Comparing the current presidential election to Idiocracy has become cliche at this point—as well as depressing, because, well, it’s not wrong. But Etan Cohen still has a free pass to do just that, because he co-wrote the script for the 2006 satire with director Mike Judge. And Cohen and Judge seem determined to undo whatever weird witchcraft they unleashed by making the film, and are now working together on a series of anti-Trump campaign ads in a valiant attempt to put off their dystopian vision a little longer.
Talking to BuzzFeed, Cohen says he and Judge “thought it would take much, much longer to get to this point,” and that they considered the film a satire of celebrity culture, and its political elements “a crazy joke.” He says that, at first, the parallels between this election cycle and the film were “just a general lizard brain kind of thing.” Then, he says, “it started to get, as the year went on, weirdly specific … the more things go on, the more it actually seems to be kind of merging in a very specific, eerie way.”
After a tweet about those spooky parallels blew up earlier this year, Cohen and Judge went to work on a series of campaign ads for President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho meant to satirize Donald Trump. “This all of a sudden felt like a very immediate need for the true meaning of satire and what it can actually do,” he says, calling the ads “very important” to him. So when can we see these presumably eerily accurate ads? As soon as the rights are cleared for Terry Crews to star in them. Get on that, Fox—the future of America may depend on it.
And yeah, in case you’re wondering, Cohen notes he would “definitely” vote for Camacho over Trump, because Camacho’s not a racist.