Al Franken Faces Donald Trump and the Next Four Years
‘Donald Trump never laughs,” Al Franken said.
This was the senator’s first observation to me on a recent afternoon. It was exactly three weeks from the day the punch line became the president-elect. And Trump’s mysterious absence of laughter had never occurred to me before, even though I’d spoken to him a fair amount and he has lived pretty much nonstop in our faces for 18 months, no end in sight.
Franken, the second-term Democratic senator from Minnesota and, before that, a longtime writer and performer on “Saturday Night Live,” has studied this. He provided commentary for MSNBC at the Al Smith Dinner, the Catholic charity fund-raiser in October where presidential nominees engage in good-natured ribbing of themselves and each other (Trump mostly skipped the “good-natured” part and was booed). “I wanted to see if Trump laughed,” Franken said. “And he didn’t. He smiled, but didn’t laugh. I don’t know what it is.”
I went back and watched video of Trump, not just at the Smith dinner. He is, to say the least, a comic cash cow. No one has provided as much fodder for the political, media and celebrity axis that Franken has operated in for over four decades. But Franken is correct. It is extremely rare to see or hear the president-elect himself laughing. Franken offered no theory on this, just a contrast. “I happen to laugh an incredible amount,” he told me. He has a distinctive and rollicking cackle, which allows his staff to track his whereabouts on the Senate floor. Conan O’Brien, a longtime friend and fellow “S.N.L.” alumnus, told me that Franken’s laugh sounded like “a hydraulic seal” whose rhythmic and almost mechanical force “can clear your sinuses.”
But these were suddenly unfunny days. A shellshocked aura was cast over Capitol Hill, particularly among Democrats. I went to see Franken in his Senate office on a rainy Tuesday as lawmakers were trickling back to town after Thanksgiving. They convened in caucus meetings and hallway quorums that became commiseration sessions. Since Nov. 8, Washington has felt like a fortressed village bracing for a guerrilla invasion.
At 65, Franken retains the thick build of the high-school wrestler he once was. The resting pout of his mouth — the Baby Huey countenance to match his honking voice — has assumed more of a smirk. Franken is not good at masking emotions. He cries easily and can become impatient and never bothered much to disguise his contempt for adversaries, at least until he arrived in the Senate, whose hidebound traditions of decorum demanded at least an honest effort. Franken has been mostly successful at this, and has been strenuous in his attempts to leave his comic past behind, though he was once busted for making dismissive faces and hand gestures behind Mitch McConnell as the Republican leader gave a floor speech in 2010. “This isn’t ‘Saturday Night Live,’ Al,” McConnell said, admonishing Franken, who later wrote a note of apology.
Unlike comedy, politics has traditionally drawn clear lines of what’s allowed, what requires contrition and what ends careers. But then Trump came along and pretty much vandalized every bright line and was rewarded with the American presidency. Trump’s ascent has also posed a quandary to political humor in general. At first, the notion of him in the White House felt purely theoretical — and funny. President Obama’s withering roast of Trump at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner might have been the most memorable comedic turn of his presidency, and certainly the most foreboding (Trump, then considering a presidential run, “would bring change to the White House,” Obama taunted him as he introduced an image of the White House rebranded as the Trump White House Resort and Casino).
One thing that made it safe to laugh was the ridiculousness of the conceit. People assumed that the normal checks and balances would kick in and never allow someone like Trump to be elected — the disapproval of the “establishment,” the outrage capacity of the electorate or even a candidate’s own code of ethics or ability to be shamed. Back in the spring of 2015, when few believed that Trump was serious or would mount a real campaign, comedians reacted to his entry into the race with ostentatious gratitude: Jon Stewart, whose final six weeks on Comedy Central coincided with the first stage of the campaign, thanked Trump for “putting me in some kind of comedy hospice.”
