Your mom is so dumb she laughed at that “joke”

It’s a small thing in the sea of fascist offenses, but MAGA’s inability to understand jokes drives me nuts. When a reporter asked White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt who suggested Budapest as a site for Donald Trump to meet Vladimir Putin — knowing that’s an implicit insult to Ukraine — she replied, “Your mom did.” 

This is not how “your mom” jokes work. They are about saying the woman who raised you is sexually promiscuous, stupid or slovenly. Perhaps if Leavitt is implying that your mom is a fascist who thinks invading Ukraine is a good thing, she’d be in the ballpark, but that wasn’t it. Instead, she was defending the anti-democracy signals Trump is sending. Traditionally, it’d hit closer to the mark to say that Leavitt’s Trump-branded kneepads are your mom’s hand-me-downs. 

MAGA people say things that are roughly joke-shaped, but have no substance, like Attorney General Pam Bondi’s meaningless “insults,” or pretty much anything Elon Musk tweets. I’d say AI could write better jokes, but then Trump tweeted a video …

"I have epic diarrhea" is not quite the burn Trump thinks it is

There’s no doubt the No Kings protests on Saturday were a smashing success. That’s because Donald Trump had the dumbest “I’m not mad, you’re mad” tantrum I’ve ever seen online, posting an AI video of himself taking a giant dump on the protesters. And by “giant,” I mean many water silos worth of feces purportedly dropped from a military jet fighter that appears to be “99% toilet,” as one Bluesky post put it. This reaction, from the actual president of the United States, reveals the depths of his childish humiliation. 

Protesters seemed, almost universally, to understand the importance of not giving Trump what he wants. For weeks, he and his GOP allies have been pushing an elaborate hoax about “antifa,” claiming that it’s a well-funded terrorist organization. Bolstering this lie requires images of young men in black hoodies and masks fighting cops, to frighten gullible or willfully delusional people eager to believe that “the left” is violent. 

It’s a good thing that the No Kings protests were largely populated by so-called normies, i.e., a lot of grandmas and parents pushing strollers. (The hostility directed at “normies” has always had an unsubtle misogynist edge.) That made it tough to spin them as “antifa.” 

As a bonus, the people who turned out are exactly the kind who aggravate an elite but stupid narcissist like Trump. Crowds tended to be educated and financially comfortable, largely the kinds of people Trump has always wanted to impress, but who invariably find him contemptible. (This is also true of the elite Republicans who back him, they just hide their hatred behind slithering ambition.) Thus Trump’s unhinged response to the whole thing. He’s just so mad that he can have all this power, but will never get what he truly wants: the respect and admiration of “respectable” people. 

I’d definitely like to see more diversity, especially racial diversity, at anti-MAGA protests. But it’s good that the professional class turns out, on the whole, because that has a unique ability to make Trump lose his mind. 

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The Portland frogs are winning

One reason No Kings was successful was it was built on the tactics developed to counter ICE raids, especially in Portland. As soon as I saw people in animal costumes show up to protest ICE, it was obvious that this was a winning tactic. Salon culture writer Andi Zeisler, who lives in Portland, explains why. Trump’s desire to paint Portland as a war zone needs images of “a line of guns pointed at mouthy, black-clad activists,” she writes, but silly frog and unicorn costumes completely take that away. The message, as Zeisler writes, is, “Nice body armor, champ, but you’re going to look stupid when you’re photographed trying to take down an inflatable frog.”

The internet is full of self-important people with no sense of humor, so it’s no surprise that some are complaining that the costumes make light of a serious situation. Such folks have more in common with fascists than they’d like to admit — namely, a tendency to mistake aesthetics for substance and to care about looking tough more than about being effective.

As we saw with Trump’s poop video, fascism is a movement driven by mediocre, moronic people who want to conceal that fact by trying to make others fear them. Of course they can still be quite dangerous. But that doesn’t change the fact that, viewed as human beings, they are pathetic and absurd — and have forsaken their right to have the rest of us politely ignore their worthlessness. 

We can see the effectiveness of the animal costumes in the data. At the beginning of October, online content about ICE and the protests was being far more widely shared by right-wing accounts than left — and most of it seemed to support the lie that cities are “war zones.” Once the animal costumes went viral, that trend was reversed. It’s the left that talks about immigration and protests more recently. Progressives, in other words, are seizing control of the narrative. So let a million frog costumes bloom. 

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What we're reading this week

• “Resistance Is Cringe — But It’s Also Effective,” Quinta Jurecic, Atlantic

• “The Wife Trap,” Sarah Jones, New York

• “In the New Trump Era, the Proud Boys Are ‘Not Apologizing Anymore,’” Hunter Walker, Talking Points Memo

• “No Kings was a huge success. Just look at Trump's response,” Paul Waldman, Public Notice

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