The Utter Joy of Watching Trump Watch People Who Despise Him
The whole ordeal has the feel of a Saturday Night Live cold open. It will almost certainly be the cold opening to SNL this weekend—albeit with (slightly) funnier material. That Trump has to sit there and take it is funnier than anything that has been read to him. We know he hates criticism of all stripes. One theory about his decision to run for president in 2016 was that it was prompted by mean jokes made by Barack Obama during the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner. “That evening of public abasement, rather than sending Mr. Trump away, accelerated his ferocious efforts to gain stature in the political world,” reported The New York Times in the spring of 2016. It was a farcical but plausible origin story: Trump was so humiliated that he had no choice but to get revenge.
It’s also worth noting just how rare it is for Trump to hear what regular voters outside of his own base think about him. As president, he regularly watched clips of comedians and cable news panelists being mean about him, sure. But those people aren’t representative of any voting bloc; criticizing or making fun of him is literally their job. And because they’re public figures of one stripe or another, Trump could single them out on Twitter. A notorious counter-puncher, he has historically dealt with the feeling of humiliation by attempting to get back at his critics.
As a president and post-president, however, Trump has rarely had to face criticism in person. He carefully curates his public events so as to almost never encounter critics of any stripe. His life is spent at a private club or on a golf course. He skipped every White House Correspondents Dinner as president. His rallies are filled with gushing supporters. He lives in a fantasy world in which Hollywood, the media, and political elites despise him—but the people love him. One key pillar of his conspiracy theory that he was the real winner of the 2020 election was that he regularly drew large crowds to rallies and Joe Biden did not. The subtext here is barely that: He has the support of the people and it takes the full force of the establishment to defeat him, whether in court or at the ballot box.