Trump: A Big Joke, But Not a Big, Fat Gay Joke
In their zeal to finally have something to make fun of Donald Trump about, some otherwise well-intentioned folks who share my disdain for the Ghosts Can’t Do It ensemble cast-member have chosen to portray Donald Trump as being in a homosexual relationship with, most popularly, Vladimir Putin but also Kim Jong-un, one in which Trump is depicted as being in submissive, or subordinate position.
Other Trump haters, similarly flummoxed by a lack of options when it comes to making fun of the WWE Hall of Famer, scam university proprietor, USFL team owner, prolific sexual predator, pussy-grabber and Little Rascals bit-player, have chosen to go down an ugly, cheap and glib route and mock the President for being seriously overweight.
It’s easy to see why they make these jokes. Trump is famously a coarse vulgarian who thinks nothing of making crude personal attacks on anyone he considers an enemy. He doesn’t play fair. He doesn’t play nice. He doesn’t play by the rules, particularly the rules of human decency and basic decorum. Trump is a feces-flinging misogynist monster of id and ego who has debased the office of the presidency and single-handedly made our country a much worse place. Why bother being nice when you’re dealing with an asshole of that magnitude?
Besides, hasn’t Trump spent the last few decades saying horrible things about women’s bodies in ways that reinforce our culture’s worst, most toxic and confidence-shattering beauty standards? If Trump can go around calling women pigs and dogs, ranking their bodies on scales of 1 to 10 and bragging to low-level Bushes about grabbing women by their genitalia then why can’t we point out the hypocrisy of he himself being extremely overweight and unattractive, a funny-looking senior citizen whose shapeless golf pants and endless red ties and baggy black suits and hairstyle serve to make him look even more ridiculous?
When Trump’s signature move involves kicking his opponents in the testicles over and over again, then running away in cowardice and fright, should we really be worried about respecting the Queensberry Rules in our political skirmishes with the rancid orange Racist-in-Chief?
Here’s the thing: you certainly can make jokes about Trump being Putin’s boyfriend or powerless bottom. Many certainly have. But that shit is not funny and also it hurts your cause and ends up targeting vulnerable groups that have done nothing to deserve being lumped in with Trump and his empire of ickiness.
When you make a joke about Trump and Putin being gay you’re implying that being gay is funny or shameful. Neither, obviously, is true. People pursuing this questionable line of comedy might think they’re commenting subversively on the hyper-macho codes of crude caricatures of brusque masculinity like Trump and Putin but the “Macho straight guy who blusters and behaves like a chauvinist pig because he’s secretly a self-loathing homosexual” is a homophobic stock character that probably needs to be retired even when it’s not applied to Trump and Putin’s relationship.
When it comes to rejecting Donald Trump fat jokes and Donald Trump gay jokes I don’t need to choose between my sense of humor and my politics and ideals. Trump gay or fat jokes by definition aren’t funny because their target is fat people or the gay community as much, if not more than they are Trump and these gags are never particularly funny, let alone funny enough to justify their intrinsic fat-shaming and homophobia.
It’s not as if there aren’t other things to make fun of Trump about. Donald Trump is the one man in the world that John Wayne Bobbitt looks down on for being such an irresistible target for crude, dumb jokes. Seriously, everything about Trump is terrible. If you can’t effectively express your anger or disdain or hatred of The Donald without getting into fat-shaming or homophobic places in the process, that says more about you and your shitty sense of humor than it does about a president who is godawful and should be cruelly mocked, but not because he compulsively over-eats or because he’s furtively in a same-sex relationship with a Russian dictator.
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