Trump’s Joke and What It Says About Me

Every now and then, an offhand something--a passing comment, a daily task, a clip on TV—tells you something deep and unexpected about yourself.  

​That happened to me early in April. During the tariff announcement in the White House Rose Garden on April 2, I thought I heard Donald Trump make a joke. And my heart fluttered.

As it turns out, the joke was lame. When holding up his chart of which country would get charged which tariff, he said, “I think you can for the most part see it, those with good eyes. With bad eyes—we didn't want to bring—it’s very windy out here. We didn't want to bring out the big chart because it had no chance of standing. Fortunately, we came armed with a little smaller chart. [Laughter]”

OK, they laughed. OK, not really funny. But here’s my point: My heart fluttered because it saw Donald Trump engage in one of the most fundamental acts of our species—attempting  a joke.

For one nanosecond, he seemed like one of us.

So why did my heart flutter? A little background here. My heart is exhausted. The tsunami-like overwhelm of the past three months—the hundreds of executive orders, the chaos, the dehumanization of immigrants and trans people and others—has left me wasted. I continue to stand in deep opposition to Donald Trump and nearly everything he does.

​But on a deeper level, I want our leaders to succeed, whoever they are. Deeper even than that, my heart is on the lookout for any shred of human I can find in even the most broken or difficult or malevolent people, because my heart really really wants to love. When it heard that Trump joke, it thought, at last, something I can work with.

I think love is what God wants too (however you conceive of God). Ever take a good look at who Jesus hung out with? From what I can make of the Christian Gospels, some of them were hard-core. At least one was a tax collector, a Jew regarded as traitorous for enriching the oppressive Romans. One was a zealot--maybe what we’d call an insurrectionist or terrorist. The name Iscariot, as in Judas Iscariot (the man who betrayed Jesus to death), might come from the Latin for “dagger man,” i.e., assassin. Jesus ended his life hung between two criminals.

And he took them all into his heart. No exceptions. Not one.

So I can’t make exceptions either. In spite of the fact that some people seem impossible to love.

The best I can do is baby steps. So when this tortured president makes a lame joke, and my heart senses a tiny bit of humanity, and it flutters, that’s a start. Good joke, Mr. President, I want to say. You can joke human; now lead human. Treat people with the compassion they deserve.