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House Speaker Mike Johnson had a rare moment of candor last week during a tense exchange with Democratic Rep. Madeleine Dean in which he was caught on a hot mic acknowledging that Donald Trump is not doing well mentally.
“A lot of folks on your side are too,” Johnson said, when Dean pressed him about the “unhinged” and “unwell” mental state the president demonstrated during his dystopian speech to military officials — a rant lowlighted by his vow to use the armed forces against American cities.
Importantly, Johnson didn’t dispute Dean’s assertion about Trump’s condition. Instead, he offered weaselly whataboutism about “your side” being just as bad. Even if that were true — and it’s not — Dean’s “side” is not running nonstop defense for a president who’s shredding the Constitution at home and demolishing America’s standing abroad.
Johnson plays a different game publicly, of course. Trump is an aspiring autocrat with obvious physical and mental issues, but Johnson and his Republican cronies are insulting our intelligence about it.
Psychosis posing as humor
It was naive to hope that Trump’s meeting with Democratic leaders last week might be constructive. Still, it was jarring to see the world’s most powerful toddler post an AI-generated deepfake of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries hours after it ended.
The fake audio has Schumer lamenting that Democrats “have no voters anymore, because of our woke, trans bullshit.” Stoking MAGA’s great replacement fears, Deepfake Schumer claims that “if [Democrats] give all these illegal aliens health care, we might be able to get them on our side so they can vote for us. They can’t even speak English so they won’t realize we’re a bunch of woke pieces of shit.”
Mariachi music plays in the background, and a silent Jeffries is wearing a fake sombrero and mustache. It’s simultaneously demented and depressingly juvenile.
ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked Johnson what constructive purpose racist deepfake videos serve in “the cause of getting a deal and opening the government.” Johnson replied, “Look, the president uses social media for humor. He makes jokes. He does lots of things.”
CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Rep. Lisa McClain if Trump should at the very least apologize to Jeffries. Perhaps knowing that was impossible, McClain said, “Listen, the president sure can get a laugh and rise out of the Democrats with his social media. I don’t think that’s anything new.”
When CNN’s Kaitlan Collins confronted Republican Sen. Roger Marshall about the video, the exchange was sadly familiar.
“Is that AI video appropriate in your view?” Collins asked. Marshall responded, “Look, I think sometimes the president plays with the press like a little boy and a flashlight and a dog.”
So, the president is a sadistic child. Nothing to see here.
Pressing Marshall further, Collins asked if he had any “objections” to the racist video, and Marshall insisted, “I think it’s said in jest.”
Of course, if a CEO tanked a critical deal because he posted racist videos insulting the heads of another company, he’d be immediately removed.
A President Harris would be expected to apologize for even a mild slight against a congressional leader that ruined a key deal. “Just joking” wouldn’t cut it, but with Trump, the GOP acts as if it’s perfectly reasonable for the president to act like an elderly Jerky Boy.
Let’s get real
Republicans have consistently used “just joking!” as a shield to downplay and defend Trump’s indefensibly incendiary and bigoted rhetoric.
For instance, Trump greeted Jeffries and Schumer at the White House last week with Trump 2028 hats, which served no point but to rub Democrats’ nose in the fact that the president hopes to deal a deathblow to the Constitution. (These hats are on sale on the official Trump store with the promise to “rewrite the rules.”)
Republicans insist Trump’s just teasing about something he’d obviously love to do if he can figure out a way to make it happen.
“I think it’s more tongue-in-cheek than anything else,” Sen. Markwayne Mullin said. Sen. John Cornyn agreed, adding that Trump has a “great sense of humor.”
Conservative pundit Ben Shapiro claimed that Trump is “just really good at trolling,” a sentiment that Senate Majority Leader John Thune shares. Thune recently told reporters, “You guys keep asking the question and I think he’s probably having some fun with it. [He’s] probably messing with you.”
But don’t take it from us — take it from Trump himself: he’s serious.
As NBC reported in March:
President Donald Trump did not rule out the possibility of seeking a third term in the White House, which is prohibited by the Constitution under the 22nd Amendment, saying in an exclusive interview with NBC News that there were methods for doing so and clarifying that he was “not joking.”
“A lot of people want me to do it,” Trump said in a Sunday-morning phone call with NBC News, referring to his allies. “But, I mean, I basically tell them we have a long way to go, you know, it’s very early in the administration.”
On the first day of the shutdown, Vice President JD Vance yukked it up with the hosts of Fox & Friends and claimed Trump’s 2028 hats were the “most important part” of his meeting with Schumer and Jeffries because it made the Democratic leaders “uncomfortable.” (Vance also dismissed Trump’s weird deep fake videos as jokes.)
