Erin Schaff/The New York Times/AP; Anthony Behar/Sipa/AP
“You can tell a lot by a laugh,” Donald Trump told supporters the other day, reviving a weird and arguably very sexist right-wing criticism of his new White House rival, Kamala Harris. “I call her Laughing Kamala. You ever watch her laugh?… She’s crazy. She’s nuts.”
Trump then proceeded to call Nancy Pelosi crazy, saying that “she turned on [Biden] like a dog.”
Like a dog.
But this is not a story about Trump’s deployment of specific types of insults against women (he bullies men, too), such as when he called Hillary Clinton “shrill.”
This is a story about laughter.
Shortly after Trump made his comments, his stalwart pal, the Fox News host Sean Hannity, piled on, saying on his show that voters “seem to detest” Harris on account of her readiness to laugh—or maybe because of the way she laughs? It’s hard to tell. But Hannity clearly aims to convince his viewers to detest Harris, if they don’t already.
Hearing Trump and his cronies insult Harris’ hearty chuckle—which his campaign also impugns in this anti-Biden ad—got me thinking about how I had never, ever heard Trump laugh.
It turns out I wasn’t the first journalist to have that thought. Several media colleagues have made this observation in the past, but if Trump wants to weaponize his opponent’s noteworthy laugh, we should probably talk about that. And Trump’s lack of one.
Suppose we take Trump’s statement at face value: You can tell a lot about a person from their laugh. Well, I’m just one guy, but to me Harris’ chortle suggests she’s a fun-loving individual. Is that such a terrible leadership trait?
Laughter is pretty much universally seen as positive. Indeed, the list of prominent people who have spoken and written of the value of laughter is long. It includes Catherine the Great, Charlie Chaplin, Charles Dickens, Robert Frost, Kahlil Gibran, Martin Luther King Jr., William Shakespeare, Gloria Steinem, Virginia Wolfe, and on and on. Perhaps more relatable to Trump would be Andrew Carnegie, who is credited as saying: “There is little success where there is little laughter.”
Less relatable for him, perhaps, would be this quote from W.E.B. DuBois: “I am especially glad of the divine gift of laughter: it has made the world human and lovable, despite all its pain and wrong.”
“It stayed with me, that I’ve never seen him laugh. Not in public, not in private…,” James Comey said. “I never saw anything that resembled a laugh.”
What does it mean when one lacks this gift? I emailed Bandy X. Lee, an outspoken psychiatrist Mother Jones profiled in 2022 whose new book is titled, The Psychology of Trump Contagion: An Existential Threat to American Democracy and All Humankind, to get her take.
Trump’s “rigidity and lack of flexibility, deriving from a state of pathology, appear to underlie his lack of humor more than anything else,” Lee replied. “In other words, it is not just a difference in style but a defect. This may belie his ‘entertaining’ persona, through which he makes others laugh, but this is the ‘charming’ façade of a dangerous personality with predatory intent, not someone with true leisure of mind who can laugh at reality.”
Trump’s estranged niece, the psychologist Mary Trump—whose 2020 family memoir, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, was a huge best-seller—also touched on the subject of Donald’s mirthlessness in a Slate interview with journalist Virginia Heffernan. When Heffernan asked Mary whether she thought her Uncle Donald was happy, she replied:
There’s no way he could be happy because the myths that have been created about him and that he’s perpetuated and believes about himself are always in constant danger of disintegrating. On some deep level, he knows that. He’s very much always living in the moment. So how can you be happy?
And how can you be happy if you don’t laugh or appreciate humor? What that says to me, because my grandfather also didn’t laugh, is that laughing is to make yourself vulnerable, it’s to let down your guard in some way, it’s to lose a little bit of control. And that can’t happen. That is not allowed to happen.
And here’s another quote, from the acclaimed author Maya Angelou. “Don’t trust people who don’t laugh,” she once told a crowd at the University of Buffalo in New York, adding, “I don’t.”
In a 2018 interview with ABC News host George Stephanopoulos, the former FBI Director James Comey reflected on this unusual trait of his former boss, Donald Trump, who seems to enjoy making supporters crack up, but rarely does so himself. “I was struck by it. So struck by it, it stayed with me, that I’ve never seen him laugh. Not in public, not in private…,” Comey said. “I never saw anything that resembled a laugh.”
After Trump fired Comey, that thought stuck with him, he said, “So I went and tried to find examples of videos where he’s laughing and I could only find [what] really wasn’t a genuine laugh.“
I looked around, too. Donald Trump is among the most filmed and scrutinized people on the planet, so if he laughed a lot we would know about it. But he really seldom does, publicly anyway. I could find only a small number of clips, and in most of them he only sort of laughs, or laughs briefly. There are even fewer in which his laughter seems genuine—such as this one, wherein Jimmy Fallon roasts Trump pretty hilariously, and who wouldn’t crack up in that situation?
But what seems to prompt the lion’s share of his scant public laughs should give voters pause. I’m all for inappropriate levity, but it’s problematic when so much of a powerful man’s laughter involves mocking people or laughing at someone else’s misfortunes. In this clip, he laughs when a rallygoer yells out that we should shoot migrants coming across the southern border.
I cannot vouch for the veracity of this next clip, but Trump seems to get a good laugh at an impersonator mocking President Joe Biden over his rally sound system.
In this one he appears to laugh at his supporters chanting—not of Hillary Clinton, but of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who had severe cognitive impairments—”Lock her up!”
And here is perhaps his most genuine laugh of all, a clip that takes us back to where we started: a powerful woman being equated to a dog.
But as Kat Abughazaleh, our video essayist, pointed out recently, the right doesn’t yet seem to have come up with a better line of attack on Harris than “she laughs too much.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story listed Maya Angelou as 86 years old. Angelou died at age 86, in 2014.
