“You can say a lot Donald Trump recently revived a bizarre and very sexist right-wing jibe at his new White House rival Kamala Harris when he told his supporters to “laugh”: “I call her Laughing Kamala. Have you ever seen her laugh?… She’s crazy. She’s gone crazy.”
Trump called Nancy Pelosi a lunatic and said, “She attacked (Biden) like a dog.”
Like a dog.
But this story isn’t about Trump hurling specific insults at women (he harasses men, too), like when he called Hillary Clinton “bitchy.”
This is a story about laughter.
Immediately after Trump made his remarks, his staunch friend and Fox News host Sean Hannity said on his show that voters “seem to hate” Harris because she’s ready to laugh. Or is it the way she laughs? It’s hard to say. But Hannity is clearly aiming to convince viewers to hate Harris, even if they don’t already.
Hearing Trump and his followers insult Harris’s heartfelt laughter (which his campaign denounces in this anti-Biden ad ), it occurred to me that I’ve never heard anything like it. erase laugh.
I don’t think I’m the first journalist to think that way. Several media colleagues have made this observation in the past, but if Trump wants to use his opponents’ notable laughter as a weapon, we should probably talk about that. And about Trump’s lack of laughter.
If we take Trump’s statement at face value: You can tell a lot about a person by their smile. Well, I’m just one person, but to me, Harris’ smile suggests that she’s a funny person. Is that such a terrible leadership trait?
Laughter is universally considered positive. In fact, the list of notable figures who have spoken and written about the value of laughter is long. They include Catherine the Great, Charlie Chaplin, Charles Dickens, Robert Frost, Kahlil Gibran, Martin Luther King Jr., William Shakespeare, Gloria Steinem, and Virginia Woolf. Perhaps the person who could relate more to Trump is Andrew Carnegie, who is said to have said, “There is little success where there is little laughter.”
Perhaps less relatable to him is this quote from WEB DuBois: “I am especially delighted in the divine gift of laughter, which, with all its suffering and wrongdoing, has made the world human and lovable.”
“The thing that stuck in my mind was that I never saw him laugh, either publicly or privately,” James Comey said. “I never saw anything like a laugh.”
What does this lack of talent mean? I emailed Bandy X. Lee, an honest psychiatrist. Mother Jones His new book, profiled in 2022, is titled: The Psychology of the Trump Contagion: An Existential Threat to American Democracy and All of HumanityTo hear her opinion.
Trump’s “pathological rigidity and inflexibility seem to underlie his lack of humor more than anything else,” Lee responded. “In other words, it’s not a difference of style; it’s a flaw. It’s a ‘charming’ facade of a dangerous personality with predatory intentions, not a genuinely easygoing persona that can laugh at reality.”
Mary Trump, Trump’s estranged niece and psychologist, wrote a family memoir in 2020. Too Much, Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous ManIt was a huge bestseller and also touched on the subject of Donald’s joylessness. slate Interview with journalist Virginia Heffernan. When Heffernan asked Mary if she thought her Uncle Donald was happy, she replied:
There is no way he can be happy, because the myth that has been created about him and that he perpetuates and believes about himself is always in danger of collapsing. He knows it on a deep level. He is always living in the moment. So how can he be happy?
How can you be happy if you don’t laugh and don’t appreciate humor? My grandfather didn’t laugh either, so to me, laughter is about making yourself vulnerable, letting yourself go in some ways, losing a little bit of control. And that can’t happen. It shouldn’t happen.
And here’s another quote from the renowned author Maya Angelou: “Don’t trust anyone who doesn’t smile,” she once told a crowd at the University of Buffalo in New York, adding, “I don’t trust that.”
In a 2018 interview with ABC News host George Stephanopoulos, former FBI Director James Comey reflected on this peculiar trait of his former boss, Donald Trump, who enjoys making his supporters laugh, but rarely does so himself. “I was shocked by it. It was so shocking that I never, in my memory, saw him laugh, either publicly or privately,” Comey said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Even after Trump fired Comey, that thought lingered in his mind, he said, “So I tried to find videos of him laughing, and all I could find were videos where it wasn’t real.“
I looked around too. Donald Trump is one of the most photographed and studied people on the planet, so if he smiles a lot, we’ll know about it. But he actually rarely smiles. In public anyway. I could only find a handful of clips, and in most of them he’s A kind of He laughs, or laughs briefly. There are far fewer scenes where his laughter seems genuine. For example, there is a scene where Jimmy Fallon criticizes Trump quite humorously, and who wouldn’t laugh in that situation?
But what seems to be causing most of his poor public laughter should give voters pause. I’m all for inappropriate frivolity, but it’s problematic when the laughter of those in power involves mocking people or laughing at other people’s misfortunes. In this clip, he laughs as a rallygoer shouts that immigrants crossing the southern border should be shot.
We can’t vouch for the authenticity of the following video, but it appears Trump is laughing at an impersonator mocking President Joe Biden at a rally.
In the piece, he appears to be mocking supporters who chant “Lock her up!” not at Hillary Clinton but at Senator Dianne Feinstein, who has severe cognitive impairment.
And here’s perhaps his most genuine laugh yet. This video takes us back to where we started: the video of a powerful woman being compared to a dog.
But as our video essayist Kat Abugazale recently pointed out, the right still can’t seem to come up with a better line of attack on Harris than “she smiles too much.”
Correction: A previous version of this article said Maya Angelou was 86 years old. Angelou died in 2014 at age 86.
