Teaching Satire in the Age of Trump

When Jonathan Swift published "A Modest Proposal" in 1729, his narrator proclaimed that the solution to ending the widespread famine and poverty in Ireland was for destitute Irish parents to sell their children to wealthy landlords in England, declaring that "a young healthy child well nursed is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled [. . .]". The outrageousness of Swift's proposal was meant to shock his readers and call attention to the callous indifference of those "persons of quality or fortune" who were responsible—either directly or indirectly—for "the deplorable state of the kingdom."

Swift's essay is an example of Juvenalian satire, named after the poet who condemned the materialism, corruption, and decadence of the first century Roman aristocracy. The primary characteristic of Juvenalian satire is moral indignation, where authors use scathing wit, irony, and exaggeration to ridicule those in power and "expose absurdity and hypocrisy, intolerance and greed and hate—all of the awful things about the world," according to Cole Bolton, editor-in-chief of the satirical news publication The Onion. The ultimate goal is not just to entertain readers, but to raise awareness and promote reform in individuals, institutions, and society at large.

The efficacy of satire, however, is dependent upon a common understanding that certain attitudes, values, and behaviors are unacceptable within civilized society and that violations of those core principles—if exposed—would bring shame and embarrassment. When Swift opens his essay with his narrator describing the "melancholy" sight of poor mothers and children on the streets of Dublin dressed "all in rags, and importuning every passenger for an alms," the reader is meant to feel instant compassion for their suffering and degradation. The narrator seems to share our sympathies, and we assume his genuine concern for the need to discover "a fair, cheap and easy method of making these children sound and useful members of the commonwealth."

It is only when the narrator reveals his gruesome proposal, however, that the reader becomes aware of Swift's satiric intent. The target of Swift's vitriol is clear: those wealthy, absentee English landlords who came to own 86% of Irish land after the increasingly strict "Penal Laws" of the 17th century stripped Roman Catholics of their property and voting rights if they refused to convert to Protestantism. Swift is not subtle in his attack, claiming that these landlords, "who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children." Swift uses satire to effectively equate the economic exploitation of the Irish to a form of cannibalism.

Molly Ivins, the late satirist and co-editor of the Texas Observer, claimed that satire is "traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful." When conservative commentator-turned-presidential candidate Pat Buchanan spoke at the Republican National Convention in 1992, he declared that “there is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war [. . .] for the soul of America." After Buchanan attacked progressive causes such as multiculturalism, "radical feminism," and the "homosexual rights movement," Ivins quipped that his speech “probably sounded better in the original German,” a not-so-subtle jab linking Buchanan's hard-right positions to Hitler's ambition to create an ethnically-pure Aryan state.

Ivins' satire was effective because there were still shared societal norms on which most Americans agreed in 1992—namely, a revulsion towards Hitler's racist, genocidal agenda. But what role can satire play when we have a president in Donald Trump who openly embraces Hitler's rhetoric, declaring in his 2023 campaign that immigrants were "poisoning the blood of our country" and that if he were re-elected, he would immediately "root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country"? Whereas Ivins could shame Buchanan and his followers by making a veiled allusion to Hitler, Trump intentionally and defiantly used language on the campaign trail that Yale professor Jason Stanley called "textbook Mein Kampf"—and still won the election with more than 77 million votes.

When Swift's narrator refers to Irish women as "breeders," we are meant to be horrified by his comparison of human beings to livestock. But Trump has no qualms dehumanizing immigrants from Central America, declaring that we should consider them less than human:

The Democrats say, ‘Please don’t call them animals. They’re humans.’ I said,

‘No, they’re not humans, they’re not humans, they’re animals’ [. . .] Nancy Pelosi

told me that. She said, ‘Please don’t use the word animals when you’re talking

about these people.’ I said, ‘I’ll use the word animal because that’s what they are.’

Once Trump began his mass deportation program after re-election, he stated that the United States would no longer accept immigrants from "shithole countries" like Haiti and Somalia:

Why is it we only take people from shithole countries, right? Why can’t we have

some people from Norway, Sweden—just a few—let us have a few. From Denmark—

do you mind sending us a few people? Send us some nice people, do you mind? But

we always take people from Somalia. Places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty,

disgusting, ridden with crime.

