I did not realize how badly I needed Rosie O’Donnell back on my television until she guest-hosted for Jimmy Kimmel and reminded me that one of the greatest weapons against a thin-skinned, tantrum-throwing, tyrant-cosplaying asshole like Donald Trump is to LAUGH RIGHT IN HIS FUCKING FACE.
Because Rosie O’Donnell is fucking FEARLESS, and Donald Trump absolutely cannot stand a woman he cannot frighten, flatten, flatter into submission, or otherwise force to genuflect before the wobbling orange wedding cake of his own self-importance.
He has been attacking this woman for TWENTY FUCKING YEARS, and that bloated, blubbery, butter-basted, blockheaded little bitch still hasn’t figured out that she is not afraid of him. He insults her. Threatens her. Obsesses over her. Drags her name out whenever the ancient grievance carousel inside his spectacularly stupid, sawdust-stuffed, synapse-starved skull starts wheezing around again, spewing the same petty, puerile, pissy little complaints he has been nursing since George W. Bush was president and people still had dedicated drawers for MapQuest directions.
And thanks to a plurality of smooth-brained, mouth-breathing, troglodytic, self-sabotaging shidiots, Donald Trump ascended to the presidency of the United States TWICE and still couldn’t evict Rosie O’Donnell from the rent-controlled duplex she apparently occupies inside his frontal lobe.
And Rosie just keeps fucking laughing.
Which made it absolutely DELICIOUS when she looked directly into the camera during her opening monologue, referred to him not as President Trump, not even as Donald Trump, but as “Mango Mussolini,” gave this teeny cheerful wave and said:
“Hi. I know you’re watching.”
I almost fucking DIED.
Five words. One wave. A goddamn assassination by finger wiggle.
She didn’t scream. She didn’t lecture. She didn’t even give the bastard his NAME. She just smiled into that lens with the exquisite serenity of a woman who knows EXACTLY where Donald Trump’s emotional prostate is located and gently pressed.
Hi, Mango Mussolini!
Because YOU KNOW HE WAS WATCHING.
You know that ambulatory sack of ego and edema was parked somewhere in front of a television, marinating in a bubbling vat of narcissistic injury, his tissue-paper ego disintegrating because the woman he has spent two decades trying to intimidate was CHEERFULLY WAVING AT HIM.
And the chef’s kiss is that she did it from JIMMY KIMMEL’S set, another person Trump has repeatedly tried to bully into submission who simply will not cow to him.
Because ridicule is Donald Trump’s kryptonite.
This ruinously insecure, criticism-allergic crybaby can spend all day cosplaying Caesar and have his emotional ecosystem collapse because somebody made a joke about his hair. For a man pathologically obsessed with dominance, Donald Trump radiates the sexual confidence of a guy who spends forty-five minutes adjusting the lighting before presenting a Vienna sausage and asking, “Be honest, does this look huge from over there?”
And we’re supposed to regard THIS asshole as a terrifying authoritarian?
This pampered, powder-faced fraud who looks like he fell asleep face-first in a bowl of spaghetti, staggered upright, got shoved into wardrobe and was sent onstage at the Shawnee Playhouse for a summer-stock production of Il Duce: The Temu Years?
The guy lacquered in peach-toned stucco, teetering around in high heels, cinched into a corset, crowned with a wind-tortured thatch installation, and wrapped in a suit containing enough excess fabric to tarp a fucking pontoon boat?
That’s the terrifying tyrant?
That distended satsuma in orthopedic elevators?
That marmalade manatee with a necktie?
That preening, pouting, pancake-pasted parcel of presidential pique?
PLEASE.
The whole goddamn thing is a SHOW.
The flags. The gold. The scowling photographs. The military spectacle. The dictator poses. The chest-puffing, chin-jutting, cocktail-wiener-swinging stagecraft of supremacy, right down to that bizarre double-fisted jerk-and-twist “dance,” the only choreography the braces around his legs now seem to allow, pumping both fists beside his hips like Hando Calrissian simultaneously jerking off two imaginary MMA fighters.
It is pomp wrapped around pathology, a gaudy, gilded, gold-plated papier-mâché colostomy bag with the emotional load-bearing capacity of a motherfucking meringue.
He’s the end-cap-clearance, factory-reject, off-brand imitation Wizard of Oz toy your coupon-clipping granny found at a garage sale after somebody had already blowtorched the face and redrawn the features with a fucking Magic Marker, now frantically yanking levers behind a polyester curtain, coughing out machine smoke and booming threats through a busted amplifier while praying nobody wanders backstage and discovers that the Great and Powerful Whatever-the-Hell is actually an aggrieved carnival appliance salesman in a discount statesman costume having a nervous breakdown.
And Rosie is Toto.
She trots right over and YANKS.