As Trump bloated into the campaign’s inescapable parade float, his supposed comic abundance became more of a crisis. Every stopgap failed in 2015 and 2016. So did every pundit assumption, and even the long-understood barriers between, say, real and fake news. Where does comedy even fit when the outrageous becomes the default? By October, the executive producer of HBO’s “Veep,” David Mandel, was complaining to The Los Angeles Times that Trump was “ruining comedy.” By December, it was revealed that Trump would remain the executive producer of “The Celebrity Apprentice,” and the fusion between reality TV and the sobering reality of the presidency seemed complete. Political humor has faced similar moments in the past, but never such a reckoning. “People on ‘S.N.L.’ actually were saying eight years ago when Sarah Palin was running, We couldn’t have written this ourselves,” said Robert Smigel, a longtime writer for the show and friend of Franken’s who is best known as the voice behind the foul-mouthed puppet Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog.
Franken’s body of work has been oddly prescient. He was the subject of a 2006 documentary, “God Spoke,” which chronicled his journey to the Senate. A.O. Scott of The New York Times described it as “an investigation of the phenomenon of ideological celebrity, with Mr. Franken as a willing case study.” You could make the case that Trump himself might represent something of a next-phase case study himself — a nominally ideological celebrity that has grown into a political phenomenon.
More remarkable, Franken wrote a satirical novel called “Why Not Me?” which details his own fictitious celebrity run for president. His character is corrupt, clueless and unprepared, but a confluence of unlikely factors — and Franken’s wildly popular vow to eliminate A.T.M. fees — somehow propels him to the White House, where things quickly go off the rails. President Franken loses his mind (punching Nelson Mandela in the stomach during a meeting!). He is the subject of a special congressional inquiry — the Joint Committee on the President’s Mood Swings — and is forced to resign after five months. Franken published “Why Not Me?” in 1999.
Now, in his Senate office, Franken kept shaking his head. He seemed to be choosing his words carefully, trying to toe the opposition party line about Trump, in so much as there is one: “Where there are places we agree, I will try to work with this administration.” But his despair was obvious. “He’s very different,” Franken said of Trump. “And that’s as far as I’ll go in my conjecture of who he is.” He chortled. “That’s become kind of a cottage industry.” Psychoanalyzing Trump, he meant. I reminded Franken that he was qualified, having presented himself at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia last summer as “a world-renowned expert on right-wing megalomaniacs.” He had received “a doctorate in megalomaniac studies from Trump University.” That was a few days after Trump accepted the Republican nomination, a remarkable development that — if you listened to the dismissive speeches and constant mockery across the spectrum of smug progressives and Never Trump conservatives — still felt at a safe remove.
I was curious whether Trump’s election would herald a change in Franken’s approach. He was always fierce in what he describes as “the heaping of scorn and ridicule,” first on “S.N.L.” and later as a liberal talk-radio host and author of political commentary with titles like “Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot (And Other Observations).” He heaped abundant scorn and ridicule upon George W. Bush but was not in the Senate at the time. “I think this can be a moment that calls out for Al’s voice,” said Ben Wikler, the head of the Washington office of MoveOn.org and producer of Franken’s show on the defunct progressive radio network Air America. Wikler, who helped Franken write his 2003 book, “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right,” said there is a great need for “fearless opposition fighters that can cut through the noise.” Franken has established himself as a legislator, he said, and it might be time for him to return to his insurgent comic roots. “Part of Al’s earlier approach to public life was swashbuckling and baiting antagonists into fights they could not win,” Wikler told me. “Humor can be a way of blasting through fear and anxiety and giving people backbone.”
I asked Franken about this. He nodded as if it had occurred to him but was otherwise noncommital. “We’ll see how he operates,” he said of Trump. “I don’t think anyone here has ever been a senator with this kind of person in the White House. This one is very different.” He coughed out a nervous laugh. “We’ll see how he evolves. And we’ll see how I evolve.”