Hours before the shutdown, Trump posted yet another AI video featuring Jeffries in a sombrero and mustache while a Donald Trump mariachi band performed behind him. Asked about it, Vance played dumb.
“On the sombrero thing, Hakeem Jeffries said it was racist,” Vance said. “And I don’t even honestly know what that means. Like, is he a Mexican-American that is offended?”
Vance went on to sneer that when Jeffries makes a deal, “the memes will stop.” Racist trolling is now an official White House negotiating tactic.
Like any cult of personality, Republicans can’t simply look the other way. They have to emulate Dear Leader’s callow behavior.
Ted Cruz — always somewhat of a creep but one who once took himself seriously — posted a video depicting Democratic senators who voted against Trump’s budget in sombreros and mustaches. A parody version of “The Macarena” plays in the background. He repeated Vance’s stand-up gangster threat: “The sombrero posting will continue until [Democrats] reopen our government.”
Ruben Gallego is actually Latino, so Cruz’s video meets even Vance’s gutter standards for racial offense.
Trump is humorless and dangerous
The “just joking” defense falls apart upon actual scrutiny of Trump’s character. He for the most part lacks a genuine sense of humor, which requires a degree of humility and capacity for self-deprecation. He’s tried to have late night hosts taken off the air for making jokes at his expense. Saturday Night Live has long been a target of his humorless rage.
Despite what Vance says, it’s not clear that Trump is even having a “good time” with his social media trolling and hateful memes. It seems more like he’s mentally unraveling and lashing out like a spoiled child because people have dared tell him “no.”
The weekend leading up to his meeting with Jeffries and Schumer, Trump flooded the zone with batshit posts on his Truth Social account. First, there was his weird infomercial video for the tacky 24-karat gold tchotchkes in the Oval Office and Cabinet Room of the White House. Then he posted an AI-generated video of what seemed like a Fox News segment from his daughter-in-law Lara Trump’s show during which he endorsed a new “medbed” program.
“Every American will soon receive their own medbed card,” AI Trump says. “With it, you’ll have guaranteed access to our new hospitals led by the top doctors in the nation, equipped with the most advanced technology in the world.”
None of that was normal, nor was it a “joke.”
As the shutdown continues, Trump hasn’t made any legitimate overtures to the people who can help end it. Instead, he’s decompensating further on social media. Last Friday, he posted yet another AI-generated video that depicts him throwing a Trump 2028 hat on Jeffries’s head and then laughing maniacally like a Bond villain.
This deranged behavior might delight his reptile brain but it won’t stop the shutdown.
Trump has previously used the “it’s just a joke” deflection to avoid accountability for his own policy failures. While on the campaign trail, he promised to end the Russia’s war in Ukraine “on Day One.” But after his reelection, he told reporters, “Obviously, people know that when I said that, it was said in jest,” as if his rallies and interviews were part of an open mic night. It’s impossible to imagine a President Harris getting away with this, nor would Republicans or Democrats stand for her shitposting during a government shutdown.
Trump posted a meme calling Democrats “the party of hate, evil, and Satan.” That’s not even a “joke.” It’s just an angry old man venting online.
Mike Johnson might want to believe that “both sides” and “unhinged” and “unwell.” But only one side is following the lead of a clearly deranged man.
It’s become an unfortunate truism that Trump routinely gets away with behavior that would have ruined the political careers of anyone else, especially presidents. The mainstream media has consistently sanewashed Trump’s incoherent blather, but it has also enabled a false narrative that he’s actually a merry jester who we shouldn’t take so seriously, no matter how unhinged he sounds. Turns out the joke is on us.
That’s it for this week
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Thanks for reading, and for your support. Have a great weekend.
What Johnson offered wasn’t candor, it was cognitive evasion. From a behavioral lens, his hot mic moment reveals the architecture of complicity: acknowledge dysfunction, then deflect responsibility through false equivalence. “Both sides” isn’t analysis. It’s a rhetorical escape hatch.
Trump’s erraticism isn’t just a personality quirk; it’s a strategic distortion of norms, accountability, and institutional guardrails. As I’ve written in Cruelty as Strategic Export, the spectacle of chaos becomes the mechanism of control. When the commander-in-chief treats governance like improv night, the real emergency isn’t the shutdown, it’s the erosion of shared reality.
Thanks for keeping the lens sharp.
— Johan
Professor of Behavioral Economics and Applied Cognitive Theory
Former Foreign Service Office
Look, the mad wannabe dictator IS the joke except that the millions of federal public servants who are suffering from the shutdown are not laughing (including the military). Oh, they'll be fine and will be paid for their time off when the government finally reopens I'm told. Well, according to the rantings of the orange-faced clown, he's going to somehow figure out how to deny federal employees who are Democrats their backpay. Who shall deliver us from this turbulent lunatic?