White House In MAGA world, Trump’s jokes always land 'What did he call her? Horseface?' one woman remarked at Thursday night's rally. Nearby, a married couple burst out laughing.

MISSOULA, Mont. — Donald Trump had the crowd hanging on every word, every pause, every gesture.

The thousands who gathered here had come to see what the president might serve up next. But they weren’t all that interested in hearing his latest policy pronouncements — they wanted to see Trump’s stand-up shtick. And on Thursday night, Trump’s newest bit was a tribute to the Montana congressman who gained nationwide attention last year for body slamming a reporter.


“And by the way, never wrestle him. Do you understand that? Never,” Trump deadpanned, pausing for a moment to soak in the roaring crowd. “Any guy who can do a body slam — he’s my kind of guy,” the president continued, using his hands to mimic a body flipping onto the ground.

“There’s nothing to be embarrassed about,” Trump reassured Rep. Greg Gianforte, who pleaded guilty last year to assault over the incident, insisting it had actually helped him get elected to Congress.

Outside the Missoula International Airport, Trump’s remarks met, predictably, with widespread outrage. The White House Correspondents’ Association said Americans should “recoil from the president's praise for a violent assault on a reporter doing his Constitutionally protected job.”

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But few people gathered in the hangar where Trump spoke were recoiling. After the rally, Peter Gianna, a retired law enforcement officer wearing a cowboy hat and a rain jacket, was chuckling as he relived the body slam jokes with a friend, expressing disbelief that Trump had gone there.

“Some of the things he says just make me laugh,” he said.

Trump’s brand of humor — cutting, insulting and sometimes even downright mean — has long offended and shocked the president’s critics. But for his supporters and allies, Trump’s irreverent jokes, which have become a central part of his increasingly frequent rallies across the country, are a feature, not a bug.

Inside Thursday night’s rally, Kendrick Richardson, 18, a student at Washington State University who came to Montana to see the president, repeatedly laughed at Trump’s zingers.

“Donald Trump’s a funny guy,” he said. “That’s a part of his charisma. That’s one of his best features.”

A group of people waiting in line for Trump’s speech recounted the president’s recent mockery of Stormy Daniels. “What did he call her? Horseface?” one woman remarked. Nearby, a married couple — Freddy Martinez, 36, a student, and Sarah Martinez, 35, a truck driver — burst out laughing.

“These individuals come to these rallies to be entertained,” said Iowa GOP Chairman Jeff Kaufmann. “I think in many ways he’s giving these supporters and attendees exactly what they want. He is at his absolute best at his rallies. That’s where he absolutely shines and he knows it.”

Trump’s advisers say the president’s crass sense of humor is at the core of his appeal to a conservative base that has rejected political correctness — and they’re betting that his jokes, paired with his broader say-anything attitude, will help deliver a repeat of the success he saw in 2016, rallying Republicans ahead of the midterms and helping him get reelected in 2020.

Responding to criticism of Trump’s body slam joke, Eric Trump told Fox News on Friday, “Oh stop. He wasn’t the guy that body slammed anybody. He can have fun. By the way, this is actually exactly why my father won.”

Indeed, there’s no hand-wringing or finger-pointing in the West Wing after the president delivers a crude one-liner. In fact, some Trump advisers, one of whom privately compared his rally performances to a stand-up comedy routine, have urged him to incorporate more wisecracks into his speeches.

One former White House official bluntly underscored the potential political windfall of Trump’s shtick: “His style and the way he speaks is a bigger part of his appeal than his actual policies.”

A senior administration official added, “The sheer volume of people that support him because he’s willing to be funny and ballsy and say what he thinks — you cannot underestimate that.”

Trump’s meandering prime-time rallies — featuring crass impressions of his Democratic opponents and jabs at the #MeToo movement — have put the president’s divisive sense of humor in the spotlight. While Trump’s opponents paint him as out of touch and mean-spirited, the president’s supporters see his comedic stylings as an invaluable weapon against his potential Democratic challengers. Trump has already started to anoint his possible opponents with derisive nicknames like “One Percent Biden.”

“His speaking style is what endears him to his supporters,” said Brian O. Walsh, president of the pro-Trump group America First Action. “It’s a big part of what fueled him through the primaries and the general election. The unpolished everyman who says what he thinks.”

West Wing aides have long believed that Trump’s sense of humor goes unnoticed by the media, which they believe unfairly take everything the president says too seriously even after fawning over President Barack Obama’s frequent jokes.

“He has a great sense of humor that he doesn’t get credit for,” said another senior White House official. Trump’s aides and advisers sometimes suggest jokes or issues he might want to touch on, but most of the president’s quips aren’t scripted. “It’s better when it’s more natural,” the official said.

Aides argued that Trump makes plenty of jokes that aren’t acerbic or biting, adding that his aggressive attacks are often in response to what he views as a slight. “He’s very much a counter-puncher,” counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway said in an interview earlier this week. “He rarely draws first blood and he always gets the last word.”

