Earlier this summer, we reported that Idiocracy collaborators Etan Cohen and Mike Judge were teaming up to make a series of apt “President Camacho”-themed anti-Trump ads. All they needed was the go ahead from 20th Century Fox, which owns the rights to the disturbingly prescient comedy from 2006. As it turns out, they didn’t get it—Fox declined, and the ads are effectively dead, but that shouldn’t really surprise anyone given that Fox boss Rupert Murdoch is pretty open about his support of Donald Trump. According to The Daily Beast, Terry Crews was on board for the ads, but even Terry Crews is no match for Murdoch’s absolute power.
“It kind of fell apart,” Judge told The Daily Beast. “It was announced that they [the ads] were anti-Trump, and I would’ve preferred to make them and then have the people decide. Terry Crews had wanted to just make some funny Camacho ads, and Etan [Cohen] and I had written a few that I thought were pretty funny, and it just fell apart. I wanted to put them out a little more quietly and let them go viral, rather than people announcing we’re making anti-Trump ads. Just let them be funny first. Doing something satirical like that is better if you just don’t say, ‘Here we come with the anti-Trump ads!’ Also, when Terry heard that announcement he wasn’t happy about it.”
So according to Judge, we all kind of ruined it by announcing that he and Cohen were making anti-Trump ads. Whoops! “I just heard that they were put on the shelf, so it looks like they’re not going to happen,” Judge added. Alas, you’ll just have to use your imagination to know what an Idiocracy-inspired anti-Trump ad might look like. But it doesn’t require much of a stretch of the imagination at all.