Many of President Donald Trump’s supporters don’t care how corrupt and stupid he is — which gives him a layer of Teflon that other politicians don’t enjoy. However, after serving in Trump’s first term as chief of staff for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), whistleblower Miles Taylor says he knows exactly what kind of blows land on Trump.
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The Achilles’ heel of autocrats is mockery, said Taylor. And Trump and his feather-thin skin is particularly sensitive to it.
“Strongmen can handle all the hatred because, weirdly (and this is Trump’s long-standing view), the hatred confirms their power,” said Taylor. “What they actually have such a hard time with is laughter. When people point and laugh, they cower and quiver. The tactic is as old as time.”
Taylor references historian Will Durant’s Heroes of History, where Durant notes how the earliest comedians worked their art tearing down political monsters in ancient Athens, wielding humor as a powerful weapon to expose corruption and greed.
“None landed a harder blow than Aristophanes, who tormented the tyrants of Athens from the stage,” said Taylor. “Amidst a foreign conflict that threatened to bring down the fledgling Athenian democracy, the playwright’s productions were purported to be ‘brilliant, coarse, and merciless,’ Durant wrote, ‘calling for a return to an almost forgotten morality, and crying for an end to war.’
“Or fast forward to when Charlie Chaplin famously punctured Hitler’s mystique, while half the world still appeased the thuggish mustached man,” continued Taylor. “Or consider the example of two of my contemporary favorites: (1) Alexei Navalny, who did more damage to Putin with one video mocking his gaudy secret palace than a decade of communiqués ever did; and (2) Volodymyr Zelensky, a comedian who once played a president on television, and who has out-dueled the Kremlin for four years running as the actual president of Ukraine.”
There is a reason that Chinese tyrant Xi Jinping bans “Winnie the Pooh memes” and Turkey President Recep Erdogan prosecutes comedians, said the DHS researcher: The ridicule works.
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“Trump understands this instinctively, which is why the briefest, winking mention of ‘Natalie’ [Harp] in Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff’s speech produced a coordinated White House meltdown,” said Taylor. “Ossoff found the nerve, and — oh boy — it connected with the whole body of Trump’s corruption. Now, the president is screaming in agony.”
But instead, Taylor points out that Democrats have spent most of the last decade of Trump’s career “drafting strongly worded letters and waiting for our institutions to save us.”
But turn on the humor and nasty insinuations and Republicans are suddenly “pearl … clutching” and claiming they are “shocked — shocked! — that anyone would insinuate impropriety by a convicted felon and adjudicated sexual abuser who hires people like Natalie to serve under him,” said Taylor.
Trump’s opponent doesn’t even have to be a trained comedian, added Taylor. Just put yourself out there “with the swagger of Aristophanes by pointedly naming the enablers, mocking the corrupt, and smiling wryly as Trump and his minions demand apologies.”
All one Democratic Georgia senator had to do, for example, was take “documented reporting of Trump’s corruption (including the secret flights, the ballroom obsession, the golf, the stock trades, the war he’s losing, and the weird stories about his too-adoring personal assistant) and compress … it into one sentence that delivered a hornet sting to the wannabe dictator in the White House,” according to Taylor.
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