You sometimes hear the expression “famous for Washington.” It describes someone well known within the staid and dorky confines of the Beltway. Someone like Senator Orrin Hatch, say, or maybe the election superlawyer Ben Ginsberg. It is a somewhat backhanded designation, which is not to say Washington does not love celebrities (to wit, the metastatic growth of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in recent years). Occasionally, celebrities from other realms cross over into politics. The Hall of Fame wide receiver for the Seattle Seahawks, Steve Largent, was in Congress for a while, as was the guy who played Gopher on “The Love Boat” (Fred Grandy). Franken followed in this tradition and is unquestionably the only person ever to both serve on the Senate Judiciary Committee and play a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee — Paul Simon of Illinois — in a “Saturday Night Live” skit.
Now comes probably the best-known celebrity ever to enter American politics — Trump — who cannonballed in at the highest level. His election made a case that celebrity itself may today be the most potent driver of American populism. Franken understands better than most the power of fame as a way to gain a political audience and scramble ideological paradigms. “One thing I’ve learned,” Franken told me, “is that celebrity trumps ideology. I have spent a lot of time over the years heaping scorn and ridicule upon Republicans. But then you meet them, and a lot of people are like, Hey, Al, love that satellite mobile-uplink guy” — one of his signature “S.N.L.” characters, a “Weekend Update” correspondent from the early 1990s who reported back to the studio via a “totally self-contained one-man mobile-uplink unit” (with a 1.3-meter parabolic antenna attached to his head).
Two weekends before Election Day, Franken went to Philadelphia to appear at get-out-the-vote events on behalf of Hillary Clinton and local Democrats. “You all have jobs and kids,” Franken would say to rooms full of volunteers. “Ignore them.” The rooms would erupt in laughter. “Kids love being left alone. Eight-year-olds are perfectly capable of operating microwave ovens.” These are Franken’s stock lines at such events. They always land. “Thank you for keeping your sense of humor through all of this,” one volunteer, Liz Martinez, told Franken after he spoke. Franken cocked his right eyebrow, John Belushi-style. “Who says I’m keeping my sense of humor?” he said.
Franken fell asleep at 2 a.m. on the night of the election and woke up with a migraine. For days, it was hard to think about anything besides Trump in the White House. “There was a week or so when sleeping literally was a great thing,” Franken said. “You go through a process of internalizing it.” In addition to the political shock, there was a broader despair over the cultural disconnect that the election laid bare. I kept thinking of an Onion headline that ran a few weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks: “A Shattered Nation Longs to Care About Stupid [Expletive] Again.” How long does it take a culture to forge a new sensibility, whether comedic or political? Franken seemed to be struggling with this a bit. There was similar confusion in the various liberal bubbles of Washington, New York and Hollywood, whose inhabitants were the supposed keepers of the American zeitgeist — the geniuses who so spectacularly dismissed the zeitgeist that elected Donald Trump.
“I really believe nobody knows anything right now,” Conan O’Brien told me over the phone from Los Angeles. O’Brien is among the less political TV comedians, particularly on cable (his show has run since 2010 on TBS). But Trump is an inescapable topic. “I really think the whole mantra that everyone must have, not just in this medium but in the world in general, is that no one knows anything.” O’Brien recalled that after Sept. 11, people were declaring the death of irony. It was not. There was like a three-week pause. But then irony regenerated itself in some altered, post-Sept. 11 form. Trump’s victory has landed a blow to the country’s notions of certainty. “I would say we’re not seeing the death of certainty,” O’Brien said. “But certainty has taken a holiday right now.” Plenty of certainty, now discarded, was generated in 2016. Our cozy silos of belief and customized group assumptions gave us our most brutal campaign in years. “Everyone has their own street corner,” O’Brien said.
‘I think this can be a moment that calls out for Al’s voice.’
