September 16, 2024 | Reading Time: 4 minutes
He turned politics into a joke. Now Trump’s the punchline
Bill Maher knows a fallen star when he sees one.
I don’t think Bill Maher knows anything about politics that you don’t know. But I do think the host of HBO’s Real Time knows when a showman has lost his touch and turned himself into a laughingstock. And he knows there’s no turning back from that.
That’s my takeaway from Maher’s latest. On Friday, he predicted that Donald Trump will lose the presidential election, and he will lose, Maher said, due to comments he made during the debate with Kamala Harris about people eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio.
“I have the credibility for this prediction,” he said. “I have been called a Trump alarmist for a very long time. They were wrong. I was right. He wasn’t going to leave power. But ever since then, and since the Access Hollywood tape where he said I’m going to grab them by the pussy and he survived – every time he’s done crazy shit and gotten into trouble, I said no, no. It’s not over. … Tonight, I’m saying I think it’s over.”
I think we should take this prediction seriously, as I said, not because he knows politics but because he knows show business. He knows how to tell a joke. He understands the blurry difference between getting people to laugh and getting laughed at. He understands the fine line between making others the butt of the joke and being the butt.
Trump turned politics into a joke and people laughed.
Now he’s the butt.
Maher compared Trump to another demagogue, Joseph McCarthy. Just as Trump rails against “the deep state,” McCarthy in the 1950s railed against deep-state Communists. Like McCarthyism, Maher believes Trumpism is going to burn itself out. “Before we were around, there was a guy named Joe McCarthy in the early ’50s, and he had a hold on America, and it blew out in about two, three years,” Maher said. “It was the biggest thing … and I feel like ‘eating the dogs,’ we’re at this point.”
I think Maher was right to compare also what Trump said in the Access Hollywood tape with what he said at the debate, but Maher came to the wrong conclusion. Trump didn’t survive in spite of it being scandal. He survived, because it was a scandal. He and the Republicans made just enough people believe the Democrats were no saints themselves, and the spectacle of it all enhanced Trump’s image as an outsider who would make a mockery of “the establishment” and its sanctimony.
While “eating the dogs” is a scandal in terms of the danger it presents to the Haitians living and working in Springfield, and to immigrant communities, generally, it’s not a spectacle in any way that says anything about “the establishment” or Trump’s relationship to it. It’s just an ugly thing to say, like a tasteless joke that no one finds funny.
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“Ultimate implosion”
If “eating the dogs” is the end for Trump, as Maher predicts, it’s because it revealed that he has lost his touch. He’s like a comedian who found fame a decade ago and has been using the same material since. And these days, he doesn’t get why people are laughing at him, not his jokes.
His fanbase is also bewildered – by the fact that the rest of the world is rapidly losing interest. Indeed, fans are getting angry. “Eating the dogs” was the funniest joke anyone ever told! He isn’t the problem. You are.
That’s when people really stop having a good time.
But instead of finding new stuff, Trump keeps doubling down. That’s probably what Maher had in mind. As long as he keeps doing what made “The Trump Show” famous, it’s over. George Conway, the notorious Never-Trumper, said as much over the weekend.
“He’s reaching his final destination, which is complete decomposition,” he said. “None of his tricks are working anymore. We’re on to them. They don’t excite anybody anymore. He’s losing in the polls. He has to try to make things up. His own vice presidential candidate, on another network, said basically, ‘we’re making up stories in order to win!’ It’s not working for him and he knows it. He knows he’s going down. You’re going to see him engage in more and more desperate behavior.”
Like Joseph McCarthy, Trump was “the biggest thing.”
Now he’s heading for the “ultimate implosion,” Conway said.
Touchy-touchy
Not only is his star fading, he’s getting touchy about it.
That’s how Harris could so easily bait him at the debate. She said his own people are getting so bored at his campaign rallies that they are leaving early. They’re tired, she implied, of “the same old show.”
That’s when Trump unleashed “eating the dogs.”
If that’s what a mere rival can do, imagine what enemies can do.
That’s what Tim Walz asked. In seconds, he said, “Kamala Harris was able … to use this guy’s inflated ego and narcissism to bait him into melting down on a national stage in front of 60 million. You don’t think Vladimir Putin can do that? You don’t think Xi Jinping can do that?”
Not only is he sensitive about his fading fame, he’s jealous.
Back in June, he was asked what he thought of Taylor Swift, who had not at that time endorsed anyone for president. Trump said, “I think she’s beautiful, very beautiful. I find her very beautiful. I think she’s liberal. She probably doesn’t like Trump. I hear she’s very talented. I think she’s very beautiful, actually — unusually beautiful.”
But after she endorsed Harris, he said Sunday:
He’s like the washed-up insult comic who wants the TV execs to bring him back, but keeps showing them why they would be fools to do that.
John Stoehr is the editor of the Editorial Board. He writes the daily edition. Find him @johnastoehr.
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