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.