Orange Wannabe Dictator Wanted To Silence Comedians

Donald Trump was a bully and a narcissist, and he hated it when comedians made fun of him. He actually thought being president gave him the (dictatorial) power to punish them!

The following is part of an excellent article of the wannabe dictator by Dean Obeidallah at MSNBC.com:

Before Donald Trump launched his war on our democracy, there was his very public war on comedy — or at least on those who dared to mock his self-inflated sense of majesty. Now new reporting shows that while in the White House, Trump wanted to use his power as president to shut down “Saturday Night Live.”

I can hear it now: “Live from New York, it’s your show canceled for mocking Donald Trump!” (Cut to the audience in stunned silence — except for a few Trump fans who applaud wildly.) And having seen up close the way authoritarians crack down on comedy and satire, I absolutely believe that Trump would’ve turned off the lights in NBC’s famed Studio 8H forever if given the chance.

The new report fits a pattern from the pathetically thin-skinned Trump, who has spent years publicly lashing out at TV shows and comedians who ridicule him — from calling for "SNL" to be canceledin the closing days of the 2016 campaign to taking time in the middle of a 2018 campaign rally to slam the late night hosts Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmell.

As The Daily Beast reported Tuesday, Trump apparently did more than just whine about comedy shows mocking him — in March 2019, he asked his advisers if the federal government could investigate the comedians and their TV shows in the hopes of silencing them. The then-president was reportedly triggered by a rerun of an "SNL" episode that mocked him. (It says so much about Trump that he publicly claims to hate "SNL" but was watching a rerun of the show.)

When Trump was told by his advisers that nothing could done to punish the show — presumably because of this little thing called the First Amendment — “Trump seemed disappointed to hear that there was no actual legal recourse or anything that” the Federal Communications Commission or Department of Justice “could do to punish late-night, anti-Trump comedy,” the Beast reported. . . .

Trump, like all dictators (or in his case, a wannabe dictator), hates being mocked. This is the same guy who refused to attend the White House Correspondent’s Dinner as president, given the odds that he would’ve been ridiculed on a national stage. “Strongmen” leaders like Trump want and need to be feared to stay in power. The last thing they want is people laughing at them. . . .

I worked on the production staff of "Saturday Night Live" for eight seasons, back when there was a tsunami of jokes made at the expense of then-Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. The shows then were filled with comedy about Clinton’s (numerous) sex scandals and Bush’s weakness: speaking English.

Neither Clinton nor Bush ever publicly whined that the jokes were unfair or called for the show to be punished for getting laughs at their expense. Why? They understood that comedically mocking a president is part of what makes our nation a robust democracy. Political comedy — at its best — is about speaking truth to power and bringing the mighty down to earth with a well-crafted joke, opposed to Trump’s idea of comedy, which was typified by his cruelly mocking a disabled reporter for laughs.

But Trump doesn’t believe in any of that.

Trump is cut from the same cloth as despots, dictators and others who despise democracy. Does anyone doubt for a moment that if Trump could shut down comedy shows or even imprison comedians who mock him that he would? And if Trump ever returns to the presidency, he will undoubtedly use the apparatus of government to punish those who challenge his rule. That clearly includes comedians.