Al Franken, comedian-turned-senator, takes on Donald Trump, TV-star-turned-president
WASHINGTON — For Al Franken, it's finally safe to be funny again just at a moment all the news around him has taken a decidedly unfunny turn.
The two-term Minnesota senator and one-time Saturday Night Live comedian is emerging as one of the fiercest challengers of President Trump and his team, and as a rising star in a Democratic Party eager for political combat.
Albeit one who uses humor as his sword — this after spending his first term in the Senate squelching his sarcasm to prove he should be taken seriously.
Near the end of a freewheeling memoir being published by Twelve next week (sarcastically) titled Al Franken: Giant of the Senate, by Al Franken, he writes that there is "a decent chance" Trump will still be president by the time readers are perusing it.
"The book is coming out May 30, so I still think there's a very decent chance he'll still be president," Franken deadpanned to Capital Download last Thursday in his first interview about the book. Seriously: Does he think the president will serve the full four years of his term?
"I don't know," he replied. "That was kind of a joke. But it's kidding on the square."
Which is, he explained, "making a joke that you also mean."
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Franken said it was "still too early" to make a judgment about whether Trump's actions could amount to obstruction of justice or other impeachable offenses. In a follow-up interview Tuesday, he noted a Washington Post report that the president had asked two top intelligence officials to push back against the FBI investigation into possible collusion by his campaign.
"It's feels like it's accelerating, and we're at a point there's a lot of there there," he said. "There's things that are ... certainly improper communications approaching stuff that may be a crime."
Perhaps it's only right that the comedian-turned-senator would become an especially effective burr in the side of the reality-TV-star-turned-president.
It was Franken who posed the question at a confirmation hearing in January for Jeff Sessions, nominated as attorney general, that prompted Sessions to volunteer he had no contact with Russians during the campaign, a statement that turned out to be untrue. Which prompted Sessions to recuse himself from the Russia investigation. Which opened the door for Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein last week to name former FBI director Robert Mueller as a special counsel in the case.
Which guarantees the sort of far-reaching, independent inquiry that the White House wanted to avoid.
"I asked him, basically, would he recuse himself ... if it turned out campaign surrogates for Trump had been coordinating with the Russians or meeting with the Russians, and he just said, 'Well, I didn't meet with the Russians,'" Franken recalled. A few weeks later, The Washington Post reported that Sessions had met twice with the Russian ambassador in 2016.
"People are like, 'That Franken, he plays three-dimensional chess; he's always several moves ahead of anyone else," Franken told USA TODAY's newsmaker series, adopting the pompous baritone voice of a pundit. That analysis gives him too much credit, he says. Sessions answered a different question than he had been asked, creating a cascade of consequences.
That said, it also was Franken who posed a policy question to Betsy DeVos at her confirmation hearing as Education secretary that became a cause celebre when she didn't seem to to be aware of a basic debate over how to measure student progress.
And it was Franken, along with New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who was said to be the most aggressive in questioning Rosenstein at a closed briefing for senators last week on the Russia inquiry.
Even at a subcommittee hearing earlier in the day viewed as pro forma by some of the senators on the dais — witness the friendly banter about the joys of fishing and the pleasures of having elk meat in your freezer — Franken peppered David Bernhardt, nominated as deputy Interior secretary, about his views on climate change.
"My job is to take the science as we find it," Bernhardt replied, an apparently scripted phrase he repeated so often that Franken began to mock it.
"I would suggest the science is in," Franken said, looking at Bernhardt expectantly, daring him to disagree.
"Would you like me to respond?" Bernhardt asked stiffly.
"That's what the long pause was for," Franken replied to laughter.
A rubber face
Franken has a rubber face, a raspy voice and a laugh so loud that aides searching for him in a crowded room will sometimes find him by pausing to listen for it.
On the Senate floor Thursday, chatting with Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth as they killed time between two votes, Franken erupted in a bark of laughter that got the attention of the presiding senator, Republican Deb Fischer of Nebraska, who couldn't see the source of the commotion. She slammed the gavel and demanded, "Order!"
Franken stepped into her line of sight to offer a contrite, confessional gesture.
He ousted an incumbent Republican senator, Norm Coleman, after a bitter eight-month recount battle that ended in an historic squeaker. He won by 312 votes out of nearly 2.9 million cast. When he finally was sworn in, in 2009, Franken decided to demonstrate that he was going to be a serious legislator, focused on his home state. He censured sarcastic comments, at least in public, in a process he dubs the DeHumorizer. He declined invitations to give funny speeches at Washington dinners and generally refused to be interviewed by reporters for national media outlets.
