Trump has killed satire

[Zorro]

Nothing lasts forever, not even the art of satire. Its long and popular run, tweaking pretensions and foibles of power with cutting irony and deft exaggeration, spanned millennia. From Lucilius and Juvenal in classical Rome to the brilliant likes of Dave Chappelle and Kate McKinnon today, satirists have delighted and challenged audiences with their pinpricks — sometimes dagger thrusts — of acid humor.

Alas, satire is dead, as of the second week of July 2020. Irony failed and exaggeration proved impossible when the president of the United States retweeted the medical opinions of former game-show host Chuck Woolery as ammunition in his weird war against National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony S. Fauci.

In 1729, Jonathan Swift satirized the exploitation of Ireland’s poor by offering “A Modest Proposal” that was anything but. Irish babies, he suggested, could be sold as delicacies for the banquet tables of wealthy British diners. Even savage Swift, however, couldn’t magnify the callousness of late-stage Trump. An average of 1,000 Americans dead per day since March 1 from the novel coronavirus. More than 1 million per week out of work, on average. In such a crisis, rather than rely on advice from the longtime head of the national institute on infectious diseases, the president promotes hogwash from the host of “Love Connection.”

Comedian Sarah Cooper caught the last car of the last train out of the dying empire of satire. She posts biting little videos to the Internet in which she perfectly matches her moving mouth to the president’s own recorded voice. Imagine that: The best way to skewer Trump’s mendacity and madness is simply to show his words emerging from the mouth of a sane person. He is the ultimate self-parody.

So I come not to satirize Trump but to note how completely unhinged the president is.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-has-killed-satire/2020/07/14/7a5fe848-c5e3-11ea-b037-f9711f89ee46_story.html

[pnwest]

1. He's killed comedy/humor in general.

I don’t laugh at ANY posts about him, cause the peril we are in is so real, so close at hand, and both his incompetence and his intentional evils, are just too dangerous. There isn’t a damn thing funny about any of this. I stopped laughing about two years ago.

[lastlib]

2. I still laugh at him every chance I get, because....

It's the one big thing that gets under his skin. Death by a thousand cuts, he gets his dander up, his blood pressure goes up...sooner or later, he will blow an artery, and become a bump on the rump of history.

[Blue Owl]

3. Another chapter in "Everything tRump Touches..."

n/t