The first thing I should state is that, at least in the world-historical sense, Donald Trump is not funny. His first presidential term enabled the far right in the United States and emboldened Israel’s ongoing massacres, before his reckless decision to assassinate Qasem Soleimani nearly provoked a war with Iran. His failure to take COVID-19 seriously killed hundreds of thousands, before his term ended in his refusal to admit electoral defeat and a mob storming the US Capitol.

The trouble is that aspects of these last two disasters were undeniably hilarious: the aghast look on coronavirus response coordinator Dr Deborah Birx’s face when Trump suggested injecting people with bleach to treat COVID-19, and the farce of him being airlifted out of the White House, stricken by the virus after peddling so much nonsense; “January 6,” as horrified liberals call it, gave us an absurd re-creation of the storming of the Winter Palace led by a man dressed like the lead singer of the dreadful ’90s English funk group Jamiroquai.

To admit that Trump is funny isn’t to say that it’s because he “triggers the libs.” His victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016 ushered in the horrors above, even if there was grim amusement in seeing people who’d been planning their White House careers ever since they applied to Harvard realizing they’d lost to “one of the bad children from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” as Chapo Trap House put it. But that’s the locus of Trump being funny: his willingness to smash the political elite’s social norms and desecrate its sacred spaces is consistently hysterical.