With apologies to Graydon Carter, 9/11 was no Donald Trump.

Back in the week after the attacks that killed (only) 3000 Americans, Carter, then editor of Vanity Fair, memorably intoned that the event was so grave and sobering that, “I think it’s the end of the age of irony.” There is dispute over whether Carter — who co-founded the regularly brilliant satire magazine, Spy, back in the late ’80s and gets some credit for the description of Donald Trump as a “short-fingered vulgarian” — was the first to suggest we’d never again laugh at the ironies of outrageous hypocrisy and shameless buffoonery. But fair or not, the line has stuck to him.

The smart kids at the Oxford dictionary define irony as, “A state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result.”

Now, given four years of Trump we can debate whether the line about “contrary to what one expects” has standing any more. Still, let’s take a quick roll through just a few of the shiv stabs of irony we’ve endured in recent weeks and see if there’s still a way to laugh.

Trump Campaign Manager Melts Down and Is Tackled By Cops in His Front Yard. To TrumpNation the MAGA reelection machine is a bigly world-class hypercar, the McLaren F1 of political campaigns, and therefore worthy of every dollar they can peel off their disability checks and send over to it. So it is ironic, to us if not them, that the campaign has somehow blown close to a billion dollars of MAGA money and is being heavily outspent in key places like Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Arizona. Irony grows when campaign manager Brad Parscale, after citing “a million” requests for tickets to Trump’s Tulsa rally, (which ends up pulling in slightly fewer than a bad arena football game), is demoted/fired. Worse, having um, “migrated” $38.9 million of MAGA dollars to side hustles he personally benefits from, Parscale has rather flagrantly bought himself a Ferrari, a $400,000 boat and a $2.4 million waterfront home … only then to learn he’s under federal investigation. At this point he allegedly slugs his wife, gets drunk, threatens to kill himself with one of the 10 guns he keeps around the house for protection, perhaps from antifa, and wanders shirtless out into his front yard (while drinking a beer) where he gets tackled by cops and carted off to mandatory psychiatric care.

To this, purly as a bonus, we have ex-GOP hack and now Lincoln Project driving force Rick Wilson saying he “believes” Trump,’s campaign funding problem is compounded by the candidate himself, i.e. “The World’s Greatest Business Man”, taking “a 20% skim” off the top of all those $10 MAGA collections and stuffing it straight into his pocket. .

Not Only Isn’t Trump “Really, Really Rich” but He’s Essentially Lost $400 Million THREE Times. Those two $750 annual tax bills got most of the attention after the big New York Times story. But people long amazed at Trump’s shell game finances took special interest in the fact that he first blew $400 million in money he inherited from his father, (and likely swindled away from other relatives), then made and blew the $400 million he made off “The Apprentice” (including acting as a pitch man for Double-Stuf Oreos). But then — and this is based on what his records show — he is now in debt to god knows who for at least another $400 million. For those keeping score at home that’s $1.2 billion he’s basically thrown in a hole and set on fire. So here we have the irony of the “world’s greatest businessman” revealed to be demonstrably incapable of balancing a check book.

(At Vanity Fair William Cohan throws this in, ” … that is only a fraction of the more than $1.1 billion or so in debt and obligations that Trump [currently] owes across his empire, my calculations show. There’s Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, which Trump owns and which has $100 million of debt on it, due in 2022. On 40 Wall Street in Lower Manhattan, which Trump also owns outright, he owes another $139 million, due in five years. He also owns 30% stakes, alongside Vornado Realty Trust, in two office towers: one in Manhattan at 1290 Avenue of the Americas, and one in San Francisco at 555 California Street. His 30% of the debt on these two buildings, according to the Vornado filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, is $448 million—$163 million of which is due next September, with the balance of $285 million due in two years. (If you are still with me, we’re up to $687 million in debt. … thanks to Dan Alexander, the Forbes Trumpologist and the author of new book White House, Inc., we can account for another $100 million or so, bringing the total debt that Trump owes to around $1.1 billion—well beyond the $421 million of debt the Times shared in its piece.)

So, for another deeper level of irony, we have the “Art of the Deal” tycoon who screams “hoax” and “no collusion” every time someone says “Russia” deeply in arrears to a collection mysterious lender/investors, all of whom I gotta assume are feeling nervous about ever seeing a return on their money.

Can you call yourself a billionaire if the only billion in sight is what you owe your creditors?

Trump’s White House is Itself a Super Spreader Cluster. Leaving aside for a second the grand(est) irony that Trump the Denier, Trump of “Like a Miracle” and “We’ve Got it Totally Under Control” fame himself becoming infected, as of Wednesday, 27 people connected with the White House have also tested positive. In D.C. that one famous building is a goddam viral hot zone.

By contrast, last week the entire country of Taiwan, all 23 million people, reported … nine cases. Want more? Over a dozen countries reported fewer than 10. The Denier-in-Chief’s personal physical situation is so bad it’s the only plausible reason why the White House is refusing to allow contact tracing to determine who in the building is “Patient Zero”, the infector of the infected.

Does any of this mean that the scales have fallen from the eyes of Trump Nation? I doubt that, profoundly. Sean Hannity is telling MAGA warriors that Trump is a 21st century version of Winston Churchill, leading us through a crisis, presumably by exacerbating the crisis with incompetence and then infecting himself to demonstrate his sheer damn manliness.

TrumpNation is keeping the faith, or maybe they’re keeping the fraud, I’m not sure which. But then there are studies exploring why conservatives don’t use or seem to understand irony and satire, as liberals do. It’s a cognitive thing.

So as you and I can agree, the problem isn’t that irony has died. It’s more a problem that we are awash in so much irony it’s too damn hard to decide what’s laughable and what’s tragic.