While “Saturday Night Live” was always subversive and groundbreaking, it was also conceived before cable and the internet rewarded niche sensibilities. As a network show, it needed to reach a critical mass of the American middle. “We’ve actually tried to make ‘S.N.L.’ a safe space across the political spectrum,” Lorne Michaels, its creator, told me in his office near the “S.N.L.” studio on the 17th floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. It has never been a production that preaches to a choir, as contrasted with cable comedy shows hosted by the left-leaning likes of Jon Stewart, Samantha Bee and John Oliver. “Jon Stewart was giving voice to visions and ideas and doing it brilliantly, but in a way that almost everyone watching agreed with,” Michaels said with a bit of an edge. “It was 100 percent pure.”
The election was still a few weeks away, and our discussion — like most discussions during that stretch of ancient history — was predicated on the assumption that Clinton would win. Michaels caught some heat for inviting Trump to host the show in October 2015; critics accused him of helping to celebrate and “normalize” someone they viewed as a monster. But the fact that Trump would eventually wage a Twitter assault against “S.N.L.” — particularly over Alec Baldwin’s portrayal of him as a menacing, bumbling imbecile — would itself suggest that the show struck the right balance. “Trump is the head writer of this whole thing,” Baldwin told me. “They could come up with something for us to do every week.” Baldwin, who said he had no Trump impersonation until he debuted the character on “S.N.L.” on Oct. 1, said he takes no special satisfaction in angering the president-elect, whom he calls “the first modern-day president who does not have thick skin.” He said that he, too, has been blamed by some people for making Trump appear more palatable than he is. “It’s kind of a Rorschach test,” Baldwin said, “for how people see the political world in general.”
Clinton’s cameo, playing Val the bartender consoling the distraught Kate McKinnon version of her, was arguably her most endearing moment in an otherwise dreary slog. By the time of the Trump and Clinton debates, the lines between parody and self-parody had blurred to a grainy haze; it was difficult to watch the candidates for two seconds without my mind jumping immediately to Baldwin and McKinnon.
Franken, who joined “S.N.L.” at its inception in 1975, never achieved the star status of the show’s first wave — John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner and Chevy Chase. “Al was relentless about being a performer,” Michaels said. Franken’s best-known creation at “S.N.L.” was probably Stuart Smalley, the mirror-staring host of the mock self-help show “Daily Affirmation With Stuart Smalley.” Smalley, who was also the subject of a movie, was inspired by Franken’s experience going through a 12-step recovery program with his wife, Franni, who battled alcoholism. “I was trying to explain recovery though a character,” Franken said. “He is a character that, at first blush, looks like kind of an idiot, but actually a lot of the stuff he’s trying to talk about is true.” There is, Franken said, a larger lesson embedded here. “I’m trying to express that you can learn things from people who you think aren’t smarter than you,” he said. “I’m embarrassed by how late in life I learned that.”
Franken left “Saturday Night Live” in 1995 and settled into a successful next act as a liberal satirist, author and radio host. He had no plan to seek any office. But then his friend and political idol, Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, was killed in a plane crash along with seven others — including his wife and daughter — on the eve of his re-election campaign in 2002. “It was just this shattering thing,” said Norman Ornstein, an author and congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a close friend of Franken’s who grew up in the same hometown, St. Louis Park, Minn.
The Republican candidate, Norm Coleman, wound up defeating Walter Mondale, who replaced Wellstone on the ballot. Franken started thinking about running against Coleman, especially after Coleman said in an interview with Roll Call after a few months in office that he was a “99 percent improvement over Paul Wellstone.”
Franken knew that running for Senate would uproot his life. Not only would he have to move back to Minnesota, but he would have to work brutally hard. “This was not someone who saw this as, Oh, I’ve been an entertainer, and now as a dilettante I’m going to run for office,” Ornstein said. Franken wound up defeating Coleman by 312 votes after months of recounts and court challenges. When he joined the Senate in 2009, Franken was determined to shed any hint that he was anything but a humble newcomer. He resisted national news coverage and tried for the most part to subvert his funnyman impulses to the solemn duties of his new role.