There was a time in America when Trump's overtly racist bile would have meant political suicide. In a 2024 article in The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum noted that even notorious segregationists like George Wallace—the former Alabama governor who infamously declared in his 1963 inaugural address, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever!"—refrained from publicly using the kind of racist language that Trump has employed over the past decade. Applebaum wrote that there is only one goal of political figures when they intentionally dehumanize others:

If you connect your opponents with disease, illness, and poisoned blood, if you

dehumanize them as insects or animals, if you speak of squashing them or cleansing

them as if they were pests or bacteria, then you can much more easily arrest them,

deprive them of rights, exclude them, or even kill them. If they are parasites, they

aren’t human. If they are vermin, they don’t get to enjoy freedom of speech, or

freedoms of any kind. And if you squash them, you won’t be held accountable.

When our students read Julie Otsuka's When the Emperor Was Divine, a novel about Japanese Americans labeled as "enemy aliens" in Executive Order 9066 after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, we discuss the emotional and psychological impact of people who have been outcast in their own country. During World War II, more than 120,000 Japanese Americans—two-thirds of whom were naturalized American citizens—were forcibly moved into internment camps for more than three years, a traumatic experience that profoundly changes how the characters in Otsuka's novel view themselves and the country they consider home.

At the beginning of every course, we analyze a poem related in theme to the major work, and for Otsuka's novel we read Harryette Mullen's satirical "We Are Not Responsible," a poem written shortly after 9/11 when many Arab and Muslim Americans were similarly targeted. With the USA Patriot Act, which passed with bipartisan support six weeks after the Twin Towers fell, the government gave itself power to surveil any American citizen without probable cause or the need for a warrant. According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the government could "rifle through individuals' financial records, medical histories, Internet usage, bookstore purchases, library usage, travel patterns, or any other activity that leaves a record." Moreover, any person or institution forced to turn over their records were prohibited by law "from disclosing the search to anyone," meaning citizens would not know that they were being investigated nor would have the opportunity "to challenge illegitimate searches," which the ACLU argued was a clear violation of the U.S. Constitution.

In the first stanza of Mullen's poem, we are introduced to a speaker who uses the impersonal language of a corporate disclaimer meant to limit a company's legal liability if customers suffer harm and believe the company is responsible. The seemingly neutral, objective statements, however, belie an undercurrent of hostility and condescension towards the person or persons being addressed:

We are not responsible for your lost or stolen relatives.

We cannot guarantee your safety if you disobey our instructions.

We do not endorse the causes or claims of people begging for handouts.

We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.

Mullen's speaker represents how those in power refuse to accept responsibility for how their actions might impact others. The irony of the first line is that the speaker does not refer to "items" that are "lost or stolen"—which is what we would expect—but to actual human beings. Mullen suggests that the speaker's primary goal is to avoid legal responsibility rather than express concern for people who have suffered a personal tragedy.

When discussing the poem's opening line in class, we ask students about the events in American history to which Mullen might be alluding. Students often point out that slaves were "stolen" from Africa and then had their families intentionally separated to prevent the formation of strong emotional bonds that might lead to acts of resistance or rebellion in America. Other students might mention that Native American children were systematically removed from their tribal families and sent to government boarding schools to "help" them assimilate into white American culture.

Since students have enrolled in the course to read Otsuka's novel, many know about the Japanese internment camps during World War II, but few know that fathers were intentionally separated from their families while imprisoned. In the aftermath of 9/11, Mullen most likely was also alluding to the government's illegal detention of Arab and Muslim Americans at Guantanamo Bay, where the vast majority of them were never officially charged with a crime, allowed legal counsel, or given the right to defend themselves in a court of law—all violations of the Fifth Amendment in the Bill of Rights.

