There is a criticism sometimes leveled at those of us who write about Donald Trump with a certain relish, and it goes like this: it is beneath you. It is cruel. You mock his weight, his intellect, his failures, and mockery is the lowest form of discourse, and a serious person rises above it.
I want to respond to this criticism seriously, which is to say I want to explain, with the cold precision of a man cataloging beetles, the internal logic of the mockery, because there is one, and it is more disciplined than its critics assume. We do not mock Donald Trump at random, the way one might swat at a fly. We mock him according to a system, a taxonomy, a filing structure as rigorous as anything in the natural sciences. Each category of ridicule is a direct and proportional response to a specific claim he has made about himself. The mockery is not an attack on who he is. It is a response to who he insists, loudly and without being asked, that he is. Allow me to lay out the specimens.
Category One: Body Shame
We mock Donald Trump’s physical condition. We note the fit of his suits, which hang on him the way a tarpaulin hangs on a parked boat, the architecture of his hair, the tangerine hue of his complexion, the general impression of a man being slowly and lovingly reclaimed by the fast food he has consumed, as a bog reclaims a dropped shoe.
We do this because Donald Trump has declared himself the fittest president in American history. His own White House physician, under what one assumes was the kind of duress usually reserved for hostage videos, once produced a report describing Trump as being in “excellent” health and radiating a vigor bordering on the biologically implausible. Trump has claimed he would have won physical fights with men decades younger. He has presented himself, repeatedly and without provocation, as an athlete, a specimen, a Greek statue that somehow acquired a spray tan and a grievance.
He weighs what he weighs. He looks how he looks. None of it would merit a single syllable from anyone, ever, were it not for the fact that the man has staked a public claim to being the most physically magnificent creature ever to occupy the office, a claim his own silhouette files a formal objection to every time he stands near a doorframe. The body shame is not aimed at his body. It is aimed at the canyon between his body and his description of it. Close the canyon, and the mockery evaporates like a spilled Diet Coke on a warm tarmac. He will not close the canyon. So here we are.
Category Two: Stupid Shame
We mock Donald Trump’s intellect. We collect the malapropisms, the geographic mysteries, the moments where he appears to be meeting the English language for the first time and finding it not to his liking.
We do this because Donald Trump has described himself as a genius. Not a bright man. Not a capable man. A genius, and specifically a “very stable genius,” and even more specifically a person in possession of a “big brain,” an organ he refers to the way a boy refers to a fish he once caught. He knows more about ISIS than the generals. More about taxes than the accountants. More about wind turbines, drones, infrastructure, the visa system, and the human body than the assembled specialists of every relevant field, all of whom, he suspects, are hiding something. Nobody, he has assured us on many separate occasions, is smarter than him, a sentence he has never once completed without incident.
A man who called Iran the Islamic Republic of Japan at a NATO summit is permitted to be a person of average intelligence without comment, because that is most of us, and there is no shame in it, and average is the exact middle of a scale that had to be built somewhere. But a man who nominates himself the smartest human currently drawing breath and then cannot locate, on a map, the country he is actively bombing has personally requested the comparison, and the comparison arrives, and it is unkind, and the unkindness was assembled entirely in his own factory. We are merely holding the genius up next to the genius’s homework. The homework has a lot of red on it.
Category Three: Success Shame
We mock Donald Trump’s record as a titan of industry. We bring up the bankruptcies, the failed airline, the failed university, the failed steaks, the failed vodka, the failed board game, and the casinos, which achieved the genuinely difficult feat of losing money in the one business mathematically designed so the house cannot lose. He built a machine that takes money from people who want to give it away and found a way to make it hemorrhage. That takes a kind of talent. Just not the kind he advertises.
We do this because Donald Trump has crowned himself the most successful businessman in the world and the greatest president in the history of the republic, superior to Lincoln, superior to Washington, superior to whichever names you have not yet thought of. He has presented catastrophe after catastrophe as strategy, has described driving enterprises into the earth like tent pegs as genius, and has claimed a commercial and diplomatic brilliance that the actual paper trail treats as a stranger.
A man with a merely mixed business career would deserve no ridicule for it, because most careers are mixed and building anything at all, even a bad thing, is hard. But a man who declares himself the single greatest success in the recorded history of the species, while his casinos file for bankruptcy and his steaks quietly vanish from the freezer aisle and his presidency mistakes allies for enemies on live television, has erected a standard, personally, with his own hands, and then handed us the tape measure. We are only reading the numbers off the tape.
Category Four: Vocabulary Shame
We mock Donald Trump’s command of language. We assemble the sentences that set off confidently in one direction, visit four unrelated locations, insult a bystander, and then sit down without arriving anywhere, the paragraphs that melt into a warm fog of “many people are saying” and “everybody knows” and “the likes of which you have never seen.”
We do this because Donald Trump has personally informed us that he has the best words. This is a real quotation, produced by a real mouth, in front of real witnesses. “I have the best words.” He has described himself as an exceptionally articulate man, a person of rare verbal gifts, a craftsman of the sentence. “I know words,” he has said. “I have the best words.” He said this out loud, on purpose, and did not appear to hear it happen.
