Laughing through the Trump era

The second answer, meanwhile, is a mild suggestion that a little more laughter might actually be good for the anti-Trump Resistance. In particular, anti-Trumpists might be a touch more effective if they could recognize how humorlessness and constant self-important dudgeon frequently helps the Trumpian cause, by setting up the dynamic I just sketched in my movie pitch — where the country is asked to choose between two kinds of folly, one squalid and corrupt but the other pompous, insufferable and paranoid in its own self-important way.

The latter sort folly is at its worst, not on the far left, but on the establishment center-left and the Never-Trumper center-right, to which I belonged in 2016 and still do, in the sense that I continue to regard our president as unfit for his job and undeserving of a second term. But that belief, it seems to me, should coexist with some self-awareness about the many blunders by the great and good that brought us to this pass, some instinct for how absurd it sounds to write and talk as though the republic dies daily only to be resurrected overnight and slain by Trump anew, and some recognition that when our law enforcement agencies send their G-men to save the Republic from Vladimir Putin, sometimes they don’t send their best.