October 22, 2020
MINNEAPOLIS (The Borowitz Report)—Americans favor continuing to mute Donald J. Trump after the final Presidential debate, a new study has found.
In the study, which was conducted by the psychology department at the University of Minnesota, researchers measured the responses of subjects when they were told that it was possible to mute Trump.
“Using advanced imaging, we were able to gauge how they reacted to this news,” Dr. Davis Logsdon, who supervised the study, said. “The pleasure centers in their brains lit up like solar flares.”
When they were told that Trump would no longer be muted after the debate, however, the subjects reacted with “disappointment, anguish, and even rage,” Logsdon said.
“One man was reduced to tears,” the researcher said. “He said, ‘I don’t understand why they can’t keep muting him—they clearly have the technology.’ ”
Logsdon said that the study yielded many other findings, including a widespread psychological need to mute Donald Trump, Jr.
Andy Borowitz is a Times best-selling author and a comedian who has written for The New Yorker since 1998. He writes The Borowitz Report, a satirical column on the news.