O’Brien said it was strange to watch Franken, such an instinctively funny person, “choose not to use one of his superpowers.” It took getting used to. “We had some serious conversations,” O’Brien said. “But clearly he was witnessing, every day in the Senate and in the government, the most absurd things. And he would have to control himself.” O’Brien said Franken told him that one of his aides gave him some advice early on: “Whenever you have an instinct to do something, just don’t do that.”
Franken’s rejection of type became his defining characteristic, at least in the Washington shorthand. The news media dutifully ground his determined seriousness into a cliché. Every publication that wrote about Franken seemed compelled to deploy some version of “No Joke” in its headlines. He keeps a framed collage in his office made up of a couple of dozen such examples (including a “Franken’s Campaign Against Comcast Is No Joke”headline from The New York Times).
Still, colleagues from both parties would seek Franken’s help in workshopping jokes for their speeches. Senator Amy Klobuchar, Franken’s close friend and fellow Democrat from Minnesota, was preparing a comedy act at the expense of Senator Ted Cruz for Washington’s annual Gridiron Dinner in 2013. This was around the time a Carnival Cruise ship ran aground in the Gulf of Mexico amid a four-day accumulation of human waste. That debacle inspired the following: In Washington, Klobuchar said, “when Democrats hear about a difficult cruise, we don’t know if it’s Carnival or Ted.” That was funny, kind of. Klobuchar ran the joke by Cruz beforehand on the Senate floor as a matter of collegial courtesy. Franken approached the pair and asked Klobuchar to repeat the joke, which she did. “Without missing a beat,” Klobuchar recalled, Franken offered this improvement: In Washington, went the Franken version, “when you hear about a cruise that’s full of [expletive], you don’t know if it’s Carnival or Ted.” That was funnier, Klobuchar conceded, though she opted for the tamer original.
Franken won re-election by more than 10 percentage points in 2014, a year in which several Democratic incumbents were defeated. He said he has felt more freedom in the Senate since his re-election. “I think the people of Minnesota get that I came here to be their senator and do the work and legislate,” he told me. I asked Franken, a longtime New Yorker until he moved back to Minnesota to run for Senate, whether he had met Donald Trump. They were in the same room on many occasions, in the way that famous New Yorkers often are. But their only interaction came at a screening of “The Sopranos” at Radio City Music Hall. Franken recognized Trump in front of him and was moved to yell out, “THAT IS THE WORST COMBOVER I HAVE EVER SEEN!” Trump spun around and saw it was Franken. He didn’t say anything, Franken said, but “sort of gave that look that said, Oh, that’s a comedian, O.K., I get it.” I asked Franken if he would have done the same if he were in elected office at the time. “Probably not,” he admitted.
Franken is fully aware that even the most thrown-off or nominally irreverent quip can become toxic after being put through what Franken calls the “de-humorizer” of partisan America. I witnessed this firsthand, and even participated, when I joined Franken in late August at the Minnesota State Fair in St. Paul. As Franken made his rounds — pouring glasses of milk at a dairy stand, eating a pork chop on a stick — he paused for a minute to receive a distraught call from his son, Joe. Joe relayed the news that Teddy Bridgewater, the young quarterback for the Minnesota Vikings, had just suffered a gruesome injury to his knee at practice that afternoon. “No!” said Franken, a lifelong Vikings fan. “This is so depressing,” he muttered after hanging up. “It’s like finding out Hillary’s having an affair with Anthony Weiner.”
‘One thing I’ve learned is that celebrity trumps ideology.’
