The Strange Case Of Donald Trump And Those Who Admire Him
John Fetterman continues to disappoint. Bill Maher remains true to form.
Democratic (no kidding) Sen. John Fetterman appeared on Bill Maher’s Club Random podcast last week, because he apparently doesn’t have any more pressing responsibilities. Not even professional comedians whose entire brand is “anti-woke,” “anti-feminist” bro humor spend this much time on talk shows and podcasts. They actually have to write their (awful) material and perform in clubs.
During their conversation, which I don’t personally recommend watching if you’re a person with a finite lifespan, Maher gushed about Donald Trump, “The things that he says aloud, the way he just voices his interior monologue — there is something not exactly psychologically normal about someone who just voices their interior monologue — but it gives him an authenticity that no one else can possibly match.”
Trump is also not a professional comedian whose material is deliberately offensive. He’s the president of the United States … again, somehow.
The almost-80-year-old Trump’s inability to restrain his most hostile impulses is not a sign of authenticity but advancing dementia. Hillary Clinton warned in 2016 that “a man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.” Yet, Maher thinks this is somehow admirable or at least impressive in its supposed boldness. Perhaps Maher gets off on seeing Trump put women in their place, especially those who challenge him.
“I saw his interview with Norah O’Donnell after the shooting, the next day, and she quotes the assassin who called him a pedophile, Hitler, whatever he called him,” Maher said, referring to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooter who did not actually assassinate anyone. “But his reaction immediately was, to her, ‘You’re a terrible person.’ And he didn’t just think it — like any politician, that’s exactly what they’re thinking. He just says it.”
CBS News’s Norah O’Donnell asked Trump a straightforward, normal question, which should not cause a “normal” person to seethe with rage and think she’s a “terrible person.” Barack Obama has praised journalists who asked him tough questions, and he wasn’t putting on an act for our benefit. He’s just emotionally stable.
“It’s at the same time horrifying and also kind of like, refreshing,” Maher went on. “It’s shockingly — the honesty, as someone who loves honesty and has made my career about it as much as I could, it is—there’s some level of it where you tip your hat and you go, ‘Wow, total honesty.”
Trump isn’t honest. He’s an inveterate liar, a coward, and a bully. For all his offensive bluster, his entire ego is made of glass. It’s why he demands that late night talk show hosts lose their job for making fun of him and his awful wife. Yet, Fetterman, a sitting Democratic senator, agreed with Maher’s delusions of Trump’s grandeur. Giggling like a not especially bright school kid, Fetterman said, “Yeah, the ultimate— ‘Quiet, piggy.’ That’s the president of America.”
Indeed it is, and that’s a tragedy not a comedy.
It’s almost impossible not to immediately contrast this with Fetterman apologizing to Kristi Noem for Democrats referring to her as “ICE Barbie.” This was during a Senate committee hearing about Noem’s fascist goons invading U.S. cities, but Fetterman felt it necessary to defend her honor. He went full Clark Gable, but slovenly and charmless.
“I never will engage on the kinds of sexist kinds of terms like ICE Barbie from a lot of the the left media will use those kind of a things,” Fetterman said in February. This was after ICE agents had murdered two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis, so Fetterman’s hardly eloquent condemnation of “sexist kinds of terms” is what Maher would normally dismiss as performative “wokeness” that misses the point.
Noem is, you might have noticed, white, and the reporters Trump most consistently mistreats are women of color: He called MS Now’s White House Correspondent Akayla Gardner “dumb” for daring to ask him sensible quetions about his vanity ballroom project, which Fetterman also defends. He also called ABC News’ Rachel Scott a “horror show” and referred to her as a “bitch” to his stooges.
Of course, Norah O’Donnell is white, as is Bloomberg’s White House correspondent Catherine Lucey, who he called “piggy,” so Trump is seemingly an equal opportunity misogynist. That’s not a compliment.
There’s nothing “refreshing” or “honest” about Trump’s cruelty. Fetterman and Maher have bought into a cynical view of humanity, which posits that at our bestial core we are essentially malicious. “Kindness” and certainly “politeness” are all pretenses, shackles on our true, “authentic” selves. So, Trump is Mr. Hyde to his supporters’ Dr. Jekyll.
Something missed about Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1866 novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is that Henry Jekyll is not in fact a good person who has become the victim of his villainous alter ego, Edward Hyde. The potion Dr. Jekyll takes doesn’t “unleash” his evil side. It merely changes his physical appearance, so he is free to commit all sorts of horrible acts without facing any legal or reputational consequence. Jekyll is Hyde. (Jekyll apparently appreciated a good pun.) He even discusses Hyde in the first person: “The pleasures which I made haste to seek in my disguise were, as I have said, undignified.”
The supposed free-speech absolutists and anti-woke crusaders considered Trump their way of unleashing their true selves without any negative consequences. “I feel liberated,” a top banker told the Financial Times shortly before Trump returned to power. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled . . . it’s a new dawn.”
Like Jekyll, wealth and privilege weren’t enough to satisfy this banker and others like him. They demanded the freedom to indulge their worst vices.
I was the first that could plod in the public eye with a load of genial respectability, and in a moment, like a schoolboy, strip off these lendings and spring headlong into the sea of liberty. But for me, in my impenetrable mantle, the safety was complete. Think of it—I did not even exist! Let me but escape into my laboratory door, give me but a second or two to mix and swallow the draught that I had always standing ready; and whatever he had done, Edward Hyde would pass away like the stain of breath upon a mirror; and there in his stead, quietly at home, trimming the midnight lamp in his study, a man who could afford to laugh at suspicion, would be Henry Jekyll.
Jekyll’s fate is sealed when he can no longer stop taking the serum that turns him into Hyde. One morning, he wakes up with the face of a brutish killer, and pretty soon, he can no longer hide from his sins. His source of “freedom” has become his prison.
Perhaps that’s why Trump’s followers and lackeys keep supporting him: He’s the deformed face for their worst desires, but all that’s left now is the twisted mask.
People often confuse authenticity with truth. If something feels conviction-driven (every single Truth Social post, for example) audiences treat it as “real” even when the facts are blatantly wrong. In fact, I really think this is what Donald Trump believes. Even when he knows he's making stuff up, it's true in his eyes (and in the eyes of millions of supporters) simply because he says it. The truth is not fixed, but negotiable. It's true for *him* even if it's not, you know, actually true, or even if it's demonstrably false. It simply doesn't matter.
Plus, a lot of modern media rewards emotional conviction over accuracy. Someone can be sincerely expressing a false belief, and that sincerity gets interpreted as credibility.
“We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled . . . it’s a new dawn.”
This is one of the most fascinatingly revealing insights into the right wing mind...This weird notion of 'permission'...what are they? goddamned children?