On March 17th, 2024, IPK Fellows Maya Vinokour and Leif Weatherby were featured in an article by Politico titled “In on the Joke: The Comedic Trick Trump Uses to Normalize His Behavior.” Read the excerpt below, then click for the full article.

Yes, Trump’s funny. “Super funny,” Corey Lewandowski, one of his 2016 campaign managers, told me. “Sarcasm and deadpan,” Sam Nunberg, one of his earliest political advisers, told me. “I thought,” Stephanie Grisham, one of his former White House press secretaries and definitely now is no fan, told me, “he was funny a lot.” But that he is or can be funny is not the point. The point is what being funny in the way that he’s being funny is letting him do — and what it is doing to his supporters. “Because he’s doing something really serious,” Leif Weatherby, a professor at New York University and a co-organizer of the Working Group on the Global New Right, told me, “with humor.”

Read the full article here.

Photo Credits: POLITICO illustration by Emily Scherer