The writers, director and one of the stars of the 2006 movie “Idiocracy” are re-teaming for a series of anti-Donald Trump advertisements.
The film’s writers, Etan Cohen and Mike Judge (who also directed it), and Terry Crews, who played President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho, will be reuniting to satirize the presumptive GOP nominee, who some have compared to Crews’ character.
At first, the similarities between Trump and Camacho were “just a general lizard brain kind of thing: The presidency is all about entertainment value,” Cohen told BuzzFeed News. “Then it started to get, as the year went on, weirdly specific. People pointing out things like, ‘Oh, Camacho was a wrestler and Trump was a wrestler … It’s like, the more things go on, the more it actually seems to be kind of merging in a very specific, eerie way.”
Cohen said they plan to start shooting the ads once Fox clears the rights for “Idiocracy” with Crews. “There’s only one Camacho,” he said.
He said that he would “definitely” vote for Camacho over Trump, and pointed out a few ways the two are different.
“They both seem to be intent on destroying the world. But maybe Camacho more accidentally?” Cohen offered. “The most dangerous contrast to Trump is that Camacho actually realizes he needs advice from other people, and knows that he’s not the smartest guy in the room. Also, not a racist.”
Cohen brought up the parallels between the 2016 election cycle and “Idiocracy” in a February tweet, which he followed with another one: “I thought the worst thing that would come true was everyone wearing Crocs.”
I never expected #idiocracy to become a documentary.
— Etan Cohen (@etanjc) February 24, 2016
“I didn’t think anyone would see it,” Cohen told BuzzFeed. “That was just an interesting, eye-opening thing, like, wow, this is just tapping into something that a lot of people are feeling right now.”
As of June 3, the tweet has 3,900 retweets and 3,618 likes. It also spawned a Facebook group called “Movement to Classify ‘Idiocracy’ film as Documentary,” which currently has 762 likes.
Now Cohen is rallying the troops to formally satirize Trump, a task he says hasn’t always proved to be easy.
“If you’re making ‘Idiocracy 2,’ and you’re trying to write whoever’s the heir to Camacho, if you put in Trump, it would be too silly to be in a movie,” he said.
Eventually, though, he realized that satire is necessary.
“This is what satire is for … To be able to hold up a mirror and say, ‘This is crazy,'” Cohen said. “‘Idiocracy’ was like that, but this all of a sudden felt like a very immediate need for the true meaning of satire and what it can actually do.”
