Donald Trump Only Laughs at Two Things

The FBI director went looking for footage and couldn't find any. His own lawyer of a decade says there are exactly two exceptions, and both of them tell you something.

Let us begin with the search.

James Comey, who ran the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had dinner with the President of the United States and noticed that the President did not laugh. This is not, on its own, remarkable. Dinners are variable. Some are funnier than others.

What is remarkable is what Comey did afterward, which was to go looking.

He told ABC that it had stayed with him, that he had never seen the man laugh, not in public and not in private. Then he went and searched for video, because he is a former prosecutor and prosecutors like evidence, and he reported that he could not find a clip of a laugh that seemed genuine.

The director of the FBI conducted an inquiry into whether the President had ever laughed. The inquiry was inconclusive in the direction of no.

Others have looked

It turns out this is a thing people do once the possibility occurs to them.

In 2012 an episode of Celebrity Apprentice aired in which Mario Andretti, the racing driver, pretended to chauffeur Trump to the show’s finale at high speed while promising not to disturb his hair. At the end of the bit, Trump laughs. An actual laugh, by the general agreement of everyone who has watched it.

A writer resurfaced that clip in recent years and it went past seven hundred thousand views, and the reaction was not that the bit was funny. The reaction was that people had never seen him do that before. They responded to it the way people respond to a photograph of a rare animal. One person said it was the first time they had seen a human laugh from him. Another said it was the happiest they had ever seen him.

That is a man’s laugh circulating as a curiosity because it is so seldom documented. There is footage of him from six decades. The archive contains one widely agreed-upon specimen and it is from a reality television program in which a racing driver drives him around.

The two exceptions

Michael Cohen worked as his personal attorney for roughly ten years, which is longer than nearly anyone has managed, and in his book he addressed this directly.

Cohen wrote that Trump very rarely laughed, and almost never, except in two circumstances. One was a crude sexual remark. The other was someone else’s misfortune.

Hold that up against the record, because there is a documented instance of the second one and it is on video.

At a rally in Florida he was talking about people crossing the border and asked the crowd how you stop them. Somebody in the crowd shouted, shoot them. And he laughed.

That is the laugh. Not the Andretti bit, which is a curiosity. That one is the working model, produced spontaneously, in front of thousands, in response to a stranger proposing to shoot people.

So the inventory of documented Trump laughter, assembled by a former FBI director and a former personal attorney and a great many people on the internet with time on their hands, comes to roughly this: one reality show gag from 2012, and cruelty.

The woman with the laugh

Now the part that I find genuinely difficult to think about for very long.

During the 2024 campaign, one of the most sustained lines of attack he ran against Kamala Harris was that she laughs. He imitated it at rallies. He asked audiences whether there was something wrong with her. His allies produced compilations of it. The laugh became, for several months, an actual campaign issue in a presidential election in the United States of America.

A man who has been recorded laughing approximately once, in a limousine, in 2012, ran for president partly on the argument that his opponent laughed too much and that this indicated a defect.

He was not being cynical. That is the thing. He appears to have genuinely found it strange. Somebody who laughs easily, in his presence, at things that are not misfortunes, is a person operating on a frequency he does not receive, and his response to receiving nothing is to conclude that the transmitter is broken.

Being laughed at

He addressed the United Nations General Assembly and told them his administration had accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of the country.

The room laughed.

Not with him. It was the other kind, the ripple that goes around a room when a group of adults simultaneously decide not to pretend anymore, and it lasted several seconds, and it is on tape, and he heard it.

He said afterward that he had not expected that reaction, and that they were laughing with him.

Consider the position that puts a person in. He has spent a lifetime not laughing, in rooms full of people, and the one occasion on which a room full of the most senior officials on earth laughed out loud in his presence, the joke was him. And he had to stand there and identify it, in real time, as friendliness, because the alternative interpretation was unavailable to him.

Comey said in his book that the absence of laughter probably comes from an inability to be vulnerable, or to risk anything by appreciating somebody else’s humor. He called it sad in a leader and a bit frightening in a president. Trump’s response to the observation was to say that Comey is not smart.

Why this is not a small thing

Laughing at a joke is a concession. That is the whole mechanism. You are admitting that somebody else produced something you did not see coming, that it landed, and that they got you. For one second the other person is on top and you are the audience, and you signal your surrender by making an involuntary noise.

He cannot do that. Not will not. Every available account says he does not have it.

And the two exceptions are exactly the two situations where laughing costs him nothing, because a crude remark and somebody else’s disaster both leave him on top. He is not participating in either one. He is watching from above and making a sound about it.

Which brings us back to a dining room in the Senate, where a group of Republicans applauded him on his feet, waited for the door to shut, and then burst out laughing.

They can do it. Every one of them can do it. They just have to wait until he is gone.