Donald Trump almost never laughs. The leader of the free world frequently displays a tight-lipped smile, but mirth-wise, that is as far as he will go.
.. For the first time in recent memory, we have a commander in chief without a sense of humor — and America is paying the price.
.. For most presidents, humor is a tool for building bridges, especially with voters who may not be persuaded by their policy goals.
.. With no talent for gracious one-liners, he finds himself ill at ease in front of all but the most adoring audiences.
.. Surrounded by followers at rallies, he uses his well-honed sense of timing as a cudgel. He jeers. He mocks. His goal is to insult, rather than to entertain.
.. It should come as no surprise, then, that Mr. Trump governs the way he delivers a punch line: consolidating support among the hard core while alienating everybody else.
.. politicians use humor to identify, and ultimately to uphold, unwritten norms.
.. Peter McGraw, founder of the Humor Research Lab, has called “benign violation theory.” We laugh when something breaks one of life’s many rules.
.. By stepping up to the line without crossing it, a commander in chief tacitly acknowledges that a line exists.
.. President Trump does not possess the sense of nuance a well-told joke requires.
.. This refusal to recognize the unwritten rules that govern us, so evident during Mr. Trump’s failed attempts at humor, is a central feature of his presidential tenure thus far. If a leader does not understand the idea of benign violations, blatant violations inevitably occur.
.. Thanks to the power of the internet, there is proof that our president has indeed laughed at least once. This was during a campaign rally in January, when Mr. Trump’s speech was interrupted by a barking dog.
“It’s Hillary!” an audience member shouted. And the candidate tilted his head back, opened his mouth wide and laughed without reservation, quite possibly for the first time in his political life.
.. they reveal a president who is constantly, endlessly preoccupied with status.
After Latest Twitter Insult From Trump, Jeff Sessions Pushes Back
Attorney general is ‘tired’ of his boss’s treatment, an associate says
Last Thursday, Mr. Trump began a meeting attended by Mr. Sessions by saying, “I also want to thank a really tremendous attorney general.” He turned to the person seated next to him and added: “That’s Pam Bondi, from Florida.” Ms. Bondi is Florida’s state attorney general.
Mr. Sessions, a former Alabama senator and one of Mr. Trump’s earliest supporters, largely shrugged off the earlier criticisms as typical of Mr. Trump’s personality. He also didn’t believe that getting into a public spat with Mr. Trump would quell the president’s outrage, the associates said. Mr. Sessions felt a better course was to try to please his boss by touting Mr. Trump’s achievements, they said.
People close to Mr. Sessions said Mr. Trump’s Wednesday morning tweet crossed a line for the attorney general, who believed that Mr. Trump was trying to assert direct control over the Justice Department’s established protocols and procedures.
.. “He is tired of it,” the second person said. “He just said, ‘Stop it. Fire me if you want. I’m not resigning.’ He also strongly believes the institution of the Justice Department needs to be protected.”
.. “He is tired of it,” the second person said. “He just said, ‘Stop it. Fire me if you want. I’m not resigning.’ He also strongly believes the institution of the Justice Department needs to be protected.”
Donald Trump Is Still Their Man
In the heart of Virginia coal country, the people of Buchanan County gave candidate Trump some of his biggest majorities, and they remain loyal. The big reason: a local rebound.
Mr. Trump’s voters here largely dismiss the critics. Many say that they love him even more since he took office and see the flak that he faces as evidence that he’s standing up for them against a power structure they distrust. “By his tweets and everything, he agitates people, but I think that’s good,” says Larry David Sr., 71, a retired civil engineer.
.. “Bluntness, speaking your mind is an Appalachian trait,” says Rev. Brad Napier, the minister at Buchanan First Presbyterian Church, who also heads the county’s ministerial association. “The attitude, ‘you can kiss my ass’—people admire that.”
.. In Buchanan County, the improving economy is what Trump supporters mention first. At the time of the Virginia primary, the county unemployment rate was 11.8%, and mines were closing; the number of mining jobs had fallen by about one-fifth in the previous 12 months. Since the primary, unemployment has fallen steadily to 7% in November, the latest month available. Local coal production jumped 15% by mid-2017, mirroring a national trend. Moody’s Analytics, an economic consulting firm, estimates that Buchanan’s economic output expanded in 2017 for the first time since 2010.
.. Buchanan’s median income is just $30,000, roughly half the national average. The population has shrunk by nearly half since 1980 to 22,000, and is expected to keep falling, according to University of Virginia demographers. Opioid addiction is climbing, and the county’s high death rate from the drugs put it on a federal watch list in 2016 for risk of HIV and hepatitis outbreaks.
.. They praise Mr. Trump for canceling some regulations that they say would have hobbled coal-fired plants and driven up costs for protecting streams that flow above underground mines. They say his election has given the industry confidence to invest in new operations because they can be sure that Washington won’t turn against coal again for at least the next three years.
.. “The month before the election was our lowest point,” says Jeff Taylor, a local mine operator. “We were close to our entire industry going out of business. I give all the credit to the president” for the revival.
