What’s so witty about Trump, mockery, and “Birdbrain”? Michael Kruse examines how Donald “91 Counts” Trump uses humor “to maintain the useful reputation as a politically incorrect outsider despite his obvious insider status as the leader of the GOP.” “Hilarious, “super funny,” some say. Kruse isn’t joking. He has quotes. Italian fascist Benito Mussolini, “had the same twisted sense of humor,” says Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of “Strongmen.” It’s a part of Trump’s bonding with his audience. “It’s such a huge part of his movement,” Alexander Reid Ross, the author of Against the Fascist Creep and a member of the executive committee of the Far Right Analysis Network, told me. “It is a way of inverting and reversing assumptions in a carnivalesque kind of way. It’s a way of upending morality,” he said. “It’s a thing that gives him permission to go on the attack in really hostile ways while saving face as just sort of an old satirist or something.” Fintan O’Toole posted a New York Review of Books essay Kruse cites: “This comic-authoritarian politics has some advantages over the older dictatorial style. It allows a threat to democracy to appear as at worst a tasteless prank,” O’Toole wrote. “Trump’s audiences, in other words, are not passive. This comedy is a joint enterprise of performer and listener. It gives those listeners the opportunity for consent and collusion.” Trump’s lame jokes allow him to “normalize the abnormal, lessen the monstrous and offer audiences a sinister kind of license.” There’s more praise for Trump “comedy.” I get what Kruse…