Review: Our Cartoon President “Church and State”

Trump admits he is anything but Christ; he is more like an anti-Christ?

Overview:

The annual White House Easter Egg Roll is fast approaching, but Trump is in hot water with the Christian community.  It turns out; the religious community takes offense to comments about cutting god’s penis off.  Trump tries a different approach and remakes himself as the most “Christian president ever,” and quickly embraces all of the love and attention that it earns him.  However, the president soon learns that the overly-religious types can be incredibly creepy, and acting like Jesus just isn’t his bag, he does way better when acting like a god.

Meanwhile, Jared Kushner is in need of a few friends.  After some pressure from Ivanka Trump, Kushner teams up with her brothers.  Don Jr. and Eric show Kushner the ropes of being a son of Donald Trump, which mostly involves trying to make the president look good.  But, the introverted Kushner realizes that there is no way he can keep up with the two wild cards.

The conclusion leads to the ultimate Egg Roll with Pence representing Christianity and Trump representing- well, his own complexes.  A visit from Trump’s true lord determines how this ends.

Our Take:

This was a touchy subject to be taking on.  It is one thing to take your stabs at certain religions, but they may have crossed a few lines.  In no way do I consider myself a Christian, nor would I let a show like this impact my opinions, but having a character like Trump calling himself Jesus or God seems a little risky.  It is pretty evident that there was a writer’s room filled with anti-Christian material just waiting for an episode like this and they let it all out.  The jabs kept coming throughout the whole show, at times it was hard to keep up.  Some of it was unnecessary, and some of it just wasn’t funny, but if you throw enough darts at the wall something is bound to stick.

In my opinion, Jared Kushner has probably been the most underutilized character thus far in the series, so I was glad to see a larger role for him in this episode.  The side plot started out strong when the Trump boys tried to convince Kushner to murder a lion- who happened to be Rex Tillerson in a costume.  Unfortunately, the story did not seem to go anywhere.  With the promise of a “bro mitzvah” that never happened, I wonder if they ran out of time in the episode to finish this plot properly.

I have been a big advocate since this series launched that they need to be doing more.  Again, I feel like there was some missed opportunity here.  When you have a major annual event like the White House Easter Egg Roll and Trump pretending to be a deity, you expect something outrageous to happen- like Will Ferrell outrageous.  But, they missed the boat and went a whole other direction.  I admit, the interpretation of who Trump worships was a great addition to the episode; it’s just not enough at this point to lift the series to where it should be.