Franken blurted this out with such matter-of-fact exasperation, which I happened to find hilarious. Later, I did something I probably should not have and shared Franken’s quip via Twitter, itself a kind of de-humorizer. This spelled trouble for the home-team senator. Audience reaction ran heavily against the remark, especially from Vikings fans (there are a few of these in Minnesota) and Franken nonfans (“Frankenstein is a liberal pinhead”). Franken wasted little time grabbing the cleanup mop. “Pretty insensitive and stupid of me,” he tweeted. “Regret it and sincerely apologize.”
The day before the presidential election, Trump dropped in for a quick rally in a hangar at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. He railed against the “disaster taking place in Minnesota,” with “large numbers of Somali refugees coming into your state, without your knowledge, without your support or approval.” He drew raucous applause and came within just 1.5 points of beating Clinton in the historically blue state. “You’ve suffered enough in Minnesota,” Trump said.
Franken was furious about Trump’s remarks. He had worked closely with the Somali communities of Minnesota and had made many friendships. A young Somali-American woman, Muna Abdulahi, whose family immigrated to Minnesota, went to work as a page in Franken’s office. He wound up speaking at her high school graduation in Willmar, Minn., last spring and ran into her on Election Day on the campus of the University of Minnesota, where she is now a freshman. She told him that her younger sister, Anisa, had just been named homecoming queen back in Willmar.
In the weeks after Trump was elected, Franken was asked to speak at a middle school in St. Paul that has a big population of Somali students. The students were terrified about the election. Tensions had run high after a September incident in St. Cloud in which a knife-wielding Somali man wounded 10 people in an attack at a mall (an off-duty police officer shot and killed him). A spate of harassment targeting Somalis ensued. “So I went to the school, and I talked to the kids,” Franken told me, “and I said: You’re Americans. You’re Americans.” Franken told me about a conversation he had in his office on Nov. 17 with a French diplomat. Franken asked the diplomat who could be considered a “Frenchman” in France. The diplomat explained that the designation was usually reserved for someone whose family went back a few hundred years in the same village. In other words, new arrivals are not “Frenchmen.”
“But in the United States, we make them homecoming queen,” Franken said with a catch of emotion. “Goddamn, it made me mad,” he said again, referring to Trump’s airport rally. “It’s literally sad, you know, that kind of thing.”
Before he entered the Senate, Franken was always more of satirist than a Henny Youngman jokester type. “You take a reality, and you exaggerate, and you show how ridiculous it is,” Ornstein told me. Take, for example, this scenario — a celebrity runs for president and does a bunch of bizarre and seemingly beyond-the-pale stuff, like boasting about the size of his penis on the debate stage, and winds up in the White House. “You look at a situation, you analyze it, and you see the weak points where you make something funny out of it,” Ornstein said. But what if no one notices the difference between the fact and the fiction, much less cares to recognize the absurdity of the details? What’s the use of satire, or straight-out ridicule, if your target can’t even be bothered to care?
“There are a lot of ironies in this election,” Franken said, folding himself into a crooked angle on his office couch. Franken kept pointing out ironies. There are different kinds of ironies. There are funny ones, like what you read in The Onion, or cruel ones that leave you bewildered. These seemed more like the cruel ones. He mentioned Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that he saw thousands of Muslims somewhere in New Jersey cheering after the Sept. 11 attacks and his contention that the Clintons were behind the Obama “birther” conspiracy. “He’d say several things a day that would end anyone else’s race,” Franken said. The day before, the president-elect had tweeted with no evidence that millions of fraudulent votes were cast against him.
After the election, the Oxford Dictionaries named “post-truth” as its word of the year for 2016 (defining it as a state “in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”). “The big irony is that I made some of my living by writing books about people who lied,” Franken told me, naming Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and others. “It just seems adorable now that I could make a living doing that, fighting misstatements of fact. And people were like, Oh, that’s terrible, I can’t believe it. And now it just doesn’t matter.” He laughed, as Franken does, but with no sign of joy. This felt too visceral to be called humor, as if we were moving on to something else entirely.
P.C: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/magazine/al-franken-faces-donald-trump-and-the-next-four-years.html
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