Students may also know that during the first Trump administration, the United States government implemented an official family separation policy at the border, which resulted in over 5,000 children being intentionally removed from their parents, according to Human Rights Watch. After their parents were subsequently deported, roughly 1,360 of these children were essentially orphaned while remaining in U.S. custody. As Michael Garcia Bochenek, senior counsel at Human Rights Watch, observed, "It's chilling to see, in document after document, the calculated cruelty that went into the forcible family separation policy. A government should never target children to send a message to parents."

In a 2023 interview with Univision, Trump defended the family separation policy of his first term as a necessary deterrent to illegal immigration: "When you hear that you're going to be separated from your family, you don't come. When you think you're going to come into the United States with your family, you come. [. . .] It stopped people from coming by the hundreds of thousands because when they hear family separation, they say, 'Well, we better not go.' And they didn't go." Whereas we are meant to recoil at the cruel indifference of the speaker in Mullen's poem, Trump has openly embraced cruelty as a means to an end that requires no ethical or moral justification.

As part of Trump's mass deportation program in his second term, he has increased the level of cruelty by arresting immigrants and sending them, not back to their home countries, but to third-country detention centers in places like El Salvador, South Sudan, and Uzbekistan. As Amy Fischer of Amnesty International notes, "Ripping people from their communities and forcibly removing them to countries they're not from, without a warning, a fair hearing, or a safety assurance, is a moral failure and a violation of human rights." In the first year of Trump's second term, the Migration Policy Institute estimates that 15,000 detainees have thus far been imprisoned in third-country detention centers, where many have also been accused of human rights abuses.

In a 2018 article for The Atlantic, Adam Serwer writes that rather than cruelty being a political liability for Trump, it is an essential characteristic that not only defines his political philosophy, but also binds together his MAGA coalition. With Trump there is a clear in-group and out-group, and his policies are based on protecting the former and attacking the latter:

Only the president and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to

the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of

us are entitled only to cruelty, by their whim. This is how the powerful have ever kept

the powerless divided and in their place, and enriched themselves in the process.

Whereas Mullen derides the speaker's refusal to take responsibility for his actions, Trump and his supporters seemingly revel in policies that inflict intentional pain and suffering on others. According to Serwer, Trump has created a loyal following of true believers "whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life."

When Mullen's speaker says, "We cannot guarantee your safety if you disobey our instructions," a clear message is sent that those being victimized had better do what they are told . . . or else. Any act of dissent or noncompliance is a justification for physical abuse at the hands of governmental authorities. Mullen's speaker echoes the threats of violence that have consistently been encouraged by Trump, who said in a 2017 speech to law enforcement officers that they should not be "too nice" when apprehending suspects: "When you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head, you know, the way you put their hand over [their head], like, 'Don’t hit their head and they’ve just killed somebody, don’t hit their head.' I said, 'You can take the hand away, OK?'"

When protesters tried to disrupt one of his campaign rallies in 2016, Trump encouraged his supporters to violently suppress the protestors' right to free speech, saying, "I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They'd be carried out in a stretcher, folks. I'd like to punch him in the face, I'll tell you." When recalling that Montana congressman Greg Gianforte had pleaded guilty for assaulting a reporter from The Guardian during a press conference in the previous year, Trump lauded the congressman's use of violence against the free press—whom he refers to as "the enemy of the people"—telling his supporters at a political rally in 2018: "Any guy that can do a body slam [. . .] he's my guy."

When masked ICE agents began mass deportation operations in Minnesota as part of Operation Metro Surge in December 2025, everyday American citizens, armed only with cell phones and whistles, attempted to warn and protect their immigrant neighbors from impending raids. After two community observers, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were shot dead by federal agents, former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem blamed the protestors for their own deaths, labeling them "domestic terrorists." Trump himself wrote on Truth Social that "ICE had to protect themselves" and that the killings were in self-defense. Instead of accepting responsibility for the deaths of American citizens at the hands of federal authorities, Trump instead blamed Jacob Frey, the Democratic mayor of Minneapolis, and Tim Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota, for "inciting Insurrection, with their pompous, dangerous, and arrogant rhetoric!"

