I’m watching Jimmy Kimmel the other night, and he’s having a grand time mocking the speech Donald Trump gave last week which, on occasion here and there, managed to bisect the truth.
“I mean,” Kimmel said, “there were so many lies, 11 fact-checkers died watching that speech.”
Not a great joke. But in a desperate time, we’ll take it. Across Trump’s five White House years, America has learned the value of laughter in the face of outrage.
And then I’m watching Stephen Colbert the night before the release of the Jeffrey Epstein sex crime files, and Colbert says, “It’s ‘Epstein Files Eve.’ Don’t forget to leave Santa some cookies and a barf bag.”
A little tasteless, maybe. But in the face of the past week’s Trump-induced nausea, and the outrage induced by the insultingly “selective” release of those Epstein records, we need all the help we can get.
And so night after night, from Kimmel and Colbert, Jon Stewart and his hilarious cast and Seth Meyers and others, we’re getting lots of laughs during these Trump White House years.
But before long, we’re going to need a change of attitude.
We need the laughs, but we also need to know when it’s time to stop laughing. This man Trump is becoming so seriously unhinged that we’re going to reach a point where it feels cruel to laugh at him.
He is a man who practices unconscionable cruelty himself. But that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to sink so low.
There will come a day, maybe not so far off, when we’re going to feel sorry for him, the way we feel sorry for anyone who doesn’t understand how badly he’s embarrassing himself in public.
We’ll find ourselves saying, This is a doddering old man, and laughing at him is not only insufficient but feels like an act of cruelty. Better we should turn our heads away.
Whoever in American history has sat in the White House and done the maddening and embarrassing things this man has done?
Like Trump falling asleep at televised cabinet meetings, even as his sycophants are proclaiming their devotion to him.
Like Trump wandering aimlessly through speeches where he forgets to stick to his TelePrompter, like the Christmas celebration speech he gave last week at the White House and spent six incoherent minutes talking about poisonous snakes.
Like Trump threatening to put half a dozen members of Congress to death for reminding military members they must never obey unlawful orders.
Or Trump labeling all Somali immigrants “garbage.”
Or Trump allocating millions for a White House ballroom nobody asked for while millions worry about health care and grocery prices.
Or Trump attaching his name to the Kennedy Performing Arts Center, named in an hour of national heartache for a slain president.
Or Trump adding a series of plaques beneath White House presidential portraits, and inscribing outrageously fraudulent remarks about political friend and foe.
Or Trump calling a female reporter “piggy” after she dared ask an uncomfortable question.
Or Trump sending out images of dumping excrement on anti-Trump protesters.
Or Trump cruelly mocking the murders of Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele.
And most of these are just the outrages from the past week or so.
So we can keep laughing as our national defense mechanism against this president — or understand that the day is coming when the laughter will have to fade because it will feel like an act of cruelty against a demented old man.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
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