It’s important to push back on the false equivalency that satirizing Drumpf is like powerful people attacking vulnerable minority groups.
(There’s are boingboing examples that follow WaPo: John Oliver’s ‘Donald Drumpf’ jokes play on the same ugly xenophobia Trump does )
Punching up (or back) is not the same as punching down.
Joking about a rich powerful corporate executive and POTUS candidate who wants to send your family members to a detention camp is just not the same as that rich powerful corporate executive and POTUS candidate making fun of the people he sent to the detention camp.
The former is pushing back against a bully. The latter is helping a bully to do bullying.
Louis C.K. has tried to explain the urge to suck up to the brand-name bully.
“Please stop it with voting for Trump,” he said at the end of Saturday’s email. “It was funny for a little while. But the guy is Hitler. … Hitler was just some hilarious and refreshing dude with a weird comb over who would say anything at all.”
“I’m saying this now because if he gets in there we won’t be able to criticize him anymore,” the comedian said.
‘It’s like a big hit off of a crack pipe’
Nihilism may explain Trump’s surge. And Louis C.K. gets that.
The whole field seems like “soft criminal opportunists,” he said. “The whole game feels rigged and it’s not going anywhere but down anymore. I feel that way sometimes.”
A vote for Trump is a way of sticking it to the system, he said. It’s also unhealthy.
“It’s a version of national Suicide. Or it’s like a big hit off of a crack pipe,” he said.
‘He’s a bully’
Trump supporters owe it to their fellow Americans to at least “know and understand who he is,” Louis C.K. said. “Spend one hour on google and just read it all.”
Why did Trump deride McCain’s imprisonment? Simple, Louis C.K. explains.
“He said it because he’s a bully and every bully knows that when you enter a new school yard, you go to the toughest most respected guy on the yard and you punch him in the nose,” he said. “If you are still standing after, you’re the new boss.”
In concluding his long post-script, Louis C.K. made clear that his concerns have little to do with Trump’s politics and more to do with his character.
“Trump is a messed up guy with a hole in his heart that he tries to fill with money and attention,” Louis C.K. said. “He can never ever have enough of either and he’ll never stop trying. He’s sick. Which makes him really really interesting.”
Give Trump another show, let him expand his Trump-themed real estate, Louis C.K. said. “But please stop voting for him.”
