Kidding on the Square

An odd quirk of this era is that the free world is led by a pair of clowns.

The actual leader of the free world is a comedian by trade. The nominal leader of the free world is a troll by disposition who delights in “jokes” that may or may not be jokes. (And who, in another quirk, is prone to wearing more face make-up than the entire Ringling Bros. roster.)

The subject of Donald Trump’s clownery came up at the end of the latest episode of The Dispatch Podcast. This tweet from the White House press shop caught Sarah Isgur’s attention as an especially obnoxious example of Trumpist trolling. When the president circulates an image of himself wearing a crown with the caption, “Long Live the King,” is he joking?

Or is he “joking”?

The term for jokes that aren’t quite jokes is “kidding on the square.” It was popularized years ago by yet another comedian who ended up in politics, Al Franken. “Kidding on the square” is when you present an idea as a joke—but you mean it.

An example. Recently, at the end of their speeches to two different right-wing audiences, Elon Musk and Steve Bannon made gestures resembling a Nazi salute. Whether they were misinterpreted, were trolling, or were in earnest is unclear, but this prediction about how the dregs of postliberal populism will respond to the controversy seems dead-on to me.

They’re going to start doing the gesture themselves. And when they’re challenged on it they’ll laugh and claim to be trolling, spiting the same hysterical libs who criticized Musk and Bannon. It’s a joke!

But it isn’t, really. It’s kidding on the square. 

“Trumpism has always been a combination of menace and absurdity,” a wise man once wrote … er, four days ago. Menace and absurdity are also the recipe for kidding on the square, not coincidentally. When White House flacks tweet out footage of illegal immigrants being shackled ahead of a deportation flight and present it as an “ASMR” video, they’re inviting viewers to relish a human being’s misery while diluting the cruelty by framing it as an absurdist goof on a silly internet genre. It’s a joke, but it isn’t.

Many Trumpist policies are presented in absurd terms in order to water down their menace. When Trump refers to Canada as “the 51^st state” and to its prime minister as “Gov. Trudeau,” it sounds like a trollish gag. Is it? When he talks repeatedly about running for a third term notwithstanding what the 22^nd Amendment has to say about it, does he mean it? Or is he joking, as nervous congressional Republicans insist?

The defining image of his first month in office was Elon Musk swinging around a chainsaw at the Conservative Political Action Conference last week like Leatherface on a ketamine bender. Musk and his “disreputable little gaggle of pudwhacking throne-sniffers” are doing a lot of indiscriminate damage to the federal government, Kevin Williamson noted in his Wanderland newsletter today, and are discrediting the long-term cause of bureaucratic reform in the process. But how menaced by it can the average American truly feel as they giggle at the absurdity of the richest dork in history, chainsaw in hand, preening for an audience like a pro wrestler before a big match?

We have rule by trolls. It won’t end well.

Demoralized.

Rule by trolls is demoralizing.

Unless you’re very young or have already sacrificed the last bit of your dignity to populism, you can’t listen to the president try to insult Canada into submitting to annexation without feeling embarrassed for your country. America is now governed by juvenile bullies—by choice. We didn’t used to be. Rule by troll may achieve some policy successes, but no one can sincerely mistake the current trajectory for a return to “greatness.”

On some level, the point of the nationalist project is to teach American citizens to feel contemptuous of America. (It has that in common with its far-left counterpart.) When Trump and his cronies treat government like a literal joke and pay little or no price for it among the population, one can’t help but feel that resistance to idiocracy is futile. And that’s to the advantage of authoritarians: The less patriotic classical liberals become, the less likely they are to oppose postliberal efforts to undo the constitutional order. Why bother? Why fight for a people that no longer takes the governance of its own country seriously?

These demoralization tactics have worked like a charm on me. Never have I been more skeptical of “American exceptionalism” than I am right now. My fellow citizens don’t care if their government sounds like 4Chan? Fine. They don’t care, I don’t care.

The whole world is stupider because of Trump’s trollishness. Ken Dryden made a trenchant point in an essay for The Atlantic about the wound Trump has inflicted on Canadian pride: To even engage with his trollishness, as Justin Trudeau did in declaring that Canada won’t join the U.S., is to be demeaned by the process. “By answering at all,” Dryden wrote, “you end up making any slur sound slightly, disturbingly legitimate, and you make yourself look weak.” Don’t feed the trolls has been good online practice since the internet began; it’s now become an issue for international diplomacy thanks to the United States.

Desensitized.

A deeper problem with rule by troll is that it’s desensitizing.

