Laughter alone will never defeat Donald Trump

Human is a weapon against wannabe dictators. But it's MAGA's weapon, too. And it can be an anesthetic.

I am not Elon Musk. And neither are you.

That's good news for anyone around us, especially our kids, whom we will strive to love and support as they age past the point of being a cute prop for a meeting and become their own humans capable of standing up for themselves and their own freedom.

Since we are not the wealthiest goof on earth, we cannot possibly blame ourselves personally for Donald Trump's return. We could not spend a quarter of a billion dollars to elect someone, including $20 million for a PAC named after Ruth Bader Ginsburg and viciously designed to fool pro-choice voters into re-electing the man personally responsible for every abortion ban in America.

Even Taylor Swift, another billionaire, probably wouldn't and didn't spend a fifth of her wealth to elect someone. It's a much easier choice for Elon since $250,000,000 is about 0.1% of his $343.8 billion net worth and about 0.4% of the $70 billion he's made on Tesla stock alone since Trump won.

These incomprehensible numbers signify unconscionable unfairness, suggesting that the question of whether or not we should have billionaires is superfluous. Instead, the billionaires seem to be deciding whether or not we will have democracy.

All this is to say that you can blame Elon Musk for Donald Trump. But how about the rest of us?

Almost losing your democracy to the host of The Celebrity Apprentice once requires soul searching. But twice? It sure looks like carelessness. We are obligated by anyone who has ever believed in the promise of progress to reconsider everything.

So, what am I guilty of? Maybe I overestimated the power and value of humor, especially in the face of a truly effective demagogue with the knack for leveraging the support of all the worst forces and people in the world.

If you’ve known me as LOLGOP, you can see why I made this error. In the 2012 election, the Republicans nominated a classic hapless foil in Mitt Romney, though he tried to be demagogue! He tried and failed to weaponize Benghazi, for instance, the way the party did for the next four years, leading to the demise of Hillary Clinton's candidacy.

We got the wrong idea from Mitt's defeat. That idea was that mocking in itself is doing something. My social media moniker alone reinforced that idea. I even joined a panel at Netroots Nation in 2013, where my tweets were offered as an example of something that helped President Obama win.

One of my biggest regrets in life is the way that outrage funneled into mockery might have helped Donald Trump steamroll his Republican opponents in the 2016 election. All it did (and what it still does) was draw attention to Trump and away from everyone else. With any other candidate, that could have been a helpful thing, but Trump’s willingness to be ridiculous and hateful is a constant catnip to a movement that has valorized these vices for generations.

The Russians got this and played up the most divisive aspects of Trump. At the same time, I unwittingly joined IRA-backed trolls in helping to savage Ted Cruz, a far less effective demagogue who has not figured out how to use the ridicule he demands to grow his appeal beyond Texas Republicans.

I'll be honest: At that point, I did not understand how good Trump is at this. I had no sense of how the most potent and venal forces in the world had aligned to capitalize on the weaknesses in our democracy that the conservative movement had spent half a century exacerbating.

There was some excuse for that in 2016. We had fun! It may have helped some cope and build solidarity against Trump, which continued into his presidency. But I didn’t realize we needed to build on that and do much more than mock him. There’s no excuse for that now.

To be fair to myself, I recognized early in 2024 that trying to defeat Donald Trump with humor alone is--to hack Andy Richter--like trying to drown a vampire in your blood. So, I focused on what I could do with the smaller, large following I'd gathered. 

That mostly meant raising money and encouraging volunteer actions. And because my following was mainly on a social network Elon Musk bought to turn into a Donald Trump campaign site, I needed something else. Blissfully, Bluesky was rising and kept getting better. I wasn't successful in getting the left to move to the site en masse then, but those of us who were there were super engaged and didn't find our will for life and posts drained out of us by some billionaire's algorithm.

Now, we are at another crossroads, one that looks like it might be bleaker than what smacked our faces in 2016. We must figure out how we will survive this mess. This why I'm helping Andrea Pitzer put together her podcast Next Comes What.

The first episode is essential for clarifying our situation. If you haven’t watched it, you should as soon as possible so we don't waste any of the precious time we have before Trump's second swipe at dictatorship begins in earnest.

I doubt anything we can do before the inauguration will be as useful to anyone who cares about maintaining some semblance of democracy. But this new episode above, "A Tiny Revolution," may be the most useful piece of content I've ever personally encountered. To me–as an old man who tries to be funny and has too big of a platform to do it–it's a master class in what humor can and can't do in times like now.

If you believe in the power of the joke, what Orwell called "a tiny revolution," it's a must-watch. 

Because it was so important to me, I used the few days I had to put it together to try to supplement Andrea's excellent commentary on how humor works for and against authoritarians with a sort of "everything all at once" manifesto of my own about how political comedy works and matters. I have to thank Andrea for allowing me to do that. If it doesn't work, please blame me. And if it does, it's all because of the framework she created.

The biggest lesson I plan to live by from this episode is about the scale and purpose of comedy comes at the end. 

Andrea concludes:

I am 100 percent as irony-poisoned as the next Trump hater. But if we can't imagine uniting more people than the number who currently agree with us using humor, and the recognition of shared experiences, then deep down I have to wonder how much we really believe in democracy. And if we make the same jokes over and over to the same crowd, and that's all we're doing, but we think we're accomplishing something, then most of the time, I'm guessing we're probably not.

The same jokes to the same people. That's a recipe for exactly how authoritarians would love for us to use humor. And that's precisely what I'm going to work to avoid.

Real laughter spreads. If it doesn't, it's the opposite of genuine humor, which instantly collapses boundaries and mores, inviting you to recreate the world in a new way beyond the hierarchies designed to suffocate us.

I'm wasting my time if I'm not making new people laugh in new ways. And frankly, that's hard! Too hard. If you can do that, you should be earning millions on stage. I'm not! Instead, I will strive to use humor as much as possible to unite and draw attention to good causes. But I must also strive to do much. With new efforts and better ideas, I will aim to invite new people to oppose Trump effectively and give democracy the fight it deserves. 

Because honestly, Donald Trump doesn't need my help. Unlike Elon's kids, he has Elon Musk on his side.