There he is.
No legend. No majesty. No magnificent masculine mystique. Just a brittle, blustering, bouffant-bearing blowhard whose psychological stability can be knocked sideways by a monologue joke.
POINT AND FUCKING LAUGH.
And watching Rosie do exactly that was cathartic for me for reasons that reached much further back than Donald Trump, because long before that malignant mandarin-colored motherfucker became the human push notification none of us can swipe away, she meant comfort to me.
Being home sick when I was younger meant blankets, daytime television and The Rosie O’Donnell Show, this gloriously goofy explosion of Koosh balls, Broadway songs, giveaways, celebrity crushes and completely unembarrassed enthusiasm pouring through the television. She loved things LOUDLY. She would practically levitate when somebody she adored walked onto that set, and there was something wonderfully uncomplicated about watching a grown woman refuse to ration her happiness for fear of looking uncool.
When you were sick and miserable on the couch, she felt like company.
There was safety in that show, a little daytime sanctuary connected in my memory to a kinder stretch of life when television could simply entertain you instead of informing you that democracy had just been stuffed into the trunk of a Lincoln Continental before breakfast.
So seeing THAT woman all these years later hit me somewhere I wasn’t expecting. The world changed. She changed. I changed. But there she was, still carrying that enormous capacity for delight, except now it belonged to a woman who has spent two decades being targeted by a vengeance-addled, vanity-engorged bully and still refuses to give that son of a bitch one drop of the fear he keeps trying to squeeze out of her.
I fucking LOVE that.
Maybe because I understand the mechanism.
I had plenty of bullies growing up, and children can be exquisitely efficient little sadists when they discover something that gets a reaction. They find the sore spot, jam a finger into it and WATCH YOUR FACE. Their cruelty isn’t complete until they see the flinch.
So I learned to sabotage the whole damn setup.
If somebody was going to make fun of me, I could let everybody laugh AT me, or I could grab the joke before it landed, improve the motherfucker and make everybody laugh WITH me.
So I became funnier than the little asshole coming for me.
You found something embarrassing about me? Congratulations, cupcake. Give me thirty seconds and I’ll make it funnier than you ever could.
And it worked like a charm, because the instant everyone starts laughing WITH the person you intended to humiliate, you’ve lost control of the room. Your weapon has been confiscated, your cruelty grenade turns out to be a party popper, and now people are looking at YOU.
Bullies hate that.
So do despots, dictators, demagogues, dime-store Duces and every puffed-up, power-drunk prick who depends upon everyone treating him like an eight-foot marble monument instead of a mortal asshole with gastrointestinal problems.
Bullies need your humiliation. Despots need your deference. Dictators need their mythology.
Humor is a goddamn crowbar jammed underneath all three.
Ridicule doesn’t make dangerous people harmless. These people are dangerous because they possess actual authority.
But we do not have to lend them OUR awe.
We don’t have to become unpaid extras in their shitty little tyranny pageant. We don’t have to gasp when the smoke machine starts or applaud the costume, and we sure as hell don’t have to help some vain, voluble, volume-discount despot inflate himself into some towering object of reverence when he keeps landing somewhere between county-fair hypnotist and divorced casino magician whose tiger got repossessed.
For a man so ravenous for submission, Donald Trump spends an extraordinary amount of time pleading with the universe to reassure him that he is bigger, tougher, richer, taller, harder, smarter, hotter, more feared, more virile, more magnificent than every other swinging mammal on Earth, while lumbering around with an ass that appears to have entered the room several seconds before the rest of him and may require its own tugboat escort.
The flags get more gigantic. The gilt gets more garish. The threats get more theatrical. The trousers descend farther toward the floor as though hems themselves have entered witness protection. Every inch of the performance screams BEHOLD MY POWER while the performer looks like a bloated birthday clown who got into a fistfight with a spray-tan booth, lost, and then demanded everyone call him Daddy.
That is the fucking charade.
And mockery is how you puncture it.
Strip away the props. Expose the fraud. Make the emperor stand there in his fucking Spanx, stretched to structural failure around that swollen, sloshing sack of octogenarian suet.
Then LAUGH.
Laugh loudly. Laugh publicly. Laugh without permission.
Mock him. Puncture the pomposity. Remind the world that underneath all the presidential pageantry, authoritarian affectation, belligerent bluster and tough-guy theater is someone who cannot fucking bear the sound of people laughing at him.
Because the emperor needs you admiring the robes.
The counterfeit wizard needs you watching the smoke.
The bully needs to know he hurt you.
Don’t give them a fucking thing.
Keep laughing. Keep pointing. Keep humiliating these pompous pricks until every last inch of manufactured menace collapses into the pathetic punchline it always was.
And Rosie?
Keep.
Fucking.
Waving.
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