Mr. Kamp is the author, most recently, of “Sunny Days: The Children’s Television Revolution That Changed America.”
". . .We need a moratorium on making fun of Mr. Trump.
- For one thing, ridiculing Mr. Trump is no longer an effective tool against him.
- He internalized and weaponized Spy’s tactic of using belittling epithets, propagating such nicknames as “Crooked Hillary,” “Sleepy Joe” and “Cryin’ Chuck Schumer.”
- He pulled a similar trick with the term “fake news,” which was popularized by Jon Stewart as a lighthearted description of “The Daily Show.”
- In Mr. Trump’s vindictive mind, “fake news” was reprocessed and deployed to mean media outlets and news coverage that he doesn’t like.
What’s more, in the Spy magazine era, Mr. Trump was just a local nuisance, a braggart presiding over a foundering casino-hotel empire. When he reconstituted himself as an entertainer, starring in “The Apprentice,” he began to pose a danger of a different magnitude.
The media would often dismiss him as just another kooky TV personality, despite his racist assertions that fanned the flames of the anti-Obama birther movement. For years, he benefited from prolonged attention without real scrutiny. People treated him as spectacle and failed to take him seriously, even when he ran for president. . .
I realize I run the risk, in making this case, of looking as if I’m missing the whole point of political humor in a free country. Isn’t laughter what gets us through our darkest hours? Isn’t one of the purposes of satire to shine a light on the folly of the wicked and misguided? . .
We Spy alumni have become accustomed to hearing people say, “If only Spy were around today” and “Please bring back Spy — we need it more than ever.”
But we don’t need a Spy revival.
We need sobriety, probity and focus.
I understand that Mr. Trump is funny, sometimes not even inadvertently. Let’s just hold off on the laughter until he is defeated."
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