The Impossibility of Satire: Trump-world is an inherent self-parody

On the “Weekend Update” satirical news segment on Saturday Night Live. anchor Colin Jost displayed a snapshot of an unhinged rant laced with profanity in the form of a Donald Trump post to Truth Social, before admitting he made it up – but until he said that, any viewer would assume it was real.

I feel Jost’s pain: there is nothing left one can say about Trump, no matter how outlandish or insane, that is so implausible as to be undeniably satire. Ridiculing Islam in an expletive-laden post on Easter? Check. Threatening literal genocide by destroying a whole civilization? Check. Posting an AI-generated image of himself as pope? Check. Posting an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus? Check.

Fact-checking sites on the web have resorted to publishing lists of fake posts attributed to Trump on social media that are circulating as memes while falsely claiming they are real.

It’s not just Trump: He surrounds himself with cabinet appointees who will shoot their dog and goat, cut off a raccoon’s penis, and dump a “freezer full” of roadkill meat (including a bear cub carcass) in Central Park while falsely framing it to look like a cyclist hit and run.

A few weeks ago, I started to write a satirical news story about Donald Trump putting his own face onto Mount Rushmore.

I sent a note to our art director, Olivia Lunger. “How difficult would it be to produce a graphic for April Fools of Mt Rushmore with Trump replacing Washington? It would not have to look really good from a graphical perspective because the whole idea is a half-assed joke in the first place,” I wrote. “The idea is to make fun of the commemorative coin which, unfortunately, is completely real.” She quickly produced exactly what I asked for.

I had a lot of jokes planned, not least that the proposed 3-inch diameter US 24-karat gold coin would be our version of the Canadian “loonie,” a gold-colored one-dollar coin so named because there is an actual common loon, a kind of bird, depicted on its reverse side. It’s mere coincidence that the Canadians put another metaphorical loon, their head of state King Charles III, on the obverse. Kings and queens typically appear on the coin of the realm, which is precisely why democracies do not do it.

Trump has lately been throwing his name everywhere, including adding it without authorization to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Arts whose name is specified by law as a memorial to the late president, and replacing with his own signature that of the treasurer of the United States on paper currency, who has been doing it since 1862. Putting his face on coinage, however. runs afoul of longstanding American tradition, with some members of the bipartisan Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee saying that putting a sitting president on legal tender “would break with democratic norms and reek of subservience to royalty.”

The Trump administration has been unusually sensitive to the propaganda value of coins and currency, including canceling plans for quarters commemorating the abolition of slavery and the right to vote for women.

What I did not realize until I began researching the topic is that Trump on Mount Rushmore has been an idea in play since 2015. According to the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, a satirical cartoon in Tulsa World showed Trump standing next to his freshly-engraved head on the mountain saying to a man in a hard hat, “Make me thinner and lose the other guys.” After Trump reportedly mentioned the idea to her in 2018, Kristi Noem, then-governor of South Dakota, where the monument is located, took it seriously and commissioned a $1,000 “bookshelf-sized” sculptural mock-up in bronze of the modified mountain.

Eric Trump, the son of Donald Trump, responsible for raising funds and constructing his presidential library, released artistic renderings showing a giant tower at least 40 storeys tall in Miami with a huge illuminated “TRUMP” sign at the top. The proposed library includes replicas of White House features such as the Oval Office and a 90,000 square-foot ballroom, as well as a massive colossus statue in gold of Trump raising his fist. A Boeing 747 airplane gift from the government of Qatar is planned to be displayed. It was unclear whether a 56-star flag shown on the outside library tower is an AI artifact or an aspirational reference to Canada, Greenland, or more. The site is a 3-acre plot acquired by the non-profit library foundation through a chain of donations from Miami Dade College to the State of Florida. Valued at more than $200 million, only part of the site is restricted to use for the library, with the remainder available for a for-profit hotel and condominiums.

I follow the news more closely than most people, and I understand why it is becoming common to just tune it all out – but that’s dangerous, and perhaps fatal, to our democracy. I don’t really want to know that cabinet secretaries are dumping roadkill meat in an urban park, and I don’t really want to know why anyone would collect a “freezer full” of it in the first place, but I feel a responsibility to know how weird these people are.

I just have no idea how to make fun of them more than they already make fun of themselves.