Review: Our Cartoon President “The Party of Trump”

“I always thought Reagan was a nerd.”

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Donald Trump is facing a split party after the midterms. On the one hand, he has his deplorable base of followers who vote on issues such as racism and xenophobia, epitomized by Ann Coulter who has been taking him to task for his lack of adherence to their values. On the other hand, however, there are the oligarchs that are only interested in using government to their own economic advantage, such as Sheldon Adelson. Donald has been told that he is not going to be able to please both wings of the party at the same time, no matter how hard he tries.

In order to court the “decent Republican” vote, he has dinner with Mitt Romney. When the senator refuses to give the president his unconditional support, the latter insults Romney and decides to pivot completely to being deplorable. Romney, as a response, decides to form a caucus of decent Republicans, but can only manage to drum up Susan Collins. He informs her that they need to make a speech on the steps of the capital, but Collins is ambivalent, continually saying that she will get back to Romney in two days, only to continue her postponements any time that Romney gets anywhere near her.

In his quest to be as despicable as possible, Trump uses the FBI to arrest Hillary Clinton. He is ready to execute her by feeding her to a tiger when Adelson demands that he release her immediately. Unsure of what to do, Trump calls an imprisoned Hillary into his office. He asks her for her advice, and the former first lady tricks Trump into locking himself up. A dejected Trump locks himself in his steam room with a plate of spaghetti and when he starts choking begins to have visions.

In his vision, Ronal Reagan tells him—in Hell—that there are not two separate wings of the Republican party, but one single unit that has been impeding progress at least as long as the twentieth century that uses decency as a shield to defend itself from criticism. Trump wakes up and knows what he must do. Romney, for his part, had a pair of abortive speeches at the Lincoln Memorial and he decides to stand up for Republican decency. Trump gets a warrant for Hilary Clinton’s arrest and then tries to feed her to a tiger on the Senate floor. Romney, in his attempt to stop the mauling, is attacked himself and suffers serious injury.

Our Take

Our Cartoon President has often been criticized for humanizing United States President Donald Trump. By making him a (literally) cartoonish buffoon, it trivializes the real damage that he’s done to not only the nation but the world as a whole. They say that comedy is tragedy plus time, so making jokes while an event is still happening might not be nearly enough time for the tragedy to be rendered funny, but I don’t think that’s true. I think that anything can be joked about, but context matters more than anything, and I don’t believe that Our Cartoon President has its ducks in a row when it comes to that.

Another rule of comedy is that punching up is good practice while punching down is more often cruel than funny. I think the reason that I was unable to find most of this episode funny was the distance from which the punch came, and whether these creators were going for face shots or body blows. While the writers of a late night comedy show certainly have less power than a world leader, their actual power discrepancy is not wide enough to be particularly incisive.

In a world where real wages are falling and more and more regular people are being priced out of affordable housing and saddled with student and medical debt, two professions that have seen very little interruption in comfort are politicians and television broadcasters. In the pair of episodes I have seen in the second season of Our Cartoon President, these are the only characters that appear on screen. This isn’t just the named characters; I don’t see a single “regular person”, Democrat or Republican, in the entire show. The result is that wealthy television writers write about wealthy journalists and wealthy politicians. A Modest Proposal this isn’t.

Additionally, the show remains woefully abstract when it comes down to talking about the things Trump actually does. They mention the immigrant-bashing and misogyny, but this show would never show us a shot of a detention center at the border. That would prevent them from portraying Trump as a quasi-endearing figure whose evil is over the top and whose stupidity is unparalleled. Then, the show would have to reckon with the very real evil that this administration perpetrates, and they couldn’t cut it with Stephen Miller eating ice cream in Trump’s bed.

Once that truth reveals itself, the show definitely gets a little harder to watch. If it isn’t effective satire, I’m only left with the option to develop it as a sitcom, and the results are not much better. This is a sitcom without any character growth or continuity (they leave that to the news that provides joke fodder), so the whole thing comes across as pretty old-fashioned. Since it is trying to be satire, I don’t find myself becoming attached to any of the characters, only becoming more annoyed with their one-note quirks.

Since there aren’t any Democrats in this episode, the show doesn’t get a chance to really succeed at its softball brand of lampooning, and that drags the whole thing down pretty heavily. There’s no way it would have been greenlit, but if this were just a show about lampooning the Democrats, it would have been a better tonal match and a far superior show. I’m by no means the first to say this, but late-night television, and its politically middle-of-the-road staffs, are not up to the task of taking down Trump, and it’s hard to see a show with so many resources behind it flounder this much.