Gutfeld Agrees With My Take

As a successful comic, Gutfeld has an instinctive insight into humor, but standup is also a peculiarly American institution, part of our popular culture. For the last several days I've been talking about Trump's relation to the popular culture superhero paradigm, in which a reactive superhero consistently improvises to escape the elaborate schemes of an intellectual, deliberative supervillain. We see this when Batman fights the Joker. but we see it even more clearly as we watch the Road Runner foil the elaborate machinations of Wile E Coyote.

Gutfeld made a very similar point in last night's monologue. At 3:28:

So the saga of Donald J Trump continues. Really, what did we talk about before him? . . . But have you noticed the reaction to the Trump conviction? It's more muted than my TV during Jesse's show. Of course, there are the usual nut cases where anything related to Trump is cause for incontinence. [Switches to clip of Joy Behar on The View talking about "leaking".] So Joy Behar wets herself in Costco. . . . But, aside from Joy and some has-been actors, where's all the noise? No one's dancing in the streets, weeping, or peeing with Joy.

The truth is, even some on the left admit this prosecution wasn't justice. Some recognized they were going too far even before the verdict. It's like if you're in a fight with your spouse and you make a casual comment about her meat loaf, and you go oh, [bleep], I'm in for it. And they're right, the verdict resulted in a bump in Trump's polling and a massive $200 million bump in donations. TWO HUNDRED . . . two hundred million, that's more than I make in a year. It even crashed Trump's donation site[.]

. . . So, how does Trump do it? How does he turn a conviction into an electoral windfall? How does he turn his adversary's energy into power? I call it the eternal cliffhanger theory. With Trump, when one act finishes, it sparks an equally thrilling next one. It's like the orange Harry Potter. And what [prompts?] the cliffhangers are those who are obsessed with taking him down. It's a perpetual motion machine. Their attacks can't help but set the stage for,"what will he do next?" And what he does next then creates another cause for attack. You think you've killed him? Nah, there is he in the next chapter to raging applause.

On one hand, we might almost see this as a case of life imitating art, we have the paradigm of the Road Runner cartoon, or Harry Potter, or Batman vs the Joker, or even Sherlock Holmes vs Professor Moriarty. We might trace the paradigm at least as far back as Til Eulenspiegel, something Gutfeld echoes by working medieval scatological references into his analysis of the character's current manifestation.

He sees the cliffhanger as Trump's device. Has Biden killed him yet? Nah. What will Biden try next? On one hand, this is a standard way to hold an audience's attention -- to find out what happens, stay tuned through the commercial break. On the other hand, Trump's peculiar innovation has been to use the cliffhanger to focus not on Wile E Coyote's latest catastrophe, but on Trump. The pattern isn't simply on the reactive superhero, although insofar as Trump is the Road Runner, he's a sort of anti-intellectual Occam's Razor, defeating the coyote's overly complex plans.

But Trump is also the more complex Dark Knight Rises version of the superhero, someone who's imperfect, not just David vs Goliath but more like David vs Saul. This is also turning out to have a remarkable appeal. Clinton polster Mark Penn poses the conundrum of how this works for Trump in this interview:

Q: Let's start with President Biden's approval rating, which remains unchanged at 44%. What does that mean that it didn't move month to month?

Penn: . . . Below 45%, it's hard for a president to get reelected. Below 40, I would say it's impossible. Below 45, it's certainly not impossible, but hard. . . . Importantly, when people look back, and I ask the job approval rating for President Trump, Trump gets a 55% job approval rating. So that 11-point gap is a critical part of what's motivating voters in these polls, and Biden has either got to bring his up or bring Trump's down.

Q: Why do you think Trump's is so high at 55%? . . . What's that about?

Penn: Well, you have to say nostalgia, in the sense that people are evaluating things in the past . . . at the time, Trump never got a 55% job approval. So he is getting in retrospect, and perhaps in comparison, a 55% job approval, higher than he got when he was actually doing the job, but nevertheless, that's the fact, that's how the voters see it.

So we have to extrapolate another factor, we can explain Trump only in part as a comic book superhero, the Road Runner, or Til Eulenspiegel, whose character doesn't change, and whose escapes are predictable. There's a change in the audience's view of Trump that we don't see in the simpler paradigms. This has to do with what I think is another important factor, the growing recognition that there was something wrong in 2020, and maybe not primarily the election.

People are rethinking 2020. The current testimony of Dr Fauci in front of the House reflects this. Just yesterday:

Dr. Anthony Fauci has said that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's vocal criticisms of him during a congressional hearing on the COVID-19 pandemic had increased the number of death threats against him.

. . . Monday's hearing quickly deteriorated into partisan attacks, with Fauci facing the most hostility from Greene, a Georgia Republican. She refused to address him as "doctor," called for him to be prosecuted "for crimes against humanity" and said he "belongs in prison."

The national mood is changing. Biden wants to lock Trump up -- but Trump has been saying lock them up all along, and people remember it.