Power and office are two different things. Someone can exercise a great deal of power in advancing or killing legislation while never holding office and allowing all the office holders to call them names on TV.

What matters is what policies are enacted. Here's a nice video on the topic that summarizes a Princeton study https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig

Powerful people have long weaponised self-deprecation as a means of letting off steam and blunting more serious attacks. (That theme is elaborated very well in the LRB here: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n14/jonathan-coe/sinking....) Michael Bloomberg is actually a great example, in how his campaign relied so heavily on irony and self-deprecation to defuse the (anticipated) discomfort around electing an old white billionaire.