"I felt it was really important for me to prove to the people of Minnesota that I was there to do the work for the people of Minnesota," he said. He made a practice of showing up early and staying late for committee hearings, something he often continues to do. He followed the advice of Hillary Clinton's former Senate chief of staff, Tamera Luzzatto, to show skeptical fellow senators that he intended to be a work horse, not a show horse.
Behind the scenes, he tried to cultivate friendships, including with conservative Republican senators who wouldn't be among his natural allies.
That included Sessions, then chairman of the Judiciary Committee on which Franken serves. Their wives became friends. Mary Sessions knit a baby blanket for Franken's grandson, Joe. (Not that it prompted Franken to pull his punches during Sessions' confirmation hearings, "When my job meant doing everything in my power to deny my friend this important position, I was relieved that there was so much to fairly demonize him for," he writes.)
When Franken was frustrated by his failure to forge a connection with Oklahoma's Tom Coburn, an obstetrician/gynecologist by training, he finally invited him to breakfast in the Senate Dining Room. "The next 45 minutes, let's just have fun," Franken began, then said, "Let me ask you something: To be a doctor in Oklahoma, do you have to have any formal education?"
"Yes!" Coburn exploded in outrage. "You've got to go to medical school!"
To which Franken replied: "OK, that was a joke."
Once that was cleared up, they got along better. When Franken called Coburn, who resigned in 2014, to ask if he could relate the anecdote in his book, Coburn said, "We have a First Amendment; you can write whatever you want!" Then they chatted about their grandchildren.
While the book provides a glimpse at some surprising friendships among senators across ideological lines, there are no kind words in it for Ted Cruz. The Texas senator gets an entire chapter of his own, titled "Sophistry," that describes him as "singularly dishonest" and "exceptionally smarmy." (Cruz's office didn't respond to a request for comment.)
"You have to understand that I like Ted Cruz probably more than my colleagues like Ted Cruz," Franken said in the interview, "and I hate Ted Cruz."
'I don't blame him'
Bashing Cruz in the book isn't surprising. Criticizing Barack Obama is.
"I also say that he was a terrific president, right?" the senator said. "And I usually couch every criticism with that."
During Franken's pitched Senate campaign in 2008, former president Bill Clinton and then-senator Hillary Clinton, among others, appeared at rallies to help him get over the top. "But one person who had no interest in providing that help was Barack Obama," Franken writes. The Obama campaign wouldn't let him on stage at a rally in Hibbing a few days before the election, he says, and sent pamphlets for get-out-the-vote canvassers to hang on doors that barely mentioned the Senate race. (Obama spokesman Eric Schultz declined to comment.)
"They felt that an association with me was not helpful to their task," Franken said, noting that Republicans were portraying him as "a foul-mouthed pornographer" in attack ads that cited satire from his comedy routines. "So I don't blame him."
Except for this: After Obama was safely elected, and Franken was locked in an expensive recount battle, he said the Obama team promised to hold a fundraiser for him. After all, if he prevailed, he would be in a position to provide the White House with a helpful 60th vote in the Senate. "That would have been a, boom, $2 million," he said of an Obama fundraiser. "It didn't happen."
Six years later, in 2014, Franken won re-election by a comfortable margin of 202,978 votes. Now he seems to feel liberated to show more humor and seek a higher profile. The memoir is a sign of that, a progression from best-selling books before his Senate days including Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Lies: And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.
Not to mention Why Not Me: The Inside Story of the Making and Unmaking of the Franken Presidency. In it, his celebrity bid for the White House succeeds but he is forced to resign after five months in office after catastrophic missteps — a weird turn on several fronts.
Franken celebrated his 66th birthday Sunday with a weekend in New York with son Joe's family, including watching the Saturday Night Live season finale from backstage. "I know how to be on the floor without tipping over a camera," he said.
His relish for debate and his full-throated liberalism is a good fit with the rising anti-Trump energy among Democrats on the left. His name has landed on the early, speculative lists of prospects for the party's presidential nomination in 2020.
He dismisses that question in a way that doesn't actually preclude the possibility.
"We have to focus on what's in front of us on health care, on rebuilding our infrastructure. That's what we need to be doing," he said. The 2020 campaign? "Look, that's a long way away."
