Behind the Beard: Why I Put on A Prophet Costume to Predict the Fall of Trump

I wrote The Simpsons episode that predicted the Trump presidency. Now, I’m wearing a $30 'Prophet' robe to predict his end

I have always been a bit earnest for a comedy writer.

Not that that is something to brag about.

Being the most sincere comedy writer is a bit like being the world’s fastest snail or a writer who would use a dumb simile like that: lame.

But it can’t be helped. It’s my nature.

The great loves of my youth were broad comedy and aching sincerity — the Three Stooges and the two stools of Simon and Garfunkel.

I suspect they are related: comedy punctures the pretensions and tensions created by high seriousness, revealing us to be bumblers, clowns and hypocrites despite our facades of dignity, while the spiritual perspective sees even our shabby, bumbling selves as having a profound dimension and value.

Or maybe not. It could go either way. Your call.

My earnestness crystallized when I read the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson. His vision of America as a place in which the sacred dimension of humanity — the truest truths of our nature — might be realized through the action of a free people rang a bell with me that is still ringing. As did the work of those writers influenced by him — especially Walt Whitman, who embraced the everyday doings of daily life in America as an expression of the sacred.

He heard America singing — and that singing was The Three Stooges. (Okay, maybe Whitman didn’t think that way, but I do: the American tradition of low-brow, undignified comedy was and is to me an expression of our humanity, and there is something wonderful about it.)

So I was deeply interested in America and the American people — which led me to propose and edit a parody of USA Today in college and then accept a job as a reporter for USA Today on a 50-state tour called BusCapade USA.

On this tour, I encountered many wonderful and kind people, but I also felt a crisis of isolation, loneliness and alienation spreading quietly across the country. I thought something should be done to give people a greater sense of being seen, heard and cared about. To this end, I proposed a network of neighborhood newsletters to my employers, but that didn’t fit their business model, so I put the idea aside, and chose a path more travelled by (at least by my more talented college friends, who had established themselves as TV comedy writers.)

But my sense of a spreading social and spiritual crisis never left me and eventually I decided to try to do something about it. I reached out to an old friend and together we created a platform for neighborhood communities called Bailiwik. (Think Nextdoor, but also think the opposite of Nextdoor.)

When I was casting around for ways to promote this platform, my friend Bill Oakley, who I worked with at The Simpsons in the 90s, suggested I lean into my hook as the writer of the episode of The Simpsons that “predicted” the Trump presidency. Until he said it, I didn’t know I had a hook, or that this was it.

But Bill who has more Simpsons memes to his credit than anyone has an infallible ear for popular culture — you might say he hears America singing; he sure wouldn’t — so I accepted his advice.

Then I thought to myself: well, I guess that means claiming to be a prophet who can see the future — and that the future is… Bailiwik.

So I sent away for a $30 prophet costume on Amazon and we filmed a commercial for Bailiwik, but I was unable to raise the money needed to move the platform forward so I shelved the ad.

It seemed like a non-starter.

Then Trump was reelected — which was not exactly proof of the higher dimension of human nature expressing itself though our national life — and then I saw that photo from the inauguration of Zuckerberg, Bezos, Sundar Pichai and Musk flanking Trump, and I wanted to vomit.

I had an immediate, visceral, crystal-clear feeling of certainty that they were wrong. I read their presence there to mean that they had accepted that Trump was just the way America is now; that his way, his values, his approach had been, in effect, ratified by the 2020 election and they had no choice but to get on board.

I thought: No. You dorks bought at the top. This is the dead-cat bounce.

You have misread both America and Trump.

You have failed the country and yourselves.

I was certain they were wrong — based on my own sense of America and, frankly, of how reality works — and disgusted by their example of complicity.

I felt a strong compulsion to express my own, opposite reading of America and our situation as clearly as possible, both so I could say I was right later, when the wheels inevitably came off of what was sure to be an unhinged second Trump administration, and to provide a counter-example to their well, cowardly, behavior.

And then I remembered that I owned a prophet costume.

---

Thank you for reading my new Substack

I'm starting this now because everybody else already did it four years ago and that's how long it takes for me to give up hoping some annoying new thing will go away and get on board.

I will be using this newsletter to explore our political, social and spiritual crisis, and how we as human beings — who, whatever our faults, have not succumbed to the darkness of Trumpism — can respond. I hope you will find my occasional newsletters of value or, if not, at least be unable to figure out how to unsubscribe.