Warren and Trump Have More in Common Than You Think

Warren’s catchphrase, “I’ve got a plan for that,” has as much cultural resonance with her base as Trump’s “Make America Great Again” does with his.
Culturally, Elizabeth Warren is a lot more like Donald Trump than you might think.

Hold on. I know: Going by their personal lives, their demeanors, and their ideological agendas, they’re apples and oranges. But apples and oranges actually have a lot in common: They’re both fruits, they’re round, and they grow on trees. The most relevant difference boils down to a matter of taste. And that’s what I am getting at.

One of the best things about partisanship is how it sharpens our skepticism about the other side. When Trump gives a speech, liberals are like contestants on Jeopardy!, eager to hit the buzzer the moment they hear anything that pings their radar for hypocrisy, deceit, hyperbole, etc.

But the downside of partisanship is that it blinds us to the fakery of our own side. When the same liberals listen to someone like Warren, the buzzer gathers dust. In the 2000s, for instance, Saturday Night Live rarely let a week go by without skewering George W. Bush. When Barack Obama was president, SNL ignored him almost entirely, save as an excuse to mock the people who didn’t like him.

“If I had to describe Obama as a comedy project, I would say . . . it’s like being a rock climber looking up at a thousand-foot-high face of solid obsidian, polished and oiled,” Jim Downey, the SNL go-to guy for political humor, once said. “There’s not a single thing to grab onto — certainly not a flaw or hook that you can caricature.”

Bush then, like Trump now, was an easy target for SNL writers — and for writers at elite media outlets generally. Warren, however, is the opposite. Which might explain why SNL’s most recent cold open was nearly a campaign ad for Warren.