We regret to inform you that the latest Simpsons Trump short is not, in fact, it, chief
BREAKING: The entire staff of The A.V. Club turned to dust today, then blew away on a hollow and howling wind, shortly after viewing the latest Donald Trump-focused “special” aired by the cast and creators of The Simpsons. It’s not clear yet if said fatal desiccation was caused by the short’s butchering of a Rita Moreno classic, its ham-fisted depiction of Reps Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib, or the shit-eating grin the animators gave to cartoon Joe Biden at the end. Either way, though, we’re dust now, and this cartoon killed us like we’d picked up a big gold cup full of rubies at the end of Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade.
To be fair, this is only the latest effort by the show’s staff to maintain some kind of relevance, some how, by pitting Dan Castellaneta’s not-actually-all-that-great Trump impression against a bit of topical humor and releasing it online. Past efforts have included a lionization of Robert Mueller (which did, at least, end for a call for more relief for hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico), plus a number of shorts that all hit the same lazy targets—Russians, Jeff Sessions is an elf, Trump has bad hair—that hack comedians have been using to distract from Trump’s more interesting and important evils for the last several years.
All of which is only exacerbated by the fact that this centrist boomer Facebook memes fodder—which, as far as we can tell, exists only to give Beto O’Rourke his next Twitter avatar— is being passed around by The Simpsons, once the smartest show on TV. (They also used to be able to write a parody song worth a damn.) It’d be a total have-a-cow bummer, really, except we’re dust now. Dust don’t care.