Tim Stanley
Jokester-in-Chief
Lincoln’s Sense of Humor
By Richard Carwardine
Southern Illinois University Press 184pp $24.95 order from our bookshop
Donald Trump is a satirist. He knows he’s preposterous and annoying, and he uses these qualities to troll his opponents. For example, when thousands of women marched on 20 January in protest against the misogynist-in-chief, Trump tweeted that he was grateful for their support. His fans laughed: the old man was playing the fool again. Others thought he was being deadly serious. BuzzFeed wrote that it ‘wasn’t clear’ if he was ‘oblivious to the meaning of the march’ or ‘simply being facetious’. Harper’s Bazaar accused him of trying to ‘co-opt’ the women. The joke had apparently sailed right over their heads.
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