A person who spoke in the ordinary loops and dead ends of unrehearsed human speech would deserve no comment, because that is how everyone sounds when a microphone ambushes them, and it is nothing to apologize for. But a man who has personally nominated himself the finest wielder of the English language currently alive, and who then produces a sentence that travels from windmills to his uncle at MIT to the word “genius” without ever locating a verb, has volunteered for the assessment, clipboard in hand. He told us to grade the words. We are grading the words. The words are, and I want to be precise here because he asked us to be, not the best words. They are somewhere near the back.
Category Five: Virtue Shame
We mock Donald Trump’s claims to human decency. We point out the tens of thousands of documented falsehoods, the imitation of a disabled reporter, the children separated from their parents, the jury that found him liable for sexual abuse, the abiding impression of a man for whom cruelty is not an occasional stumble but the load-bearing wall of the entire structure.
We do this because Donald Trump has described himself, repeatedly and with a straight face, as a lovely person. “I think I am a nice person,” he has said. “I’m actually a nice person.” He has declared himself the least racist person you have ever met, the least racist person in the room, the least anti-Semitic person you have ever seen in your entire life. He has announced that nobody respects women more than he does, that no one has done more for equality, that his supply of compassion is essentially bottomless. He has awarded himself, across the full moral spectrum, a perfect report card, and signed it, and mailed it to himself, and been delighted by its arrival.
A person of ordinary, marbled human character, generous on Tuesday and short-tempered by Thursday, would deserve no scrutiny, because that is nearly everyone who has ever lived and grace is owed to all of them. But a man who names himself the least racist, most respectful, kindest, most compassionate figure in any room he enters, and who then reads aloud, at length, from a public record that contradicts each of these claims in sequence, has set the terms of his own trial and supplied the evidence for the prosecution. He asked to be graded on virtue. The transcript is very long. We have read the whole thing. There will be no gold star.
Category Six: Temperament Shame
We mock Donald Trump’s emotional composure. We catalog the 3 a.m. posts, the feuds conducted with senators who have had the decency to already be dead, the physical impossibility of allowing a correction to pass without escalating it into an international incident, the general spectacle of a man piloted entirely by whichever grievance floated nearest to the surface that morning.
We do this because Donald Trump has certified himself, in writing, as a man of extraordinary calm. “I have a great temperament,” he has said. “I think I have a great temperament.” He has, in what may prove his most durable contribution to the language, described himself as a “very stable genius,” a phrase so violently at war with the man producing it that it escaped his control on the day of its birth and now roams the culture freely as a joke he authored against himself and continues, to this day, not to get.
A person of ordinary temperament, who gets rattled and nurses grudges and occasionally posts something at midnight that looks worse at dawn, would deserve no mockery, because that is simply the weather of being a person. But a man who notarizes himself as very stable, and who then spends the smallest hours of the morning relitigating a decade-old insult with a man now safely in the ground, has issued the very ruler by which he begs to be measured. We are holding the stability up next to the stable genius’s timestamps. The two are not on speaking terms.
The Unifying Principle
Notice what connects all six specimens, because it is the entire point, the reason the collection hangs together instead of being a pile of insults in a drawer.
In every case, the ridicule is not aimed at a trait. It is aimed at a lie about a trait. We do not mock Trump for being heavy, for being of average mind, for having failed in business, for speaking in circles, for having a marbled character, or for owning a normal human temperament, because those things describe a vast share of decent people who have never harmed a soul and deserve nothing from anyone but warmth. We mock him for declaring himself the fittest, the smartest, the most successful, the most articulate, the kindest, and the most stable man alive, while being visibly, gigantically, on-camera-in-perpetuity none of these.
The technical term for the distance between what a person swears he is and what a person plainly is, when the swearing is grandiose and the reality is a tarpaulin on a boat, is hypocrisy. And when it is total, when it soaks every square inch of a person’s self-presentation until there is no dry patch left, it graduates into something grander, a kind of comprehensive, load-bearing, architecturally significant fraud. The mockery is the instrument by which we survey it. Each category is a ruler laid against a specific boast. We would put every last ruler back in the drawer tomorrow if he simply stopped boasting.
He will not stop boasting. It is, as far as anyone has ever been able to determine, the single activity he performs with total, unwavering, world-class consistency. He is, at long last, the best at something.
So the mockery is not beneath us. It is a precise instrument, calibrated to a precise target, wielded with real affection for the craft. And the target, in every case, painted itself, stood back, admired the work, and announced that no one has ever painted a target better.
BRILLIANT piece. And every mocking chips away at his façade. Hoping for a complete and total – impeachable – meltdown.
I could barely eat my morning cereal from laughing so much. As a person who has struggled with her weight since adolescence I sometimes feel a frisson of shame when I make fun of his in the foulest way I can, but then it fades as I read (not really—I get about two words in and my brain actually shuts down) some inanity he has said and I just say it anyway. He is so totally detestable, I just can’t bear to look at him or listen to anything he says. He reminds me of the big black (3 inch-long) Oriental cockroaches that infested the last apartment I lived in here in Chicago. I was so traumatized by them I kept imaging that every tangle of dog hair I saw on the stairs in my new dwelling was a roach body. I would hesitate, lean over a tiny bit just to make sure it was not a roach, then I’d go on my way in relief. I long for the day I can go on in relief from the torment that is Donald Trump. Some days I wonder if I hope in vain.