“Trial balloons” is the term Jonah Goldberg aptly used on The Dispatch Podcast to describe the sort of half-jokes to which Team Trump is prone. Whether it’s leaning on Canada to join the U.S., broaching the possibility of an unconstitutional third term, teasing the idea of monarchy, or some such fascist proposition, trollish provocations are the way Trump and his cronies nudge the Overton window toward their political program without rattling it so loudly as to frighten Americans.

If he were to turn around and say, “I want to be king,” the stock market would tank. (I hope!) But if he says, “Many people are saying I should be king. Mar-a-Lago would make a hell of a palace!” then, eh. You know how he is. 

Kidding on the square is how postliberals inject taboo ideas into the bloodstream of public opinion without causing a sharp reaction, like administering a small dose of poison to build up a tolerance to higher doses later. Incremental corruption, I’d call it. If you’re giving a Nazi salute “ironically,” you’re still giving a Nazi salute. And the more normalized the “ironic” salute becomes, the more normalized the salute becomes, period. 

Jonah laid out the three familiar steps of right-wing rationalization when Trump floats a trollish-sounding policy idea, like wanting to take over Greenland. First comes “He’s joking! Can’t you take a joke?” Then he doubles down: “Fine, he’s serious, but I disagree.” Then he triples down, making his position official MAGA dogma in the same way that the Pope speaking ex cathedra sets doctrine for the Catholic Church. By that point, the shock among his supporters has worn off and it’s time to rejoin the team: “He’s right!”

That tactic doesn’t always take the form of jokes or even half-jokes. Trump and cronies like Steve Bannon were deadly serious when they began laying the rhetorical groundwork before Election Day 2020 to cry “rigged” if he ended up losing to Joe Biden. They recognized that asking for support in overturning an election would be asking a lot even of a movement as morally and civically degraded as the American right. You can’t just spring “we’re doing coups now” on 75 million Republican voters. The poison needs to be administered thoughtfully, with care.

Kidding on the square is an effective salve for guilty consciences. If you’re a partisan Republican who retains some dim, atavistic loyalty to the Constitution, watching Trump flirt with monarchy should induce at least a mild ideological immune reaction. After all, there’s no idea that’s more clearly anti-American; the cognitive dissonance involved in posturing as super-patriots, as Trump voters routinely do, and then suddenly being asked to line up behind monarchy would be agonizing.

Offering the idea as a “joke” first is the easiest way to introduce it to the right and center-right without causing a backlash. And insofar as liberals are sure to react with horror, the tactic ends up enlisting Republican voters in the supposed gag. Look at Democrats clutching their pearls at this silly “Long Live the King” tweet! By rallying the right to defend him in the sub-debate over whether he was kidding or not, Trump makes his supporters feel like they’re in on the joke.

Then, if it turns out not to be a joke, they’ve invested too much of their own credibility to turn around and say, “We’ve been had.” Better at that point to pretend that you knew he was serious all along, like Pee Wee Herman tumbling off his bike and declaring that he meant to do that, than admit that your hero is a villain who fooled you—and that the left understood him a lot better than you did.

So much of fascism is about face-saving.

Provocation as policy.

The worst thing about rule by trolls, though, is that trolls are provocateurs whose interest in politics derives mainly from the opportunities it provides to scandalize or wound their adversaries.

That mindset is antithetical to good government. You would never enlist trolls to write a piece of legislation meant to improve the general public welfare, for instance, as they wouldn’t understand the concept. There is no “general public welfare,” only their tribe versus enemy tribes and a battle of all against all for dominance.

But if, like Donald Trump, you’re a provocateur by nature and admire fellow provocateurs willing to display a trollish ruthlessness toward enemies, that’s the sort of person to whom you’ll be drawn in filling out vacancies for high government positions.

Take, for instance, Don Bongino, who until Sunday evening was a surly right-wing podcaster but today is the second-most powerful official at the world’s most famous law enforcement agency. Bongino is a former cop and Secret Service agent so he’s not without any relevant experience, but that’s not why he landed on Donald Trump’s radar. He landed there because, after leaving the Secret Service, he remade himself as a populist media star and Trump sycophant.

A really trollish one too. He’s been known to wear “Socialist Tears” T-shirts and say cringy things like, “My life is all about owning the libs now.” In a media universe of pugnacious Trump apologists, he’s distinguished himself by his pugnacity. Less than two weeks ago, he complained about federal judges ruling against the president and fantasized about Trump setting up a courtroom in the White House and rendering his own decisions about executive branch controversies.

