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Trump Tries New Jokes
Kisses, bizarre antics, and new lows in comedy.
The Trump show is a bit stale. Four years into the series, the writers seem to have lost creativity, motivation, or both. If one excludes phrases that literally didn’t exist four years ago, like Covid-19, it would be hard to even tell the difference between rallies held today and rallies held with candidate Donald Trump five years ago.
Donald “the newspapers write mean things about me” Trump is the victim, and if you ever forget that, he will remind you. Over and over again. Trump, the white male billionaire who inherited his fortune and doesn’t pay taxes, is aggrieved.
I’ve studied this slow-moving, downward descent into relative obscurity for awhile now. In “Trump Fatigue Syndrome,” I noted:
A side effect of Trump Fatigue Syndrome is stagnation. This occurs when the familiar tactics don’t work. Google Trends notes that searches for “Sleepy Joe” are a small fraction of what they were for “Crooked Hillary.”
Even on his preferred medium — Twitter — the president’s act has grown stale. In internet parlance, the interaction rate is how much buzz a post garners using metrics like reactions, comments, and shares. Trump’s interaction rate has dropped precipitously. His first month on the job, his interaction rate was 0.55%. Halfway…