The End of the Joke

The laughter stopped years ago. The consequences haven’t.

For years, Donald Trump was treated as a punchline – a blustering reality show host who stumbled into the presidency, mocked for his ego, his rhetoric, and his grasp of facts. Late-night comedians built entire monologues around him. World leaders rolled their eyes. Even many of his own supporters admitted, half-smiling, that he was “a bit of a character.”

The joke ended on January 6, 2021.

What unfolded that day – an armed mob storming the U.S. Capitol, spurred on by a sitting president – revealed what too many had ignored: the laughter had been masking something far more dangerous. Trump wasn’t just an entertainer in over his head. He was, and remains, a man willing to tear down institutions to protect himself.

And now, in his second term, the danger has deepened.

He has ordered troops and the National Guard into several American cities, claiming it was to “restore order.” But it’s hard to miss the political convenience – the deployments came not in response to national emergencies, but to protests against his own administration. Rumours swirl of his readiness to invoke the Insurrection Act, a measure intended for extreme unrest, but which in Trump’s hands could become a tool for domestic suppression.

Meanwhile, his new Attorney General has been tasked with pursuing those who are “disloyal” – a word that no longer seems to mean “corrupt” or “incompetent,” but simply “independent.” The Department of Justice, once the guardian of the rule of law, is being recast as an instrument of presidential vengeance.

The economic front offers no relief. His tariffs are broad, erratic, and economically self-defeating. They are not part of a coherent trade policy but rather another lever of control, a way for Trump to wage political battles under the guise of protecting American jobs.

And then there’s the military. The president has begun dismissing generals he views as disloyal, demanding instead a force “loyal to the commander-in-chief.” But that loyalty, in Trump’s vocabulary, is not to the office – it’s to the man. The American military, built on allegiance to the Constitution, now faces a creeping test of personal obedience.

These are not the actions of a misunderstood populist, nor of a leader trying to correct Washington’s excesses. They are the hallmarks of a president who has learned the one lesson January 6 failed to teach him: that power, once seized, must never again be relinquished.

The United States is now governed by a man who has stopped pretending to care about limits – legal, moral, or institutional. The laughter has stopped, but the danger has grown. What began as absurdity has evolved into authoritarianism, dressed still in the language of patriotism and “law and order.”

Perhaps the most sobering truth is this: democracies rarely collapse overnight. They erode, one institution, one rationalisation, one “temporary measure” at a time. Trump’s America is living that process in real time.

The world once laughed at him. No one is laughing now.

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