When the Joker’s Jokes Don’t Land

AI image generated by Craiyon

“Trump lost the debate because of his performance, or lack thereof,” Republican consultant Dennis Lennox argues. He adds, “That’s what happens when you wing it.”

[Note to self: should we have trademarked “Winging It”™?]

Yet, Trump’s ability to wing it, to give the impression of making things up as he goes along, has long served him well. It has again and again helped to persuade his followers that he was trustworthy and authoritative. How? By conveying that, unlike other pols, he wasn’t reading his handlers’ script. He wasn’t basing his thoughts on a white paper written by some empty-suit, east-coast elite. No, what he offered came straight from the gut, so trust him….

All that simply by going off prompter and free associating. Impromptu because prompter-less.

Handlers and empty suits represent politics at its worst. Trump was the anti-politics politician. He’ll drain the swamp. His base ate it up.

Trump’s authority, then, comes from his listening to his gut, his intuition, his instincts. This has power in part because it resonates with his base’s gut, intuition, and instincts. Not only has he heard his gut, he’s heard the fear and anger roiling in their gut. Provoking their fear and anger in his gut-wrenching accounts of all those scary cat-eating immigrants, Trump gets everyone on the same page, fearing, hating, in a “fight or flight” state. Listening, the improviser’s superpower, is key. And Trump had it.

Or used to.

When Intuition Steers You Wrong

But here’s the thing. Daniel Kahneman told Sam Harris, “It turns out you can have intuitions for bad reasons. All it takes is a thought that comes to your mind automatically and with high confidence, and you’ll think that it’s an intuition, and you’ll trust it. But the correlation between confidence and accuracy is not high.” Intuition is a function of Kahneman’s Fast Thinking/System 1: Hot Cognition. High confidence—charisma—makes it possible. It all starts with listening. But sometimes your listening comes up empty handed. Winging it has persuasive power but its authority may arrive in an empty suit.

How many times have your intuitions proven wrong? Probably about as many times as your spontaneous behaviors have proven disastrous.

In the debate with Kamala Harris, Trump beat drums that had no resonance. He told jokes, as it were, that had no punch line.

No, not everyone, not “all the legal experts,” nor “all the Democrats and Republicans” wanted Roe v. Wade abolished. According to Pew Research Center, sixty-three percent of Americans favor access to abortion. So 63% of his audience felt he wasn't listening to them. Not a way to win a debate.

No, not everyone thinks we should follow the advice of Hungarian strong man Viktor Orbán. True, the willingness to embrace autocracy is increasing worldwide. But according to The McCourtney Institute for Democracy, one in five of adults in Generation Z and Millennials indicate “dictatorship could be good in certain circumstances.” That means 80% don’t favor autocracy. That means that 80% of young voters probably weren’t persuaded by Trump’s appeal to Orbán’s claim that “you need Trump back as president.”

Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary

Cramming vs. Hamming

Frank Bruni in The New York Times points to Kamala’s careful preparation for the debate: “holed up. Hunkered down. Studied. Practiced.” Bruni compares that to Trump’s making it clear that he was “someone nimble enough to wing it, a peacock unmoved and unbound by the conventions that lesser birds obey.” Bruni concludes: “We often dismiss or even degrade all the cramming that candidates do by branding their performances ‘rehearsed,’ as if anything that isn’t spontaneous isn’t sincere. As if real talent requires no tending. As if careful planning is inferior, even antithetical, to true inspiration.”

[Note to self: Yes, we should have trademarked it!]

Bruni points to the truth captured by the Oscar Wilde quote used as my epigraph: “spontaneity is a meticulously prepared art.” When I discovered that quote, I knew it perfectly summed up the key to unlocking the power of improvisation, and the hard work that lay behind it. Its power lay in the impression of spontaneity, not the fact.

For John Harris at Politico, by contrast, “Trump was improvisational to the point of incontinence,” a not so kind reminder of one of Trump’s problems which Marc Rubio called attention to after a 2016 debate.

But the key is that improvisations must be meticulously prepared. There’s nothing wrong with working hard to create that impression. Kerouac worked six years editing his 130-foot scroll, written in 3 weeks. But On the Road was a classic Beat novel because his blue pencil didn’t efface the impression of writing impromptu, that he had followed the Beat adage, “First thought, best thought.” Even after six years of editing, his book helped inspire the disruptions of the 1960s.

Bruni is right when he argues, “Trump seems to think that there’s some ingenious scheme or meaningful valor in improvisation, when there’s really just laziness, arrogance and a likely path to humiliation, which was his richly deserved destination on Tuesday night.”

That’s true of Trump. But Bruni is wrong to leave the impression that this is true of all improvisers. There’s nothing lazy about Louis Armstrong who played gigs 300 nights a year, or the comic geniuses that populate the stages at Second City in Chicago or the Groundlings in Los Angeles. All of them have trained hard and long. They've done the work.

Trump? Not so. For all of his life, he seems not to have done a lick of work.

But, still, the results of hard work must come out looking like the result of the moment. Kamala’s laughs and body language as she listened to Trump’s absurdities made that clear. She may have prepared her many zingers in advance, but they came as if confected in the moment.

Kamala pointed out that at Trump’s rallies, “One thing you will not hear him talk about is you. You will not hear him talk about your needs, your dreams, and your desires. You deserve a president that actually puts you first.” When she said that — obviously preprepared — it was nonetheless conveyed that she listens to our needs, dreams and desires.