Was he making a rhetorical point? Trolling? Kidding on the square? Who can say?

Whatever the case may be, he’s now the deputy director of the FBI, Kash Patel’s new right-hand man. Having a belligerent populist troll in charge of federal law enforcement is terrible for the general public welfare but terrific if your priority is using the bureau to persecute enemy tribes. And as a matter of owning the libs, which is now the highest calling of a Republican Party led by and for trolls, it almost can’t be topped. The only surer way to evoke “socialist tears” would be, uh, making Matt Gaetz attorney general.

The news of the Bongino appointment last night left me wondering: How would the pundit class have reacted last year if candidate Trump had announced his intention to make Dan Bongino No. 2 at the FBI? What would the evening roundtable on CNN have sounded like that day?

I suppose I’ll never know for sure, but my guess is that Trump apologist Scott Jennings would have rolled his eyes nearly out of his skull at the credulousness of his easily-baited liberal colleagues. Obviously Trump wasn’t really going to appoint Bongino to help lead the world’s most famous law enforcement agency, he would have said. He was trolling to throw his left-wing opponents into a tizzy and to give his base the pleasure of watching them freak out.

“You’re all suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome,” Jennings might have declared. Patel as FBI chief, Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of the Department of Health and Human Services, the Fox News weekend guy as secretary of defense—those are insane ideas, blatant trolling. Jokes! You know how he is.

And now here we are, with a government of trolls. (So much so that even notorious trolls have noticed!) The most prominent executive initiative of Trump’s first month in office is led by a man who recently changed his social media handle to “Harry Bolz” and who named said executive initiative after a famous internet meme. Is it any wonder that DOGE hasn’t done much to reduce federal spending but has done quite a lot to wound federal agencies favored by leftist cultural enemies?

Everything’s a joke until it isn’t. Everything is deadly serious yet not serious at all.

There’s a method to this madness.

Trust nothing.

Three weeks before the election, the New York Times reported on the curious phenomenon of Trump voters beyond the cultish base of his support who refused to believe him when he said alarming things.

Do you fear he’ll do what he’s threatening to do by purging the government and filling it with conspiracy theorists, the Times asked one supporter? “I don’t,” came the reply. “It could just be for publicity, just riling up the news.” Another was pressed about his plans for mass deportation and answered, “He may say things, and then it gets people all upset, but then he turns around and he says, ‘No, I’m not doing that.’ It’s a negotiation. But people don’t understand that.”

There’s a common saying that’s abbreviated “FAFO.” Steve Hayes would be mad at me if I spelled out what that acronym stands for, but suffice it to say that Trump supporters who thought his wackier pronouncements during the campaign were being made “for publicity” or as a negotiating tactic or as jokes are quickly approaching the “FO” stage of the process.

What makes their incredulity last year so curious is that Trump, of all people, proved in the two months leading up to January 6 that he should be taken seriously even when he sounds like an out-and-out nut. Yet the Times speculated that his fans’ resolute denial about his more hair-raising statement isn’t so hard to explain: “It’s how they rationalize his rhetoric, by affording him a reverse benefit of the doubt. They doubt; he benefits.”

Indeed. But they benefit too, no?

If every alarming thing Trump says can be conveniently dismissed as hyperbole or strategy or trolling, then Trump voters need never reckon with the implications of supporting him. Here again is the guilty conscience at work: You can vote for cheaper eggs and a stronger border and ignore all the rest of his fascist nonsense as mere windbaggery. He’s serious about the stuff that you care about and not serious at all about the stuff you dislike.

His habit of “kidding on the square” contributes to a perpetual sense of uncertainty about his intentions that lets him and his fans claim he’s serious or not as political circumstances require. Or at least it did, until he landed back in the Oval Office and started having to show his cards on policy.

The biggest mystery in American politics right now is what happens to the president’s support as more of his “soft” supporters arrive at the “FO” stage of political disillusionment. Perhaps they’ll resolve their cognitive dissonance the way his diehard supporters do, by shifting opportunistically from claiming that he’s not serious when he says X, Y, and Z to deciding that, actually, they support X, Y, and Z. (So much of fascism is about face-saving!) But perhaps not: Maybe instead they’ll still begin shifting toward the Democrats in protest, as some tantalizing early evidence from swing districts suggests.

If the latter, let me be the first to predict that the next round of “jokes” we’ll begin hearing from Trump and his lackeys will be about having to challenge the results of the 2026 midterms, or perhaps cancel them entirely, due to the supposedly high and rising risk of election fraud involved. Funny stuff. You know how he is.