…and then I'll stop thinking about the guy for the weekend. He makes it tough, though. At times, I get the feeling some aide tells him, "Mr. President, our monitoring says that Mark Evanier is not thinking about you" and he goes "We can't have that" and he quickly thinks of something to say that will piss me off and he calls an impromptu news conference to say it.
I don't subscribe to his Twitter feed and I even have him blocked, just in case he decides to assert some Executive Privilege to address Americans who don't want to read his silly ramblings. But I just know that after he sends each tweet, he tells that aide, "Make sure someone Evanier reads quotes that."
And every so often, everyone who does Trump jokes — even me — gets a message in some form from someone who says, "Hey, could you lay off those lame attempts at political humor?" Often, those communiques sound like desperate pleas from someone who voted for Trump, still craves some of what he promised to do to/for this country and doesn't want to be reminded that he or she helped put such a horrible human in the White House to further that agenda.
But the interesting thing to me about Trump jokes is that most of them aren't political jokes. They're jokes about his hair, about his girth, about his manners, about his obsession with self-praise, about his rudeness towards anyone who doesn't kiss Trump butt, etc. We were making jokes about all those aspects of him before he was even remotely a candidate for political office…back when he was a staunch pro-choice Democrat. (Since 1987, he has changed his party affiliation five times.)
Most political jokes — about Trump or anyone — are not about the person's politics. Most of the ones about Bill Clinton were about his marital fidelity and lack thereof. Most of the ones about George W. Bush were about his mangling of the English language and him doing things like choking on a pretzel. 90% of the jokes about Joe Biden seem to be about his handsiness or other social faux pas.
You could take an old fat joke about Orson Welles or Kate Smith or Dom DeLuise or someone and switch it to Chris Christie — and people do. That does not make it a political joke. Even jokes about an official's hypocrisy — saying one thing and doing another — you could argue are not really political.
Of course, if you really wanna see Trump get Term #2, I suppose you could look at any joke at the expense of Donald J. and think it's a political joke because it may diminish someone's opinion of the guy and cost him votes. In that case, you shouldn't get mad at the people who make the jokes. You should get mad at your candidate for personal behavior that makes it so easy and irresistible to make the jokes.