Donald Trump as a Failed Borscht Belt Performer
The rail network in the Catskills with summer resorts, ca. 1901 – Public Domain
Several weeks after the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, I finally sat down to watch Trump’s performance. The Dinner is one occasion when the President is expected to be entertaining as well as presidential. What I saw was a very poor imitation of Borscht Belt comic performers like Sid Caesar, Rodney Dangerfield and Henny Youngman. While many psychologists have analyzed Trump’s behavior, the Catskills’ comedy tradition offers another way of understanding him as a failed performer.
The Borscht Belt was a region just north of New York City in the Catskills Mountains. In its heyday, it was a retreat for up-and-coming Jews from New York City as well as the incubator of famous comedians like Jerry Lewis, Jack Benny and Don Rickles and singers like Barbra Streisand, Tony Bennett and Eddie Fisher. Like many young New York comics of his generation, Woody Allen also worked the Catskills circuit in the 1960s. For decades, Grossinger’s and the Concord were the place to be for a very special clientele. (My uncle, Dr. Ben, took me there twice.)
All of the famous comedians who performed there had a special flair; New York wise-guy Jewish humor. There was the precision of Henny Youngman, often mixed with self-deprecating Rodney Dangerfield or the stinging aggression of a Don Rickles. It was all very New York; it was all very in with a certain in-crowd.
Donald Trump was not part of that crowd. I doubt if he ever spent a Singles Weekend at Jennie Grossinger’s retreat in Sullivan County. Yet Trump’s public style borrows many of the rhythms of that New York comic tradition, even if he was never truly part of it. The only problem at the Waldorf Astoria on July 24, 2026, was that Trump wasn’t onstage at Grossinger’s entertaining a very particular crowd. He was the President of the United States speaking on national television to the entire country and the world.
Whether intentionally or not, Trump’s public style shares features commonly associated with that tradition—cadence, exaggeration, insult and audience interaction—even if his performance lacks the craftsmanship that made the great Borscht Belt comics successful.
The Borscht Belt comics usually shared several qualities. They were funny. They understood timing. They mocked themselves as readily as they mocked others. And they knew the difference between performance and reality. Trump lacked the discipline or self-awareness that made those comics effective.
Henny Youngman could get a laugh in ten words. “Take my wife…please.” Trump often repeated the same point three or four times, explaining it long after whatever humor it possessed had evaporated. Great comedians know when to stop talking; Trump can’t.
Rodney Dangerfield built his reputation on self-deprecating humor. His signature line, “I don’t get no respect,” always made himself the butt of the joke. Trump’s comedy worked in precisely the opposite direction. Throughout his Correspondents’ Dinner speech, he repeatedly boasted that the United States had become “the hottest country” under his presidency. Where Dangerfield invited the audience to laugh at him, Trump invited them to admire him.
Don Rickles built his reputation on razor-sharp insults that were both funny and theatrical. However savage his remarks sounded, audiences understood that everyone—including the target—was part of the act. (One of his famous lines was “Nice to see you… now go home.”) Trump’s jab at Kaitlan Collins—“Kaitlan, do you ever smile? Smile. You have a nice position. You’re at CNN fake news. You should be a happy person. So smile, Kaitlan, just smile.”—lacked both the wit and the theatricality that made Rickles’ insults work.
And finally, Trump told a joke that was met with little or no laughter. The room was largely silent. Trump immediately tried to explain the joke—a sure sign that it had failed.
The joke was: “The other day, a senator I knew got a text, a great guy, from his wife. And she said, ‘When you get home, I wanna have you immediately come up the stairs and make love to me.’ And he said, ‘I can’t do both.’”
Trump then asked the audience: “Does anybody get that one?”
One of the cardinal rules of stand-up is: Never explain a joke.
Youngman got right to the point. Dangerfield’s insecurity was a comic invention. Rickles’ insults were theatrical. Audiences understood that the three men were playing characters. Trump, by contrast, presents no such separation between performer and person. His boasts, grievances and insults are offered not as a comic persona but as authentic expressions of himself. That is why the conventions of Borscht Belt comedy fail him. The audience is never quite sure whether it is being invited to laugh—or simply to agree.
A president can be presidential and humorous at the same time. Barack Obama and his speechwriters nailed it at the April 2011 Dinner, although not in the Borscht Belt spirit. Referring to the “birther” conspiracy questioning whether he had been born in the United States, Obama said: “Now, I know that he’s taken some flak lately, but no one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than The Donald. And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter — like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?” Touché. Told with Rickles-like sting.
The joke was sharp without being personal. It mocked Trump’s conspiracy theories rather than Trump’s appearance or character. Unlike Trump’s own performance fifteen years later, the humor was economical, disciplined, with great timing, and left the audience laughing without requiring explanation.
Why does all this matter in the context of a president speaking and relating to the general public? Telling jokes is the hardest part of public speaking. Being president and being humorous are not simply combined. At the recent Correspondents’ Dinner, Donald Trump bombed as a comic, just as he is failing as a president.
Donald Trump Gives Decline New Meaning
It wasn’t so very long ago that there were three great powers reasonably ascendant on planet Earth. I’m thinking, of course, about the greatest power of that moment, the United States, but also Russia (in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse), and a distinctly rising China. In the future, there may only be one — at the moment, the quietest and least aggressive of them — China.
Let’s start with the obvious: Vladimir Putin’s Russia is on the downhill slope. In February 2022, the Russian leader made the grim mistake of invading Ukraine, a far smaller officially unaligned nation that his country bordered and a seemingly obvious target at a moment when NATO appeared to be spreading its wings in Russia’s direction. (In 2014, of course, Russia had already seized the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine.)
