President Donald Trump has been testing the idea of running for a third presidential term, which is both the natural next step in the nation’s path to fascism and antithetical to the U.S. Constitution. The government’s behavior is decaying, and the sarcasm and irreverence we’ve allowed from them is actively disconnecting us from the country we could be. It will take the embrace of conviction and earnestness to quell American fascism.

Trump’s irreverence to those around him is now a mainstay on the political stage, and arguably the reason his opponents cannot simply scold him into submission. But while irony is a staple in American media, we must reckon with how we have suffered from allowing people to puppet irreverence from such lucrative positions. To put it succinctly: 

Our president is a fascist and we’re pretending he’s a meme.

We treat Trump the same way we treat a character like Deadpool who can cash in on multi-million dollar movies, directly badgering the audience and deflating the people around him by operating on his own logic, divorced from reality. The problem is, multi-billion dollar franchises and powerful governments shouldn’t get to take a part in irreverence.

Our oversaturation of meta humor and irony for the sake of irony robs us of earnest dialogue and dilutes discourse on the national stage, and both Deadpool and Trump have reached their national peak in a landscape where the main character can operate on a privileged set of rules, and their words are used for little more than trolling others.

Trump’s disconnect from reality has actually been touched on by Saturday Night Live (SNL) in its recent years with cast member James Austin Johnson’s portrayal of the sitting president, who embodies a core aspect of Trump by breaking the fourth wall.

An Easter sketch last year had Johnson hold up Trump’s real ‘USA Bible,’ while a Founding Fathers sketch with Lin Manuel Miranda had the broadway icon frozen in the background while Johnson made notes of the cast’s inability to move while he spoke.

A good amount of the sketches in Johnson’s SNL tenure, even last week’s Easter sketch, have broken the fourth wall as the faux president mocked castmates and weaved himself in and out of the narrative, breaking the generally agreed upon rules of the show by addressing cast members by their real name.

This acknowledgment that Trump, as a character, is allowed to move above and beyond our own values and laws on his own whim calls back very poignantly to his pursuit of power since before 2016. 

His false claims that the first black U.S. president was from Kenya, the Central Park Five were guilty and deserved execution, and that immigrants living in Ohio ate dogs and cats were met with a far different level of discernment because we have been subtly coached for years to never take a fictional character’s words at face value, yet still not impede because we are beholden to the rules all the same.

Be it Trump or Deadpool, the concept of irony and irreverence has taken the place of earnestness in national discourse, preventing any genuine conversations between disagreeing parties. The Atlantic’s Ibram X. Kendi described a similar phenomenon when explaining why critical race theory was near-impossible to discuss with the American right. 

“[Republicans] who dismiss the expositions of critical race theorists and anti-racists in order to define critical race theory and anti-racism, and then attack those definitions, are effectively debating themselves. They have conjured an imagined monster to scare the American people and project themselves as the nation’s defenders from that fictional monster.”

This relationship with irony has not necessarily eroded earnestness, but rather convinced us to choke ourselves when we become earnest. 

When Corey Lewandowski, a former campaign manager for Trump, was confronted during a Fox News panel about a 10-year old girl with Down syndrome being taken from her mother in South Texas, he interrupted with a mocking, “Womp womp”; later clarifying that regardless of the tragedy of the story, the breaking of the country’s immigration law takes precedence over human rights.

And that is what makes our comfort with irony so dangerous: a wink at the camera to assure the audience that what they are feeling shouldn’t be taken to heart. How else could we hear about our own elected government sending 238 men to prison when three quarters of them seem to have no criminal record? The cognitive dissonance required to stomach these policies simply does not allow for true empathy.

Comedian Bo Burnham has much to say about this “winking” at the camera, and even referenced Deadpool’s role as a meta character in his deeply foreboding Netflix project “Inside”, where he records a series of quasi-apocalyptic songs from his own self-quarantine. One song, ‘Funny Feeling,’ encapsulates the surreal societal fears surrounding its mid-2021 release.

“Deadpool’s self-awareness, loving parents, harmless fun. The backlash to the backlash to the thing that’s just begun.”

Burnham elaborated his own discomfort with Deadpool’s showy self-awareness on the A24 podcast “High Anxiety”:

“But like, Deadpool is so deeply troubling to me, because it’s like a billion dollar corporation winking at the audience, and everyone is just totally cool with it. It’s a 200 million dollar movie with a guy being like, ‘Here is the trailer for my stupid movie, watch it you idiots,’ and everyone is like, ‘Yeah, he gets it.’ I’m like, ‘Does he? Does Deadpool get it?’ You know, that makes me look at stuff and go, man, like, irony is—and all that stuff is just toothless.”

Part of Burnham’s attention is on the financial success that Deadpool garners, and how the meaning of any kind of irony or irreverence is suddenly stripped when you acknowledge that Deadpool actor Ryan Reynolds has successfully wielded it to simultaneously downplay his career faux pas and reap massive financial rewards. He will wink at the camera, pretending to be a Bugs Bunny or Charlie Chaplin figure, but this time with his own gin company, wireless mobile company, and football league.

Economic synergy in the place of earnest storytelling is all too similar to our national discourse, and points to a selfish political landscape that is boisterous, cruel, and hollow in every way that matters.

As we merge Deadpool and Trump, everything becomes a sly “wink”, and words hold less and less power. Instead, the accepted irreverence unites audiences and citizens in the unquestioned adoration of a character who knows they are fake and is then therefore, real to us.

It is this unique acceptance of a suggested reality, where we as an audience readily forgo an earnest connection in exchange for being let in on the joke. The problem is, Donald Trump is running out of jokes, and we are rapidly approaching the day when he no longer has to pretend he’s joking.

Liv Lyons has been an editor for the Thunderword since 2023. Their short story blog, “Loser Pulp“, is released twice a month.