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Today: Jennie Rose Halperin, digital strategist and librarian at NYU’s Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy.
Issue No. 200The Trump Era of Joan Rivers
Jennie Rose Halperin
The Trump Era of Joan RiversThe late Joan Rivers was friendly with Donald Trump for decades, with Rivers openly praising Trump in several interviews, including one on her own show. “He’s so smart,” she gushed in a 2012 appearance on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen. “I think he would have made a great president… He’s a businessman!” A closer look suggests that this chirpy observation was more about their relationship and his celebrity than about endorsement. During this year’s presidential campaign, Trump told journalist Ramin Satoodeh that Rivers had voted for him in 2016, an election that took place two years after her death. “I thought she might have been a Republican,” he said. “She voted for me, according to what she said.” While Rivers and Trump were publicly close, she also told comedian Kathy Griffin “not to make an enemy out of Donald Trump,” advice that Griffin famously did not heed. “I think in the beginning she would have been like, ‘Yes, great, super,’” Rivers’s daughter, Melissa Rivers, offered in a 2017 interview when asked whether her mother would have supported Trump’s political career. “And then she would have been like, ‘Oh shit,’ as he came closer to the presidency.” As a finalist in the 2009 season of NBC’s Celebrity Apprentice, Rivers faced off against poker champ Annie Duke for the big prize of $250,000, to be donated to the winner’s designated charity. Across the huge conference table from the contestants were judges Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump, their father seated between them. “Joan, why should I pick you to be the Celebrity Apprentice?” Trump asked Rivers. “Because I think that I represent winning, and business, in the new way that this country is taking on, which is we are honorable,” Rivers said. “We cannot do business in the old way, you can’t grab money because it will affect those you grabbed from... America is all about charity.” Rivers donated the $250,000 prize to God’s Love We Deliver, an organization that delivers meals to New Yorkers with AIDS, cancer, and other serious illnesses who are too sick to cook or shop for themselves. Over the years, Rivers donated so much money to the organization it established a fund in her name. A couple of months later, Trump participated in a Comedy Central roast of Rivers. “We’ll... send in a hazmat team to remove all hazardous materials found in that toxic pool you call a vagina,” he joked. Rivers’s comedy was edgy, outrageous, and often offensive; her archival rolodex of 65,000 jokes, all typed, cross referenced, and organized by subject in a massive card catalog, contains 1,756 jokes labeled “Tramp.” “The Queen of the Barbed One-Liners” spent her career directing cruel quips at the rich and famous, but she saved the most biting for herself. Trump’s vulgarity was just misogyny disguised as a joke. In 2018, NBC cut ties with Trump over the derogatory remarks he’d made about immigrants while on the campaign trail.
Millennials might know Rivers from “Fashion Police” or her plastic surgery addiction, but her career was forged in late night, the same shows that made Donald Trump a regular media fixture; he appeared on David Letterman’s shows more than 30 times. But Trump hasn’t been on the late night circuit since 2016, when Jimmy Fallon was criticized for normalizing the candidate by ruffling his hair. In interviews and campaign rallies, Trump has made it abundantly clear that he misses the golden age of late night, particularly the legendary Tonight Show host, Johnny Carson. Carson helped make Joan Rivers’s career, and she was a popular guest host on The Tonight Show for years. But when news leaked that she hadn’t made the cut for consideration as Carson’s successor, she took Fox’s offer to host her own show in the same time slot as The Tonight Show. Carson took his revenge; he never spoke to Rivers again and blacklisted her, forbidding any celebrity who appeared on The Late Show with Joan Rivers from coming on The Tonight Show. Unable to adapt to streaming, the traditional late night shows are bleeding viewers. At his height, Carson reached 17 million Americans every night. Now, operating on a four-day schedule, The Tonight Show reaches about 2.04 million. And Trump himself may have something to do with the twilight of late night. Tonight with Jimmy Fallon’s head writer, Rebecca Drysdale, quit the show in late 2020 because she could no longer bear to write about him. In a Facebook post discovered by the Chicago Sun-Times and CNBC, she wrote that “doing material about Trump has led to divided creative teams, anxiety, tears and pain… I don’t believe that making fun of this man, doing impressions of him, or making him silly, is a good use of that power. It only adds to his.” Even as the news of late night hosts “distraught” over Trump’s win spread, the administration’s circus has provided a firehose of outraged engagement. In 2017, a communications professor at George Mason University counted 3,100 jokes about Trump, as compared with Clinton’s 1,700 in 1998 during the height of his impeachment scandal. In The New Yorker this week, Isaac Butler wrote at length about Carson’s dumbing down of the talk show genre, which shifted from Dick Cavett’s politically engaged interviews and open opposition to the war in Vietnam to Carson’s mugging at the camera and inoffensive “bipartisan” political jibes. To quote Mort Sahl, “Carson’s assumption is that the audience is dumb, so you mustn’t do difficult things. . . . His staff will only book people who will make him look artistically potent.” Like many of the 1980s rich, both Rivers and Carson styled themselves as “fiscally conservative and socially liberal,” politics that Trump, too, once seemed to share until recently: catnip for white Boomer nostalgia for a bygone era, when someone could condemn the poor for their laziness, but still have gay and Black friends, still believe that women should probably not be forced to miscarry in a parking lot or stay married against their will. Carson, who presided over Reagan’s inaugural gala at the request of Frank Sinatra, once said, “In my living room I would argue for liberalization of abortion laws, divorce laws, and there are times when I would like to express a view on the air… But I’m on TV five nights a week; I have nothing to gain by it and everything to lose.” For Carson and Rivers, maintaining political inscrutability was advantageous; their real politics were television ratings and money. Some percentage of Trump voters believe that he is likewise just doing it for the ratings, that his terrifying authoritarian rhetoric is schtick, “just riling up the news.” Despite all evidence to the contrary, these voters still believe that Trump is a “businessman,” that he’s “fiscally conservative,” that he won’t touch the socially liberal policies that many Americans support. What is there left for any interviewer to ask? What would his old friend Joan Rivers make of all this? What more is there to know that has not come out yet? Donald Trump is weird and has no friends, he's rambling and unable to focus and makes no sense, he has never made any sense, he loves showtunes in a creepy way (to say nothing of the gay anthem, “YMCA”); he’s a convicted felon, he’s a fraud, he’s a rapist. He’s the president-elect.
HYDRA THERAPYAt The New Republic, Ana Marie Cox has a useful and gentle reminder that rest is good, and it’s an option.
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