Trump has famously broken satire… Will satire ever break Trump?
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Everyone has a favorite Onion headline.
“Fall Canceled After 3 Billion Seasons.”
“Area Man Passionate Defender of What He Imagines Constitution To Be.”
My personal favorite ran on January 20, 2001, the day George W. Bush was inaugurated: “Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity Is Finally Over.”
Add to those the following:
“Trump Taps Dog-Shooter to Run Homeland Security.”
“Part-Time Fox News Host and Accused Sexual Predator Tipped for Secretary of Defense.”
“Vaccine Skeptic with Worm-Eaten Brain to Head Up Health and Human Services.”
“Putin Fan and Alleged Russian Asset Announced as Director of National Intelligence.”
Those last four are, of course, not actually spoof headlines but the real news. Trump is assembling what can well be described as the Onion Administration, creating news that makes more sense as parody than reality.
If you Google “Trump breaks satire,” you’ll get a plethora of articles attesting to the fact that the president-elect is making it difficult to satirize him because he seems to do it himself. If he is just trying to troll comedians, getting back at the likes of Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert for decades of ridicule, could he be any better at it?
The Onion has been at the center of this vortex, and I think they’ve handled the sewage sandwich far more adeptly than Saturday Night Live’s toothless sketches. (Remember SNL actually had Trump on as a host when he was running for president in 2015.)
So it’s a logical next step to start chipping away at the MAGA Industrial Complex from within, starting with taking over Alex Jones’s rabid anti-news site, Infowars.
Jones, you’ll recall, is the deeply cynical far-right crank who wilfully tortured the families of Sandy Hook victims, declaring that the mass school shooting that took the lives of 20 children and six adults in Connecticut in 2012 never happened.
He didn’t stop until some of the parents got together and sued him. Turns out he was messing with the wrong mourners. These families were furious, tenacious, represented by a great legal team, and ended up winning a judgment of $1.5 billion. In 2022 Jones declared bankruptcy in an attempt to stave off the selling of his assets, including his prize media platform.
With the glacial pace of justice, it took another two years for the court-mandated auctioning of his assets to finally take place, and last week The Onion announced that they had purchased Infowars in that sale.
In an amusing press release, Bryce P. Tetraeder, the CEO of The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron (score one for the Branding Dep’t), wrote:
What’s next for InfoWars remains a live issue. The excess funds initially allocated for the purchase will be reinvested into our philanthropic efforts that include business school scholarships for promising cult leaders, a charity that donates elections to at-risk third world dictators, and a new pro bono program pairing orphans with stable factory jobs at no cost to the factories.
Which is to say, they’re not sure yet what they’re going to do with the brand, but they’re going to have fun — and we will too.
That is, if the sale actually goes through. The AP reported that a company “affiliated” with Jones is trying to stop The Onion’s acquisition of the IP.
Walter Cicack, a lawyer for that company, First United American Companies, “claimed that the bankruptcy trustee overseeing the auction improperly colluded with The Onion and families of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut in naming The Onion the winning bidder.”
No one ever said the satirical assault on the institutions of right-wing quackery was going to be easy. But it’s a good conceptual start.
The point Tetraeder has already made is that non-crazies could learn a thing or two by tearing a page off the crazies’ playbook.
Imagine the nutty conspiracy theories that could be promulgated by the Spherical Earth Society:
“The EPA is designed to protect the environment.”
“Fluoride in drinking water improves your teeth.”
“Vaccines can stop smallpox and polio.”
And craziest of all: “The deep state is working for you.”
Those may not be as funny as what The Onion could come up with. But if people really believe a narcissistic, sociopathic, sexual predator and Hitler enthusiast will make a good president, they’ll believe anything.
J.B. Miller is an American writer living in England, and is the author of the forthcoming novel Duch.
