The fast pace of events under U.S. President Donald Trump has some good news and some bad news for the Onion and the rest of the Internet’s satirists. The good news is, there’s a lot of material to work with. The bad? There’s so much material, churning through the news cycle at such a speedy pace, that it becomes tough to interject with a joke.“We had a ton of great articles about various parts of the campaign, Trump’s personality and the people around him,” Onion editor-in-chief Cole Bolton said in an interview with the Washington Post on Friday. “But we felt like each one of those is a drop in the bucket.”So, the Onion is trying something new: Why not flood the Internet with a ton of jokes about the Trump administration, all at once?The Trump Documents, released by the Onion on Monday, are the satirical newspaper’s fictional version of the Pentagon Papers. It’s about 700 pages of fake executive order drafts, emails and classified “documents” that, collectively, are the Onion’s first big swing at capturing this particular political moment. Bolton calls it a mix of “really hard satire” about the administration, its people and its goals, along with some more traditional Onion-y silliness. It’s all supposed to have the feel of a major leak of classified documents.The Trump Documents, in a way, are an attempt at finding a way to produce effective work — in the Onion’s case, satire — in a world where expectations have changed. It’s not that Trump is hard to satirize. It’s that there’s too much to satirize.“We just couldn’t keep up all the time,” Bolton said. “There was just so much to ridicule that it got to be such a drag. I’m sure it’s the same way with regular journalism, just following him all the time would be just tiring.”The Onion is hoping that by flooding th ...
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