The tiresome outrage over Donald Trump’s Pearl Harbor gag

A lot of long-harboured pearls were clutched this week over an indelicate aside delivered off the cuff by – who else? – Donald ‘Joker’ Trump. Off the cuff? His shirts must have the shortest sleeves in DC by now.

For anyone who missed it, he was asked, in the presence of Japanese prime minister Sanae Takaichi, why he had not informed his allies about the attack on Iran. Surely, he replied, glancing mischievously around at what he mistakenly took to be a promising audience, if anyone should understand that he wanted to maintain the element of surprise, it would be Japan. ‘Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor?’ Right? Right?

Well, putting that curious first-person pronoun aside for one moment, no. With my Stand-Up Comedian hat on, I have to say that while not remotely offensive, this is a piss-weak analogy.

Sure, the Japs preserved and enjoyed the element of surprise on 7 December 1941 (a date that continues to limp on in infamy, though now somewhat overshadowed by 9/11). The problem here is with the word ‘allies’. Clearly, that was not the column heading over the United States’ entry in Japan’s friend / enemy ledger before the Mitsubishis rained death on the Pacific fleet.

Trump had options. He could have mused as to why Japan had not thought to inform Hitler about their plans. Mildly anachronistic, but a mere backstitch in the timeline and broadly accurate. I think that would have landed differently, though. Probably a bit abrasive, even for the Don.

On the other hand, he might have wondered whether the States should have shared intel with their allies on their plans for Hiroshima four years later – except of course, that they did. Churchill was up to speed on the bomb, and so indeed was Stalin, though through less-official channels. But again, a joke about Little Boy, as well as annoying Marco Rubio, might have landed differently – or rather, detonated 600 metres in the air, and taken out American-Japanese relations with it.

So, from a comedy-purist point of view, the squib was damp. But from a ‘shock, horror, frightened horses’ point of view it was also damp. After all, an awful lot of water has flowed around the harbour wall since then. As with jokes about the English regicide and the Black Death, tagged with an innocent ‘Too soon?’, time plus tragedy equals comedy. Those taking wilful offence to Trump’s joke are as tedious as ever.

The single most striking and revealing aspect of the remark was Trump’s use of that presidential ‘Me’. It suggests that Trump regards his identity with the office of POTUS as being beyond time and space, somewhere between the pope and Doctor Who. Which would explain a lot, not least his views on a third term.

So much ink gets spilt over Trump’s gaffes that it was almost refreshing to see Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s vastly more considered speech be subjected to the same level of textual exegesis within the same 48-hour window.

‘History’, observed Bibi yesterday, paraphrasing perhaps my favourite historian and general sage, Will Durant, ‘proves that, unfortunately and unhappily, Jesus Christ has no advantage of Genghis Khan’.

It was surely not beyond the wit of listeners to understand the principle here – namely, that meek and mild has its place, but will not deter the ruthless and blood-thirsty, however confident one is that justice will be served in the hereafter. Sometimes, violence must be confronted on its own terms. More to the point, this was a reference to Iran as the Great Khan, not a threat issued to Christians not to get in Israel’s way, as many online interpreted it.

It’s all so very tiresome. But if it does encourage even a handful of listeners to seek out Durant’s peerless distillation of the lessons of history – called, helpfully, The Lessons of History – it will not have been for naught.

The irony is that the outrage over Trump’s and Netanyahu’s remarks will drive many weary neutrals into their respective camps. Which is a shame, given the potential horrors being unleashed in the Middle East.

Trump’s jokes and braggadocio can no longer conceal growing concern that we are watching a slow-motion catastrophe unfold that might yet make Pearl Harbor look like a rejected plot strand in The Triangle. From the promisingly high-yield opener of the war, taking out the scarcely mourned Ayatollah, we are proceeding every day towards a stew of reprisals and economic devastation that no one can now plausibly shrug off as panic-mongering. And while it is a well-established principle that it is easier to ask forgiveness than permission, that doesn’t quite map on to diving into the shark tank and then shouting, ‘Who’s with me?’.

Ah well. To paraphrase John Belushi in Animal House – ‘Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?’ It is now.

Simon Evans is a spiked columnist and stand-up comedian. Tickets for his tour, Staring at the Sun, are on sale here.