.. Economists examining the coal turnaround say that the reasons are more complicated. A pick-up in the global economy in the summer of 2016 began to boost demand. U.S. coal exports started to recover in the last quarter of 2016—just before Mr. Trump was elected—and shot up 68% in the first six months of 2017 compared to a year earlier. Over the same period, global prices doubled for metallurgical coal, the kind used in steelmaking—and the kind that Buchanan produces.
.. deregulatory moves—in which the Supreme Court and Congress also played roles—didn’t change the economics of coal. But he did say they may have given coal operators a shot of confidence: “Psychology can’t be discounted.”
.. The American Coal Council credits “a combination” of market factors and Trump policies
.. Buchanan County was until recently heavily Democratic, a legacy of the New Deal and decades of organizing by the United Mine Workers. Al Gore carried the county handily, despite his environmentalism, as did John Kerry in 2004.
.. He liked the fact that Mr. Trump “doesn’t beat around the bush” and stands up to people like North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un. “You shouldn’t let a little country like that push around the U.S.”
.. Although Buchanan is very dependent on government aid—one in four adults in the county gets Social Security disability checks—many residents are vociferously anti-government. Locals blame Washington for regulations that hurt the coal industry and for favoritism toward what they see as undeserving minorities.
.. The tax bill? Complicated, many say. But if it helps the rich the most, that’s fine with Robert Collins, a local trucker, who figures that middle-class workers will also benefit. “In order to keep jobs and provide things that employers need, the wealthy have to have breaks too,” he says.
.. Residents like to say that “Virginia ends at Roanoke,” a city 180 miles east with a trendy downtown, or “You need a passport to get to the other side of Roanoke.” They are jokes, but they underscore how separate voters in southwest Virginia feel from the rest of the state and from nearby Washington, D.C.
.. Buchanan residents believe that outsiders unfairly dismiss people from the Appalachian region as racist and that Mr. Trump gets the same treatment. They figure he was misquoted in the recent flap about Haiti and African countries. As for his comments about the march of white supremacists in Charlottesville this past summer, a number of his supporters here agree with him that there was “blame on both sides.”
.. Cultural issues weigh heavily. When President Trump talks about striking back at the so-called War on Christmas, many people here nod in affirmation.
.. They believe that’s the case in blue-state areas of America, especially coastal cities.
.. Ms. Raines, people felt they were losing their place to others who were “pro-abortion and pro every other vice.” Now she says, “you’re beginning to see the mood of the country change.” She points to public prayers at cabinet meetings, Mr. Trump’s embrace of evangelical ministers and his conservative appointments to the courts as evidence of the change.
.. Though often profane, insulting and bombastic, Mr. Trump registers here as a religious champion.
.. “I’m a Christian,” he says, “I don’t think he represents my views.” But he says that he understands how religious and cultural issues cement Mr. Trump’s support.
.. “He is a strange messenger,” says Ms. Raines, the high school teacher. “The Lord can use anybody to accomplish his purposes.”
Trump’s short-term achievements will cost conservatives
Amos went to Israel at a time of great prosperity to tell the nation God would destroy it for failing to care for its widows, its poor, its orphans and its refugees.
Everyone looked around at the success, riches, and plenty and mocked the prophet.
.. ch, and it has become far easier for conservatives to turn a blind eye to injustices than speak up.
.. More and more conservatives are modeling Trump’s bad behaviors. His vulgarity, his thin skin, his willingness to insult and demean, and his willingness to degrade his office are now reflected in conservative political leaders who increasingly see their goal as beating the other side instead of advancing ideas and sound public policy.
.. The party of small government is perfectly happy to grow government as long as Trump is spending the money. The party of limited government is perfectly happy to have a powerful chief executive as long as Trump is wielding the power. Trump and his supporters have also doubled-down on unwise precedents set by the Obama administration. President Barack Obama investigated leaks to reporters such as James Rosen; Trump now seems to revel in the idea of shutting down whole networks whose coverage he hates. Republicans who decried the left’s hostility to free speech in the Obama years now champion censorship of their opponents... It is safe to say many of the president’s supporters have concluded that arguments and debates no longer work, so they will take what they can get as quickly as they can before the tide rolls in and washes this administration away.
.. The short-term gains of this administration, like those of the last, are being achieved by executive order and appointment. So too then can the gains of this administration be wiped out as easily as those of the last.
.. There will always be partisans on the left who hate anything those on the right do. But they are not who conservatives have to worry about. Conservatives have to worry about those in the middle who are persuadable. They have to worry about minority voters increasingly skeptical of the secular drift of the Democratic Party. They have to worry about younger voters.
.. It has become harder to make the case for family and morality as prominent evangelicals applaud and justify the bad behaviors of a thrice-married adulterer who believes immigrants should be judged based on their nation of origin, not the content of their own character.
.. not only has Anthony M. Kennedy not retired from the Supreme Court, but also he has drifted left.
.. the precedent is now there for Democrats to just ignore a replacement who Trump nominates. The conservatives who rallied to Trump to save the high court may very well lose it because of him.
.. Though many conservatives, myself included, have cheered the successes of this administration, most of them are easily reversible and, along the way, it will be harder and harder to separate the successes from the low character and behavior of the man whose name is connected to them. Conservatives may no longer care, but for most Americans, character still matters. At some point, those on the right will pay the price.