What a time to be alive!
With our country barreling headfirst toward a recession (folks, it’s a matter of when and not “if”); gas prices up to a national average I don’t care to state here and engagement in a wildly unpopular war of choice, our president is prioritizing the demonization of a late-night comedian and the prosecution of a former FBI director over a sophomoric social media post.
Jimmy Kimmel, who hosts an eponymously titled show on ABC, has made lampooning President Donald Trump his stock-and-trade, and occasionally, his barbs are pretty funny. However, recently, when Kimmel did a parody of a White House Correspondents Dinner, with mention of “expectant widow” Melania Trump, an obvious joke about Trump’s age, which is a frequent trope in his shtick, Trump, himself, ramped up insults against Kimmel and calls for his ousting, as did the First Lady.
Meanwhile, the former FBI director James Comey is under criminal indictment for a post he made last year, in which seashells had been arranged on a beach bearing the cheeky message “86 47,” to which the Trump administration took to mean “kill the president.”
When Trump and others in the MAGA circles began clutching pearls about this display, Comey took the post down and went on record to state that he never thought the messaging to mean anything of the sort; that he found it to be an artistic and amusing display.
Going after Comey and Kimmel is just typical bad faith pearl clutching, and it’s exhausting, like so much of what comes down the pike from the Trump administration in its second iteration. When did our culture get to the point of where public officials, especially the occupant of the nation’s highest office, treat criticism and/or satire not as a routine part of public life but as a personal affront requiring retaliation?
Whenever the president lashes out at a late-night comedian like Jimmy Kimmel, it feels a lot less like governance, or beneath the dignity of the office, and more like a spectacle of grievance. Comedians operate, by design, in the world of satire, exaggeration and critique, and poke at power, all within the spirit of the mighty First Amendment.
Satire is not something to be stamped out or scolded by those who put hands on the levers of power, but something that should be a regular part of our broader conversation. It might seem ridiculous that Trump tends to hyper-fixate on rebutting jokes from people like Kimmel, but it signals an intolerance for criticism, which is what the Comey indictment certainly codifies.
Comey’s charge is a waste of government resources, and anyone who would interpret the term “86” as meaning to kill or eliminate is a fool. There are actual crimes the Department of Justice should focus on, but alas, it seems to be Trump’s own private law firm in this day and age.
Such moves are not a sign of focused leadership but give credence to the many claims out there that the president is unhinged, and/or emotionally stunted. Praise him and do exactly what he wants and you’re his best friend, but the slightest criticism makes you a “low IQ individual” or worse, “woke.”
If the DOJ is going to be used to go after those who criticize the president or post memes about him, then we should demand the same of our elected officials. We should demand stiff penalties for them if they utter one lie or one derogatory remark about someone.
Accountability and criticism remain essential components of our constitutional democratic republic, and when leaders actually lead, and display restraint in the face of criticism and lighthearted lampooning, they reinforce confidence in those freedoms. When they do not, they risk normalizing a political culture in which every joke in an insult that should merit consequence, and that is a far more serious concern than whatever Jimmy Kimmel might say during his nighttime monologue.
Chris Edwards is editor of the Tyler County Booster, a sister newspaper in the Polk County Publishing Group. He can be reached at cedwards@polkcountypublishing.com.
