Without wit or irony: Trump rescues kittens

On September 11, 2024, Jimmy Kimmel made fun of Trump on his show “Jimmy Kimmel Live”. “‘So much insanity [...],’ Kimmel said. ‘On the day of the debate he’s posting cat memes. [...] These memes are part of what might be the dumbest Republican lie yet,’ he added, referring to the rumor [about Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio] spread by Trump’s running mate JD Vance.”¹⁰⁰ “Insane”, “dumb”, “lie”: Kimmel and his laughing audience don’t understand that these terms slide off of Trump, the Janus-faced, Dionysian, dancing performer. Like Janus, Trump looks and speaks and dances in one direction and at the same time in the other.¹⁰¹

Ironically, however, Trump thereby undermines the very possibility of making him the subject of wit, irony¹⁰² and satire. For Trump there is ‘iconic’,¹⁰³ but not ‘ironic’.¹⁰⁴ Apart from Jimmy Kimmel and a few other late-night talkers, nobody actually laughs today when Trump publicly shares his “stream of consciousness” (Wolff), dances or posts AI-generated images to the prompt “Trump saving cats from hungry Haitians”. The final irony of the age of retweets and memes, which Trump helped to create and accelerate enormously, is the self-abolition of irony.

No matter how apodictically Trump speaks, contradiction and caricature are no longer possible—except as another form of approval. Anyone who talks about Trump on social media today speaks for him. In the social media cosmos of the Trump era, reacting is applauding. This is how Trump gets what matters to him alone: “attention” and “headline, headline, headline” (Michael Wolff¹⁰⁵).

The fact that it has come to this also owes to the misunderstanding that the current argument seeks to debunk. Sennett summarized it laconically. “People are constantly asking: How can people believe in this nonsense? But it’s not about words.”¹⁰⁶

But then what is it about? Trump, as his mugshot from the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office (which has been ennobled as an official presidential portrait) shows, is a performance artist who is a virtuoso of that Janus-faced masking that pre-Christian antiquity celebrated as a promise not of reality but of possibility—even if, as in Trump’s case, it is nothing but “greatness”. One thinker who would have liked this is Martin Heidegger. In 1927—almost four decades before his Spiegel gnomic declaration, “Only a God can save us”—he wrote¹⁰⁷ in § 7 of Sein und Zeit: “Possibility is higher than reality.”¹⁰⁸ Following Sein und Zeit, one might ponder whether this is a contribution to Trump’s “substance” or, in German, his “Subs-
tanz”.¹⁰⁹

Notes

1. ¹⁰⁰www.yahoo.com/entertainment/dumbest-republican-lie-yet-jimmy-095348214.html (6/6/2025).
2. ¹⁰¹Wolff calls Trump “a chaotic, ad hoc, impulsive president moved principally by the sound of his own voice and by the last random person to have gotten his ear.” Wolff, All or Nothing, p. 277. In the podcast “The Rest Is Politics”, Wolff says: “of course he didn’t build that wall. And even here, again, it will go, he will snatch children from their mothers until he doesn’t. And then that’s reversed.”
3. ¹⁰²The fact that irony depends on truth is also expressed in a “brief and enigmatic marginal note” by Luther on the passage he translated, John 18:28-40, in which Jesus stands before Pontius Pilate, who asks the famous question “What is truth?” (John 18:38). Luther writes: “What is truth? Irony is. If you wish to speak the truth / then you are lost (Was ist warheit. Jronia ist. Wiltu von warheit reden / so bistu verloren).” Jochen Hörisch: Theorie-Apotheke. Eine Handreichung zu den humanwissenschaftlichen Theorien der letzten fünfzig Jahre, einschließlich ihrer Risiken und Nebenwirkungen, Frankfurt a.M. 2010, p. 10 (without reference to Luther).
4. ¹⁰³Cf. note 90.
5. ¹⁰⁴Wolff writes about a conversation with Trump: “‘I’m thinking of calling this book Landslide,’ I offered, only slightly concerned that he might read the irony. ‘Cool title. The other title I gave you, Fire and Fury’”; Wolff, Landslide, p. 304.
6. ¹⁰⁵Podcast “The Rest Is Politics”.
7. ¹⁰⁶ www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buecher/autoren/buch-von-richard-sennett-den-erfolg-unerschuetterlicher-selbstdarsteller-verstehen-110081345.html
   (6/6/2025).
8. ¹⁰⁷“Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten”. Spiegel interview with Martin Heidegger on September 23, 1966, in: Der Spiegel 23/1976, pp. 193-219.
9. ¹⁰⁸Martin Heidegger: Sein und Zeit, Tübingen 11/1967, p. 38—Aristotle’s “Poetics” already states that “poetry” is something “more philosophical and more serious than historiography” because, unlike the latter, it does not communicate “what really happened” but “what is possible according to the rules of probability or necessity.” Aristotle, Poetics, p. 29 (1451a-b).
10. ¹⁰⁹Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, p. 90 (§ 19).