Donald Trump likes to think of himself as a funny man.
He doesn’t have the talent for jokes like Ronald Reagan or the easy charm of Bill Clinton. But he’s spent enough time in reality TV to play for laughs when he’s in the mood.
He likes to drop the occasional bomb, with a crooked smile and the empathy of the late Don Rickets. The big problem is that he’s lost sight of his audience. And he is too old to understand how damaging that has become.
Trump, 79, has done many crazy things in the first year of his second term. But by posting an AI picture of himself as Jesus Christ, he wasn’t just making a bad joke; he was giving ammunition to his enemies at home and abroad.
The most unlikely of these is the Iranians, who have proved themselves the most adept propagandists.
And they have managed to exploit a divided United States ... with Lego.
Tehran has unleashed its Gen Z on America with startling results. It may be losing the military conflict, but it is winning the PR war.
As a country, we like to laugh at ourselves. It’s why Saturday Night Live is such a cherished TV tradition. But how do we feel when the rest of the world is laughing at us?
SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE SNL's final insult to Trump is Alec Baldwin singing "Macho Man."
NBCTrump likes to boast that he leads the most powerful country on the planet. But he is out of touch with his people. And it is difficult to go full-on dictator in a democracy.
When Adolf Hitler talked of himself as a demigod during the Third Reich, nobody in Germany contradicted him. If Vladimir Putin wants to pose shirtless on a horse, the Russian media doesn’t publish before and after photos of his midriff.
The Cambodians didn’t ridicule Pol Pot for murdering intellectuals with soft hands, and Kim Jong-il can say he was born under a shining star and a rainbow on a sacred mountain without any North Koreans invoking the equivalent of a 25th Amendment.
Trump uses a clip of Ben Stiller’s 2008 comedy ‘Tropic Thunder’ to promote his strikes on Iran, and the actor demands he take it off social media, saying: “We have no interest in being part of your propaganda machine. War is not a movie.”
America’s polarization is not altogether a bad thing. It means we can still enjoy debate. We can still protest. And we can still upbraid our president when we think he has overstepped the mark.
Quite what the president was thinking by posting the Jesus meme is impossible to guess. It is clear he is no longer thinking straight, and none of the stooges that surround him have the cojones to tell him.
He finally saw sense and took it down. And then blamed the “fake media” for not realizing all along that he was supposed to be an AI doctor and not a deity.
That is another problem Trump has been unable to overcome, despite all his efforts; a democracy needs a free press to nourish and protect it.
Trump has demeaned and insulted the media, but he cannot do away with it. He just doesn’t have that power, and he never will have.
The biggest problem Trump has now is that he has given up the most important weapon in any U.S. president’s arsenal. The truth.
We simply cannot believe what he says and does because experience has shown us he is not honest or straightforward about the facts.
He demands cheerleaders, but it is no longer a game when you are playing with people’s lives. We don’t want boasting and belittling. We want to know what’s happening.
So, when the president of the United States posts a picture of himself as Christ, or standing next to Christ, our first reaction is surprise, then shock, and ultimately disgust.
Even worse, when Iran posts their own AI meme that takes Trump’s artificially generated picture and turns it into a video of Jesus throwing the president into the pits of hell, our first impulse is to ... laugh.
We cannot help but smile at an Iranian post that reads: “TRUMP $20.28 per gallon.”
South Park and SNL will poke fun at the president because, quite frankly, he is such an easy target. We laugh, but uneasily. He is the leader of our country, after all. We actually want him to do well.
When Iran posts AI Lego videos showing the president hiding the Epstein files and memes of Trump as an ’80s rock star with a bouffant hairdo, crooning “Voyage Voyage” by Desireless, retitled “Blockade,” we can’t help but laugh along and share them with our friends.
The joke is on us, of course.
For decades, Iran’s conservative clerics have been terrified of Western culture and sought to keep it away from their own people. Most of the country has been kept offline since the beginning of the war in the world’s longest digital blackout.
Iran’s free newspapers have been muzzled and its TV shows filled with propaganda.
This is not a regime that promotes fun. It is the antithesis of the freedoms we cherish.
There is an irony here. Had Trump trusted the mainstream media, he would be assured of an authentic portrayal—the likes of the New York Times, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal may not agree with everything Trump does, but they will always offer a context describing the realities of life under the ayatollah.
Social media is an altogether different situation. There is no demand for balance. For Tehran, it’s the Wild West, and they can strike at will.
If Trump and his acolytes, with their mean-minded responses to the media and their puerile humor, had kept something resembling dignity while asking American troops to lay down their lives for their country, we would at least have the moral high ground.
But Trump gave that up a long time ago.
The result is that America’s hard-fought reputation as the world’s defining democracy has gone where Iran’s AI engineers sent Trump’s attempt to represent himself as the Messiah.
Down in flames.