As for the complaints that his jokes cross the line, Conway echoed Eric Trump’s point. “One of the reasons that the president made it to the presidency is the rejection of political correctness,” she said.

Even some of Trump’s critics acknowledge privately that the president has a talent for reading a room and playing to his audience, pointing to his timing and ability to execute a barbed joke. Comedian Andrew Dice Clay, known for his crass and politically incorrect jokes, once made the case that Trump stole his act. Last year, Judd Apatow joked that he knew Trump would win the election because he was much funnier than Hillary Clinton.

At a recent rally in Iowa, the president skewered Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, mocking the lawmaker for insisting that neither she nor her staff leaked Christine Blasey Ford’s private letter describing her alleged assault.

Slapping a confused expression on his face and shaking his hands, Trump pretended to be Feinstein: “Wha, wha … no, I didn’t leak.” He then poked fun at the senator for at one point double-checking with a staffer that her aides didn’t leak the letter.

His caricature prompted gleeful chants of “lock her up” from the riled-up crowd.

Trump egged them on: “In other words, did she leak it? 100 percent.”

He paused, then quipped, “No, I don’t want to get sued. 99 percent.”

The crowd erupted in laughter.

Trump isn’t the first president to draw attention for making regular quips. Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were all known to deliver pithy one-liners.

Obama, for his part, had a penchant for dad jokes, and during his repeated appearances at the White House Correspondents’ Association annual dinner he took aim at his critics, while poking fun at himself, as well. “I look in the mirror and say, ‘I’m not the strapping young Muslim socialist that I used to be,’” he said with a wink at the 2013 WHCA dinner.

However, Obama could sometimes be ruthless. During the 2011 WHCA dinner, he lambasted Trump, who was then pushing the false claim that Obama wasn’t born in the United States.

“All kidding aside, obviously we all know about your credentials and breadth of experience. For example — no seriously — just recently in an episode of ‘Celebrity Apprentice,’ at the steakhouse, the men’s cooking team did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks,” Obama said dryly. “And there was a lot of blame to go around. But you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. And so ultimately, you didn’t blame Lil Jon or Meatloaf. You fired Gary Busey. And these are the kinds of decisions that would keep me up at night.”

The mockery got under Trump’s skin and was reportedly one of the factors that drove him to run for president. Since ascending to the White House, Trump has skipped every WHCA dinner.

Veterans of past White Houses of both parties said Trump’s brand of comedy is unique in that it’s deeply acerbic and rarely self-reflective. For example, his performance at the 2016 Al Smith Dinner in New York — an annual event of bipartisan comedy — was widely panned as too caustic. He got booed for several lines, including one directed at his rival, Hillary Clinton: “Here she is tonight, in public, pretending not to hate Catholics.”

David Litt, a former Obama speechwriter who helped craft jokes for the 44th president’s WHCA addresses and is now a writer for “Funny or Die,” said Trump’s humor is often based in cruelty.

“He weaponizes what he would call jokes to an unprecedented extent,” Litt said. “All of the examples of him telling a joke are also examples of him being a bully.”

Litt added that the laughter at Trump’s rallies “is about solidifying a tribal identity at the expense of someone else. It’s laughter in agreement rather than laughter because something is funny.”

Trump’s defenders counter that the president's humor isn’t always mean-spirited. And while he is rarely self-deprecating, he has recently made a few jokes at his own expense.

“I never had alcohol, for whatever reason,” Trump said earlier this month. “Can you imagine if I had? What a mess I would be. I would be the world’s worst.”

Kaufmann, the Iowa GOP chairman, added that Trump’s humor “can actually be very subtle and very dry. It’s not all hard-hitting, partisan stuff.”

He pointed to a joke Trump made about the large number of Nebraskans who attended Trump’s rally in Iowa last week. After the crowd cheered more loudly when he mentioned Nebraska than they did when he mentioned Iowa, Trump quipped, “I didn’t know you were bringing half of Nebraska.”

When world leaders stirred after Trump claimed at the United Nations General Assembly last month that he had accomplished more than any other administration in history, Trump smiled and ad-libbed. “Didn’t expect that reaction, but that’s OK,” he said, prompting laughter from the crowd. Trump’s defenders played the moment off as a tactful and humorous way to read the room. But the president’s critics painted him as wounded and defensive, a criticism that frustrated many in the White House and boosted their belief that the media don’t understand the president’s sense of humor.

When he’s not in public, Trump is not known as a jokester. Current and former White House aides said the president is often deeply serious in private.

“Few would describe him as being really funny behind the scenes or finding things particularly humorous,” another former White House official said. “He’s usually not especially lighthearted, but [he] can be.”

Trump rarely laughs in public, a phenomenon first highlighted by Gawker during the presidential campaign. “It’s not as if he has no sense of humor or is incapable of that,” the former official said. “But he tends to smile or chuckle rather than give a big laugh.”

Asked about the apparent shift in tone at his rallies, the former official said, “It’s performance art. He’s putting on a persona and he’s going through a routine of sorts.”

Restuccia reported from Washington and Schreckinger reported from Missoula, Montana.