Almost four and a half years later, however, what a disaster it’s proven to be for Putin who, despite taking some Ukrainian territory, still can’t seem to imagine making peace. And all of this at a moment when the spread of artificial intelligence and drones (and the increasing Ukrainian skill in producing ever greater numbers and more devastating versions of them) are changing the very nature of war — and not in Russia’s favor either. Only recently, Ukrainian drones even struck that nation’s capital, Moscow.
By now, though Putin has refused to negotiate a peace, his country has had an estimated 450,000 of its troops killed (more, according to the New York Times, “than U.S. fatalities in all wars combined since World War II”) and perhaps nearly a million more wounded in its war with Ukraine. In addition, significant parts of Russia, including Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and especially the power grid in Crimea, have been clobbered by those Ukrainian drones, which, among other things, have been going after the country’s energy infrastructure.
Someday, it will undoubtedly be all too clear that the invasion of Ukraine was the moment when Russia relegated itself to a distinctly less than great-power status on this planet.
The Rise and Fall of Donald Trump’s America
As for the United States, from the moment in 1945 when it emerged totally victorious from World War II as the only nuclear-armed nation on the planet, in the (all too literal) wake of the atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for endless decades it would be the greatest of all powers ever. And it would, in the end, also prove to be an imperial force unlike any other in history in the fully globalized nature of its power and its alliances across significant parts of the planet from NATO in Europe to SEATO in Southeast Asia. Over the years, it would only emphasize its imperial stature by establishing a staggering 800 or more military bases in countries around much of the planet. And yet strangely enough, from the Korean War in the early 1950s on, it proved incapable of imposing its will militarily on country after country from Korea and Vietnam to Afghanistan, Iraq, and today Iran, despite its staggering military power, the stunning amounts of money it poured into that military, and its powerful weaponization.
Even at this very moment, its military budget remains almost three times that of the next most powerful country on the planet (China) and five times Russia’s. And mind you, that was before President Donald Trump called on Congress to raise the nearly trillion-dollar Pentagon budget by another half-trillion dollars a year (yes, a year!). And yet we’re also talking about the country whose people, as if intent on making a point about how their country had entered an era of decline, did indeed elect Donald Trump (yes, Donald Trump!) twice as president of the — as of now — anything but United States of America.
Can there be any question that he gives the very image of decline new meaning? After all, it’s hard historically to find examples of great powers, even in full-scale decline, putting a figure quite like him in the position of ultimate authority. And it certainly tells you something that, as the New York Times reported recently, the man who “presided over the largest business empire of any president in modern U.S. history” in his first term in office (with revenue of $594 million in 2017 alone) has now left that record in the dust of history by helping his revenue to surge to $2.24 billion in the second year of his second term in office. His financial rise, of course, should also be considered the definition of American imperial decline.
And strikingly enough, every step he takes and every act he engages in seems to involve (or do I mean devolve?) further decline nationally and globally. To put all of that in context, just imagine such an imperial head of state refusing to even acknowledge, no less take into account the fact — and it is a fact — that this planet, thanks to the pouring of fossil fuels into the atmosphere and the stunning nature of the phenomenon known as climate change, is itself going down (at least as a habitable place for humanity) at a reasonably rapid pace. In fact, he’s done everything he can to intensify that phenomenon — and it certainly is intensifying.
Only recently, for instance, literally hundreds of thousands of people in Spain and France had to be evacuated from their homes due to a summer of record-breaking heat and wildfires, while in the United States, the third “heat dome” in a single month only recently hit with temperatures in the desert Southwest expected to reach an unprecedented 120 degrees.
In short, Donald Trump’s America is undoubtedly going to give imperial decline new meaning, while just one major power seems to be on top (so to speak) of the situation in any way whatsoever. And that power is, of course, China.
The Rise and Fall of Planet Earth
Now, just to keep things in perspective, note that no country on earth pours fossil fuels into the atmosphere the way China has in its rise to preeminence on this planet. Still, as what might indeed now be considered the singular rising power on planet Earth, it also seems to be blazing a distinctly new imperial path on a changing planet. As a start, with the exception of some skirmishes with India in 2020 and 2021, it has so far proven historically unique among imperial powers in not going to war during its rise (not even as yet trying to take Taiwan, despite its repeated claims to that island). And wars in our age are distinctly dangerous not just for all the obvious reasons but for the way they pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Admittedly, in that same rise, while China has indeed put more fossil fuels into the atmosphere than any other country (35% of the global total in 2023 alone), it has also finally begun leveling off its use of fossil fuels, while taking control of the global production and sale of green energy equipment in a remarkable fashion. As of this moment, in fact, it produces the vast majority of all the solar panels, batteries, and wind turbine equipment on this planet and has led the way in a nearly monopolistic fashion in the production and sale of electric vehicles globally, accounting for more than 70% of them.
And in a world that itself is changing in a striking fashion (and at a remarkable speed), China has risen to a kind of quiet global preeminence in a uniquely peaceable fashion (if you leave aside how it has treated some of its ethnic minorities) by becoming economically and climatically, not militarily, a one-of-a-kind country. And that should be considered no small thing on a planet where any kind of military activity pours greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in a genuinely unnerving fashion.
With wars from Ukraine to the Middle East to Africa still raging and putting ever more fossil fuels into the atmosphere, however, it remains a distinctly open question whether humanity can stop itself from essentially making full-scale war on Planet Earth and so, in a deeply unnerving fashion, on ourselves. If we can’t, then count on this: the rise and fall of great powers could indeed be superseded by the distinct fall of this very world of ours in a fashion and ways that we probably can’t yet truly imagine.
This piece first appeared on Tom’s Substack.
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