Last night on “Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” filmmaker and activist Michael Moore said a new army will bring down President Trump the fastest: a comic armada. “I believe the way to bring him down is with satire,” he said.
“His thin skin, as you’ve pointed out so well, is so thin,” said Moore, who a year ago correctly predicted in an open letter that Trump would be elected, back when the prospect seemed absurd.
“All we need is like a thousand or a million little comedy shivs — just, you know, non-violent, don’t hurt him,” he added. “But just under his skin, because he can’t take being laughed at.”
The evidence for Moore’s assertions is abundant. By nearly all accounts, Trump began to sour on former press secretary Sean Spicer when he began being parodied by Melissa McCarthy last fall on Saturday Night Live. (What bothered Trump most is that he was being portrayed by a woman.) And Trump often tweetstorms after he’s depicted on the show.
Moore said of McCarthy: “She’s taken down the first Trump administration official with satire.”
Trump has been vocal about his displeasure in other ways. In speeches, the president has demonstrated a fixation on being risible. “At what point does America get demeaned?” he asked in the White House Rose Garden June 1, on the seemingly disconnected topic of the Paris Climate Accords. “At what point do they start laughing at us as a country? We don’t want other leaders and other countries laughing at us any more. And they won’t be. They won’t be.”
The previous week at the G7 conference, Trump rode in a golf cart behind other world leaders who were walking to the meeting and engaged in a handshake battle with new French president Emmanuel Macron.
