Shucking Oysters: Still Life with Donald
By Alex Allen
Did you hear the one about…? Neither did I. Being funny today seems to be as popular as having a cough and sniffles. Remember when having a sense of humour was considered attractive? Now, it’s socially awkward being the life of the party. It’s become a sign of disrespect and immaturity. Oh, grow up. Are we suffering from a new strain of world chronic humour fatigue syndrome or just losing our humour?
In his first term in 2016, Donald Trump was the perfect target to joke about. Topics of the day like police brutality and Black Lives Matter were not exactly late-night fodder. For the writers – whose job was to come up with something funny out of the absurd and horrifying news feeds – figuring out how to joke about Trump was a challenge. The challenge was not for lack of material, it was that he was already a parody. He was the punchline.
In interviews with the comedy trio Colbert, Kimmel, and Fallon, a theme emerged during Trump’s first presidency: Writing Trump jokes sucked. All wondered that if they just stopped writing about him, would he go away? At the time, it was still considered laughable that he would be the nominee, let alone the president.
Fast forward to 2025. When things start going really crazy, satire becomes too true to be funny. As Trump begins his second term, late-night hosts are back with their anti-Trump jokes, yet the tone and mood seems hollow. Instead of funny, this time around, many are finding Trump-bashing tiresome. How many more at best, amateur Trump impersonations do we have to watch, let alone find funny this go-around? In the Daily Mail, Alex Hammer wrote that it’s “not necessarily disagreement with the message conveyed by most of late-night television that Trump is a malignant force in American life,” it’s about sheer fatigue. And it’s just the beginning of a four-year roller coaster ride.
I read somewhere that comedians ultimately want to be philosophers. Think about the great philosopher-comedian, George Carlin, his comedic brilliance was his unfiltered social commentary. Can you imagine if he was alive today? Or perhaps, comedians ultimately want to be politicians. Zelensky was a Ukrainian comedian who played a teacher in a show who becomes president. The TV program, “Servant of the People,” was about a high school teacher who rises to the top of Ukrainian politics after a viral video “shows him waxing lyrical about government corruption.”
Trump had a similar career trajectory with the show “The Apprentice,” which featured aspiring, but otherwise unknown, business people competing for a chunk of money to promote one of Trump’s properties. In Trump mode, the show always ended with the encouraging words “You’re fired!” Trump then proceeded to be fired by NBC when the studio disagreed with remarks he made about Mexican immigrants during his presidency announcement in 2015. Soon other upstanding individuals played host to different versions of the show, notably former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in a reverse career move, and lifestyle mogul Martha Stewart, who has yet to announce her run for presidency.
Or maybe politicians ultimately want to be lifestyle moguls. In between upending the world, Trump seems to be channelling Martha in the felony interior decorating department, making the White House a Washington version of Mar-a-Lago.
The most controversial makeover is to the iconic Rose Garden, which will be stripped of its greenery and replaced with limestone or other hard surface. Trump wants to recreate the “patio experience” that he has at Mar-a-Lago. Apparently, Trump has been known to spend hours of his Florida evenings soaking in the Gulf of America air and receiving his minions. He especially likes to blast Luciano Pavarotti and James Brown tunes at earsplitting volumes. And just to complicate things, the Rose Garden is not technically part of the White House; it comes under the purview of the National Park Service, which is controlled by the Department of the Interior. So, maybe he’ll do a little exploratory drilling before he pours the cement.
The Trumping of the interior would not be without its gold veneer – gold vases, gold statuettes, and gold figurines. It’s all about gilt and mirrors, marble-and-gold, canopy beds, and fresco-style ceilings. Trump plans to hang – the ultimate symbol of the nouveau riche – a GREAT BIG chandelier from the ceiling of the Oval Office. Just outside hangs his infamous scowling mug shot in all its felon glory. (Trump once again monetized the moment with t-shirts and bumper stickers emblazoned with the mug shot and phrase: “Never Surrender!” Within 24 hours, he made more than $4 million. Not bad for a convicted felon.)
Trump has also hinted that he would like to build a ballroom at the White House at a cost of a $100 million. He is not the only president to put his personal imprint on the White House. Gerald Ford built the swimming pool and Barack Obama got the basketball court.
The Trump look, Peter York wrote, “is miles from the architectural tradition of Washington, whose neoclassical public buildings evoke stability and trustworthiness through their restraint.” The capital was designed to project a message of simplicity, democracy and egalitarianism – precisely the opposite of the new brand in town. Dictator interior decorating, which simply means, “I am tremendously rich and unthinkably powerful.”