Trump's refusal to assume responsibility for the violence his administration has inflicted on the American people is coupled with his underlying contempt for those who have been victimized. When Mullen's speaker claims that those in power refuse to "endorse the causes or claims of people begging for handouts," the dismissive tone implies that the needs of those less fortunate are illegitimate and not worthy of our concern. With the enactment of his "One Big Beautiful Bill" in July 2025, Trump authorized the elimination of $187 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program [SNAP]—the largest cut in the program's history—which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicted would result in 4 million people, including 1 million children, seeing their food benefits reduced substantially or eliminated altogether.

The editorial staff of the National Catholic Reporter called the legislation "one of the most immoral pieces of legislation in recent memory" for prioritizing tax cuts for the wealthy at the expense of food assistance for the poor:

The promise of American democracy is not merely the freedom to accumulate

wealth. It is the promise of mutual obligation, of building a society in which our

fortunes rise or fall together. [. . .] Jesus weeps over this cruelty. So do we. We

must reject this heartless bargain and instead pursue policies that honor the dignity

of every citizen and the collective well-being of our nation.

Despite the National Parents Union calling the reduction of SNAP benefits "a moral disgrace and a direct assault on America's working families," Trump used his State of the Union Address in February 2026 to celebrate that "in one year we have lifted 2.4 million Americans—a record—off of food stamps." In response, Massachusetts congressman Jim McGovern tweeted, "What a crock! He didn’t lift anyone—he KICKED them off. Want to actually lift people off SNAP? Pay them more. Lower their grocery bills. Give them healthcare. Increase their social security. Provide their kids with school meals. Instead, Trump kicks them while they’re down."

Whereas Mullen could use satire to critique the hypocrisy of George W. Bush's claims of being a "compassionate conservative" in 2002, our current political ecosystem has hard-right conservatives declaring "a war on empathy" and our president hosting a Gatsby-themed Halloween party the night before SNAP benefits were set to expire in November. As comedian Jon Stewart noted on The Daily Show, “There were dancers, costumes, champagne—a wonderful celebration where the theme was apparently gross income inequality. [. . .] Usually at a time of national suffering, there’s a generally accepted principle in leadership that you at least pretend to feel the pain of the people that you represent. But this president seems to go out of his way to let struggling Americans know that he is doing very well.”

While the goal of Juvenalian satire is to promote awareness with an eye towards reform, there has to be hope that reform is possible. With someone as amoral as Trump, who undoubtedly agrees with Mullen's speaker that those in power have "the right to refuse service to anyone," reform is not a realistic expectation. What we can do, however, is hope that enough of the 77 million people who voted for him in the last election will come to realize that there is still a place for empathy and compassion in our society. Satire, though, might not be the best vehicle to transmit such a message.

Rather than employ the good-natured, ironic detachment that he is known for as co-host of Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update, comedian Michael Che instead made an earnest, straightforward plea on Instagram after seeing "a lotta racist videos celebrating (mostly black) families not being able to buy groceries" after their SNAP benefits expired in November. Che asked people to put aside their partisan rancor and "draw the line at feeding the poor," relating that when he was a boy, his own family depended on food stamps to survive: "I grew up on free cheese and powdered milk and waiting for your friends to leave the store so they won’t see me pay with stamps. That shit ain’t as glamorous as it sounds. I promise.”

While satire may be effective when we find ourselves straying from our ideals, what our country needs now is a firm understanding of what those fundamental American ideals are. There was a time when we admired and respected the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who said during the Great Depression, "The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." There was also a time when we heeded the words of Jesus in believing that the best way to honor and emulate the life of Christ was through service to others, especially to the most vulnerable among us who desperately need our help.

Instead of the ridicule or scorn associated with satire, perhaps the best way to re-establish our moral framework is to simply share genuine, heartfelt personal stories like Che's about how our governmental policies affect individuals, families, and communities at large. Perhaps when we read about the pain and suffering that others endure in novels like Otsuka's, we can once again see the world through perspectives other than our own. Perhaps this newfound awareness and understanding will then inspire us to rekindle the American ideal of treating others with kindness, dignity, and respect—and to elect representatives who reflect the best in the American character, rather than the worst.