Why is it so hard to satirise Donald Trump?
Everyone thinks they have a dead-on Donald Trump impression, don’t they?
After all, on the surface, he’s a dead easy person to impersonate. He’s one of the very few politicians in the world recognisable as a silhouette. You get the posture, the hand gestures and a strange wig, and you’ve won half the battle, surely?
Yet… No one can, can’t they? Even on the few occasions he’s been depicted in films, no one can quite get it right. The ones who have, like Brendan Gleeson and Sebastian Stan, have talked openly about how you can’t get too close to a full-on impression of him because then it becomes a comedy sketch. Alec Baldwin gave it the Ol’ college try on SNL, clearly attempting to replicate Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin impression that kneecapped the then-governor of Alaska’s political career. It did not have the same effect.
Which is kind of the problem, isn’t it? You can’t do an impression of Trump because the closer you get to replicating his mannerisms, the more it feels like a parody. This is because Trump himself is inherently ridiculous. The whole point of doing an impression of someone is to take an aspect of their personality and point out a hitherto unseen ridiculousness. The Sarah Palin impression from earlier is a perfect example. “I can see Russia from my house” made the entire world of American politics see her differently than they did before.
Everyone can see the ridiculousness in Trump. You can’t make him look ridiculous because he already does. This is an issue that goes far beyond perfecting an impression of him and into every aspect of trying to satirise him. Every time someone has tried to “take on” the Trump era, from SNL to South Park to the legions of music written about him, it has failed and failed miserably. The bigger problem is one coming up on this revenge tour of a second presidency.
The problem is that it’s not just the jokes about how ridiculous he is that aren’t landing anymore, it’s the jokes about his fascism that are feeling too real now.
Why do jokes about Trump feel weird now?
The best example of this comes from the (at the time of writing), currently airing final series of The Boys. The Amazon Prime superhero series is one that wields satire with all the grace and elegance of a rampaging herd of elephants. The series’s main villain, psychotic Superman parody Homelander, is a satirical parody of what Trump sees himself as. An all-powerful demigod that’s still powered by paranoia, pettiness and seething, endless daddy and mummy issues.
The end of the last series saw Homelander install himself as the de facto president of the United States. In the lead-up to series five, the creators were outright saying that one of the moments of unrepentant evil that they gave to Homelander in the upcoming series was replicated by the leader of the free world. At the time of writing, we haven’t seen the episode in question, but considering that was a quote that came out shortly after Trump gloated over the death of Robert Mueller on social media, it’s pretty likely that’s the candidate.
Because that’s the great weakness of humour and satire, isn’t it? It only works on people who feel shame, people who still fundamentally want to do the right thing – it doesn’t work on people like Donald Trump, who does not care if he’s doing the right thing, who might care so deeply about what others think of him that he once traced an outline of his hands to a comedian who made fun of them, but won’t ever change himself or his behaviour for anyone else.
And why would he? It’s the reason his fanbase is so huge. Which might be the most terrifying aspect of all of this.