmed. There is a name for it. So he stood up there and did what he always does. He hit down. He made jokes about people’s weight. He made jokes about their intelligence. He made jokes about how women look. He read out the names of people he doesn’t like, and mocked them. Always mocking. And when no one laughed he blamed his speech writers. The cruelty dressed as humor has worn so thin. And for the 30% of you still in the cult who will inevitably call me a crackhead and blame it all on my Dad, all I can say is please, for the love of God, open your eyes. Wake the fuck up. Have some dignity. Have some pride. Joe Biden wasn’t standing at that podium last night. Donald Trump was. And at the end of it he put on a red hat that said Trump 2028 and told the room he was running again. No one laughed because everyone knows he has no intention of leaving. Just another joke at our expense.