In the 1960s sitcoms The Andy Griffith Show and Gomer Pyle USMC, Jim Nabors played the part of Gomer Pyle, a country boy innocent who worked as a gas station attendant before joining the Marines. Two of Gomer’s widely known and much repeated expressions were “Shazam” and “Surprise, surprise, surprise!”
Since taking office on Jan. 20, President Donald Trump he has offered Americans plenty of reasons to revive those hallmarks. Make English the official language of the United States? Surprise, surprise, surprise! Put the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to work under the world’s richest man and expose massive sloth, ineptitude, and fraud? Shazam! Cut the flood of illegals coming across our border to a trickle? Double shazam!
Many on the right have remarked that a dark cloud has been lifted from our land since Trump’s election and inauguration. One sees this change of mood in the daily news. The dour headlines that once greeted me and my first cup of morning coffee during the Biden presidency have disappeared, replaced by “Hurricane Trump” bringing some new piece of shazam, or a surprise, surprise, surprise.
What doubles up the fun of this windstorm of change is the often-unintended humor it evokes in the responses from Democrats and the radical left. When DOGE ordered government bureaucrats to submit a list of five things they’d accomplished in the past week, the howling could be heard across the land. “The horror! The horror!” as a dying Kurtz says in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Meanwhile, everyone I know from lawyers to teachers to homemakers could easily list five things they’d gotten done every day. I’m a maker of lists, and I scratch off at least six or seven accomplishments, large and small, every day.
Equally amusing are those who have failed to recognize the sea change in American attitudes. Recently, for example, after an off-duty policeman in a Chick-fil-A shot to death a knife-wielding maniac intent on murder, Boston’s mayor Michelle Wu offered the condolences of the city to the family of the dead criminal, which drew mockery and disgust from voters. Wisconsin’s Democrat governor Tony Evers was blasted with ridicule when he supported an initiative to change “mother” to “inseminated person.”
The Trump-J.D. Vance-Zelensky blowup in the Oval Office and the Ukrainian president getting the boot from the White House provided another opportunity for a round of memes and jokes. At the Babylon Bee, we had headlines like this one: “Zelensky Kicking Himself For Not Wearing His More Formal Green T-Shirt To White House Meeting.”
And speaking of the Babylon Bee, try this simple experiment if you’re looking for a chuckle. Spend five minutes on the Bee’s website perusing the headlines and articles you’ll find there, like “FBI Investigation Reveals That Epstein List Shredded Itself” or “Federal Judge Declares Constitution Unconstitutional.” After you’ve soaked in a bit of those waters of satire, head back to online news and commentary, and you’ll quickly find some real headlines that reading as if they came straight from the Bee. My observation of this similarity is not at all a reflection on the writers for these sites but is an indication of how our news today has become unintentionally humorous and absurd.
Clearly, the cudgel used for so long by the left to thrash the American people—open borders, DEI policies, the spurious gender and race “critical theories,” the crackdowns on freedom of religion, speech, and the right to assemble—has turned into a lash made of wet spaghetti.
The very nature of our laughter has changed as well. This time last year, when Team Biden would issue its latest disastrous policy or report, our laughter, if we laughed at all, was dark, bitter, and cynical, with a current of hopelessness running through our remarks. Today’s headlines, however, at least for me, often bring belly laughs of approval and amusement.
By my earlier references to Gomer Pyle, readers will rightly infer that I’m an old guy. Fourteen men have served as presidents during my lifetime, yet not one of them before Donald Trump has delivered such a daily mixture of good news, hearty laughter, and “Surprise, surprise, surprise!”
Shazam!
