BRET STEPHENS: A presidency without humor
Sunday, Dec. 9, 2018 -- "He never lost his sense of humor," former Sen. Alan Simpson said of George H.W. Bush. "Humor is the universal solvent against the abrasive elements of life. ... He knew what his mother and my mother always knew: Hatred corrodes the container it's carried in." Did President Donald Trump catch any of this? Sen. Lindsey Graham, the episodically spineful Republican from South Carolina, has claimed that, in private, the 45th president is "funny as hell" and has "a great sense of humor." If so, it's a better kept secret than his tax returns.
Posted — Updated“He never lost his sense of humor,” the former senator from Wyoming said of his friend of more than 50 years. “Humor is the universal solvent against the abrasive elements of life. That’s what humor is. He never hated anyone. He knew what his mother and my mother always knew: Hatred corrodes the container it’s carried in.”
Did Donald Trump catch any of this as he sat there in the first pew? Lindsey Graham, the episodically spineful Republican from South Carolina, has claimed that, in private, the 45th president is “funny as hell” and has “a great sense of humor.” If so, it’s a better kept secret than his tax returns.
But Trump, I suspect, isn’t unfunny. He’s anti-funny. Humor humanizes. It uncorks, unstuffs, informalizes. Used well, it puts people at ease. Trump’s method is the opposite: He wants people ill at ease. Doing so preserves his capacity to wound, his sense of superiority, his distance. Good jokes highlight the ridiculous. Trump’s jokes merely ridicule. They are caustics, not emollients.
This brings me to Simpson’s second, connected point: “Hatred corrodes the container it’s carried in.”
In June 1971, Richard Nixon sent a memo to Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman complaining that his good-natured appearance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner had been followed by a press conference in which “the reporters were considerably more bad-mannered and vicious than usual.”
The press, of course, mostly hated Nixon, and he repaid them in kind. His mistake was to suppose that his only choice lay between ingratiation and hatred, rather than indifference and humor. It left him incapable of rising above. Till the end of his presidency, Nixon was trapped by a thirst for approval he would never get and an appetite for destruction he could never achieve.
In sum, that humor in democratic politics is also its most effective weapon: the strongest shield and the sharpest blade. It doesn’t just amuse, leaven and comfort. It defangs, attracts, and mobilizes. Winston Churchill was a wit, as were Jack Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. Nixon and Jimmy Carter weren’t.
Does any of this make a dent on Trump? I doubt it. His character is what it is. And his style of politics isn’t democratic so much as it is cult-of-personality. Trump appeared engaged throughout the service, but I suspect that Simpson’s speech flew right past him.
It shouldn’t fly past the rest of us. This is an angry age, in which Trump’s critics also simmer in rage, ridicule, self-importance, self-pity — and hatred, too. They think they’re reproaching the president. Increasingly they reflect him. Simpson’s message contains a warning to us all.
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