Make those birds stop laughing at me

Send President Trump abroad to rub shoulders with a bunch of foreigners, and chances are somewhere around 100 percent that he'll come back thinking about whether anyone is laughing at us. "Russian officials must be laughing at the U.S. & how a lame excuse for why the Dems lost the election has taken over the Fake News," the president tweeted on Tuesday morning.

If you've been paying any attention at all over the last couple of years, you know this is a topic he returns to again and again. Search Trump's Twitter feed and you'll find that who's laughing at whom is an obsession for him, with the United States usually the target of the laughter. "The world is laughing at us." China is "laughing at USA!" Iran is "laughing at Kerry & Obama!" "ISIS & all others laughing!" "Mexican leadership has been laughing at us for many years." "Everybody is laughing at Jeb Bush." "Putin is laughing at Obama." "OPEC is laughing at how stupid we are." "Dopey, nobody is laughing at me!" I could go on (and on, and on), but I'll spare you.

This is nothing new for Trump; he's been talking about us being laughed at for his entire career in public life. In his first major foray into politics in 1987, he spent nearly $100,000 to buy full-page ads in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, lamenting the fact that America helped defend countries like Japan without getting enough in return (sound familiar?). The last line of the ad was, "Let's not let our great country be laughed at anymore."


It is Trump's gift to future biographers that he makes so little attempt to hide his psychological issues, but the desire to avoid being laughed at truly stands out. Perhaps there was some childhood trauma that led to this obsession, a schoolyard incident in which a bully pulled down Donny's short pants to the guffaws of the other tots (particularly the girls!). It would be only fitting if Trump, the world's foremost avatar of anxious masculinity, lived in terror of women's laughter, but he seems concerned with everyone's laughter, whether it comes from people or governments. As much as he cares about winning and getting the better of someone, defeat is marked by the ultimate humiliation of being laughed at.

Yet ironically, no president in history has ever been laughed at as much as Trump. Long before he ran for the White House he was considered a cretinous buffoon, one of the world's least serious people trying to convince everyone how serious he is. Even Trump's cartoonish hair, which looks like what you'd get if you put three separate comb-overs into the Large Hadron Collider and smashed them together at the speed of light, seems to be in large part an effort to avoid being laughed at for being bald.