On Sunday, June 21, Brianna Keilar interviewed Tim Murtaugh (Director of Communications for Trump’s 2020 election) about Trump’s speech at the disastrous Tulsa rally. She showed a clip of Trump talking about COVID testing, during which he says, “Here’s the bad part. When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’ll find more cases. So, I said to my people slow the testing down, please.” Here’s the exchange between Keilar and Murtaugh about that clip:
KEILAR: Is that true, he’s asked for the testing to be slowed down?
MURTAUGH: No, it’s not. As a matter of fact, the United States leads the world in testing. We’ve tested more than 25 million Americans —
(CROSSTALK)
KEILAR: So, why is he saying that then?
MURTAUGH: I understand there’s not a lot of a sense of humor at CNN. He was joking. When you expand testing, you will naturally detect the number of cases. That’s the very point he was making. I’m not surprised you’re unable or unwilling to understand the president has a tongue-in-cheek remark there. But that was the point he’s making.
KEILAR: I mean, Tim, 120,000 Americans dead. I do not think that is funny. Do you?
MURTAUGH: He was trying to illustrate the point that when you expand testing —
(CROSSTALK)
KEILAR: You said it’s a joke?
MURTAUGH: — in fact, leading the world. You can often use ironic humor —
(CROSSTALK)
KEILAR: Is it funny, Tim?
MURTAUGH: He was trying to use —
KEILAR: Dead Americans? Unemployed Americans? Is that funny to you?
MURTAUGH: You can ask it 100 different ways. But the point the president was making —
KEILAR: And you won’t answer it. And there’s a reason why.
MURTAUGH: I am answering it. The president was illustrating the point that American testing has expanded to such lengths that we are now detecting more positive cases.
It stands to reason — it stands to reason we will have more positive cases when you do more testing. That’s just a fact.
KEILAR: You are aware that that hospitalization numbers disprove what you are saying. That testing does not solely account for the numbers we’re seeing, including Florida, a state you just held up as a model, which is certainly is not.
It is not funny that Americans are dying. It’s not funny that they’re unemployed.”
This interaction is painfully familiar to anyone who has tried to have a useful conversation (or set a boundary) with a bully. Bullies deliberately hurt a victim, in front of an audience of supporters and enablers, and then escalate the pain by simultaneously acknowledging and denying the deliberate injury. The cruelty is the point; it is the pleasure.
One of the ways that bullies simultaneously deny, acknowledge, and intensify the pain is through saying, “It’s just a joke, and you can’t take a joke.” While acknowledging that you’ve been hurt, and that they know it, they’re saying that they have no intention of apologizing for or even avoiding future instances of the injury. It’s a dominance move—the cruelty is the point. And it isn’t that they don’t care about feelings, or are particularly (or even any) good at taking a joke. Think about how thin-skinned Trump is, or how badly (and often violently) bullies respond when the joke is on them. It’s “Fuck your feelings.”
Murtaugh was claiming that Trump was “just” joking about reducing COVID testing. And Murtaugh got aggressive about it, saying that he wouldn’t expect that CNN would be able to see the joke, being humorless.
This is a talking point on the right (the Proud Boys, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists especially like it): that “liberals” are humorless scolds. (It’s a very gendered insult.) Bullies want to be able to hurt others, without any accountability, and shifting the issue to “liberals”‘ lack of humor is a way they think they evade accountability. It often works.
As an aside, I’ll say that I think it’s possible to make jokes about awful subjects—that kind of dark humor is sometimes the only way to keep from crying. But Murtaugh had blocked himself off from that route of defense by having accused CNN of being humorless. Someone engaged in dark humor doesn’t think the situation is humorous; it’s bleak, and dark humor is an admission of just how grim it is.
Keilar responded by naming what he was doing: “I mean, Tim, 120,000 Americans dead. I do not think that is funny. Do you?”
And he fell apart, unable to answer her question. He had tried to make the issue her lack of sense of humor, and she threw it right back at him, drawing attention to the implication: that dead and dying Americans is something people should find humorous. He deflated like a tired balloon.
“He was joking” was how the White House and Trump campaign tried to spin Trump’s statement that he would order a reduction in testing just to make the numbers go down (since the rising numbers make Trump look bad). Trump, however, betrayed them all, saying, “I don’t kid.”
And, in fact, the Trump Administration ended funding for COVID testing in five states. So, Trump wasn’t kidding, and his Administration is reducing testing. Or it isn’t. Some representatives of the Trump Administration are claiming this reduction of funding will not reduce testing (as are many Trump apologists).
So what is going on? They’re contradicting each other. Either Trump was kidding, and he was lying (or forgetting?) when he said he doesn’t kid, or else he wasn’t kidding, and he’s incompetent as a President, unable to get his Administration to do what he has “ordered.” Either way, that isn’t particularly funny.
But what is funny is what happened to Murtaugh. He and other Trump apologists had, again, been left hanging in the breeze, trying to deflect attention away from the chaos of the Trump Administration, and instead ended up looking like lying fools serving a chaotic and impulsive Trump. Joke’s on them.
I said dark humor is sometimes necessary.