The Only Joke Donald Trump Knows

Yesterday President Donald Trump spoke at the National Boy Scout Jamboree, because Presidents do things like that and Donald Trump is President. I know it’s been like two years, but keep saying it to yourself.
In the course of his typically rambling comments he referred, as one does when addressing a room full of teenagers, to possibly firing HHS Secretary Tom Price if Republicans in Congress fail to repeal Obamacare.
Here are some of the headlines that came out of the speech:
Donald Trump Jokes About Firing Tom Price If GOP Repeal Effort Fails
Trump Jokes to Boy Scouts About ‘Firing’ HHS Head, Pushes for Obamacare Repeal
Trump swipes at Obama, jokes about HHS Sec. Price at Boy Scouts national summit
If you’re not familiar with it, this is the only joke Donald Trump knows. The one that’s not the least bit funny, but allows him be both be a bully and promote his “You’re Fired!” brand.
To paraphrase Bernie Sanders, “let’s be clear” this is not a joke.
If you think this is a joke you may also believe a turd is the Hope Diamond or what’s deposited daily in my son’s diaper is creme brûlée.
Jokes are sacred people!
I don’t know that there’s anything on this earth I respect more than someone who is really and truly funny. At one time, caught in the vice grip of a quarter life crisis, I quit my job and had the faintest idea that I might give stand-up comedy a try. As tens of thousands have done before me I bought a little Moleskin notebook, jotted down some nonsense and showed up one night at an open mic. Mine was in Northampton, Massachusetts at a coffee house the name of which escapes me.
There were some really funny people there, though you wouldn’t know any of their names. I stood up maybe a dozen times before scurrying back to the safety of a 9 to 5 job, but living as I do in the New York area I have continued to collect friends who harbor dreams of a career in comedy. They are all very funny, and they all work incredibly hard at something for which hard work, and even talent offer no guarantees.
Of course not all comics are the same, but the ones I like are rhetorical craftspeople and emotional gymnasts. They take all their fear, insecurity, anxiety and empathy, drag it up on stage in front of people, and transform it from something that could very well make you cry, into something that will make you laugh.
It is literally a gift from the the gods.
Our current President is the antithesis of this. He is a perfect, cheeto-colored, outer-space-like vacuum of self-awareness and compassion, and as a result he lacks every single cognitive tool necessary to either write or deliver a joke. Which is why this…this thing he does ALL THE TIME, is not a joke, it’s a threat.
So for all of us out there who love jokes, who appreciate humor, please stop calling this something it isn’t and ruining one of the few things we have left to console us as the nation descends further into the orange morass.
