Maybe Trump Farting in the Courtroom Is a Strange Kind of Justice

Trust Donald Trump to take an ugly situation and make it infinitely worse. In this case, he’s managed to fill the internet with memes and jokes about his own farts.

Trump’s hush money trial started last week, with Trump having to sit through five! entire! days! of jury selection and other procedural matters, including the reading of potential jurors’ mean social media posts about him. It’s a kind of purgatory that even a sensible person would find excruciating (if a sensible person landed themselves in that situation in the first place), so it’s hard to imagine what might have been going through a mind like Trump’s.

But as jury selection neared completion, some absolutely surreal news broke: Trump was apparently farting in the courtroom. Like, a lot.

This development is such a strange thing to contemplate. Is it actually happening? Is it wishful thinking? The fact that we’re talking about it at all is pretty telling.

Let’s get one thing out of the way before we go any further: It’s not cool to make fun of someone’s bodily functions, even if that person is the worst guy on Earth. We all have bodies. Bodies, in general, fart and poop and make embarrassing noises and smells. Once, I was giving a lecture to a college class and I burped in the middle of a word. One 18-year-old smartass yelled out “Ewww!” and I wanted to squeeze into a gopher hole and spend the rest of my life there. Even the healthiest, most able-bodied bodies do humiliating stuff sometimes.

… but there’s also the fact that this is Donald Trump we’re talking about. Remember when he made fun of a disabled reporter by jerking his arms around in mock convulsions? Pardon my language here, but what a thoroughly fucking awful thing to do. Remember alllll the times he’s made fun of people’s weight? Trump is a constant fountain of the most vile, reprehensible kind of body shaming, so it feels like a bit of cosmic justice that he’s now being subjected to the very humiliation that he tried to inflict on other people.

Or, at least, it would feel like that if he had any capacity for self-reflection. (And if innocent people didn’t have to share the room with him.)

But, look, I know, you came here for some jokes. In the interest of avoiding ableism, I’ve hand-picked a few social media reactions (some jokes, some commentary) that highlight Trump’s despicable personality instead of making fun of his body. I’ll be brutally honest, though—as much as I personally love fart humor, I barely cracked a smile at the discourse. Anything that gets me thinking about Trump’s asshole is just too repulsive to be funny.

But, nevertheless, here you go.

(featured image: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)