If you watched Wednesday night’s episode of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” you likely saw Dave Bautista’s NSFW sketch attacking Donald Trump’s tough guy persona.
Funny as it was, I think the value is far greater than a few hearty laughs.
The Marvel movie stalwart and former World Wrestling Entertainment superstar has endorsed the Harris-Walz campaign, after backing the Biden-Harris campaign in 2020. His latest attack on Trumpian bravado is right on time, given that the MAGA movement has sought to woo male voters using far-right podcasters and juvenile peer pressure.
Charlie Kirk says you’re not a man if you vote for Kamala Harris. Dave Bautista disagrees. I guess the choice is yours, America.
From the only logical setting for such a performance — the center of a boxing ring — and with the sound of rock guitar in the background, Bautista confronted the hypermasculine id head-on:
Fellas, we gotta talk. A lot of men seem to think that Donald Trump is some kind of tough guy. He’s not.
I mean, look at him: He wears more makeup than Dolly Parton. He whines like a baby. And the guy’s afraid of birds.
That last line is a reference to this video, FYI. The segment continues with more jabs that seem sure to get under Trump’s skin.
For instance: “Look at that gut. Like a garbage bag full of buttermilk.” Trump likes to insult other people’s physical attributes and has a disturbing obsession with praising his own body, so I don’t imagine that line going over well with him.
There are also lines about Trump’s Vietnam draft deferment over bone spurs and his admiration for Vladimir Putin. Bautista wraps up by listing things Trump fears — including mockery.
“But mostly, he’s terrified that real, red-blooded American men will find out that he’s a weak, tubby toddler,” the actor says, closing with a flurry of, shall we say, colorful insults, including a reference to Trump’s infamous “Access Hollywood” remark about women.
Check out the clip here:
Watching the sketch, I was reminded of what experts on authoritarianism — such as Ruth Ben-Ghiat — have written about the value of comedy in bringing dictatorial figures down to size. As Ben-Ghiat wrote in August:
Authoritarians do have their own twisted sense of humor. Most of them are sadists, so they enjoy humiliating people, including their sycophantic elite enablers. Benito Mussolini loved to make fun of anti-fascists who had “repented” to reduce their prison sentences; he would read their confession/conversion statements out loud in Parliament, mocking them for having capitulated to him.
Trump behaves similarly, whether he is humiliating his GOP lackeys on television or mocking a disabled reporter. The point is to cultivate cruelty in his followers. Getting them to laugh with him means, at least in that moment, that they are not laughing at him — being ridiculed is the thing strongmen most fear.
It’s not lost on me that, in a few short months, this kind of mockery could be met with punitive punishment if Trump is elected president. After all, as president, he mused about the feds looking into “Saturday Night Live” for mocking him. It’s not far-fetched to think that Trump, after effectively being given broad immunity from conservative Supreme Court justices, would feel more empowered to mete out punishment against his comedic critics.
That’s part of the reason I don’t think we should underrate the value of Bautista’s mockery. Ultimately, it’s going to take more than jokes to stave off a second Trump presidency. But humor can be a powerful way to take Trump’s hypermasculine persona and expose it for what it is: a ploy meant to woo broken men.