Mike Judge and Etan Cohen, the creative tandem behind the 2006 cult comedy Idiocracy, are reportedly writing anti-Donald Trump campaign ads set to star actor Terry Crews, who played the fictional wrestler-turned-President Camacho in the movie.
In an interview with Buzzfeed, Cohen said he began to notice similarities between the real-world 2016 presidential race and his 2006 film, which imagines a world in which America’s collective IQ has plummeted and has thrust the country into a kind of idiotic, dystopian nightmare world.
In the film, Crews — in real life, a former professional athlete himself — plays the brawny President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho.
“It’s like, the more things go on, the more it actually seems to be kind of merging in a very specific, eerie way,” Cohen, who wrote Idiocracy along with Judge, told Buzzfeed of the similarities he sees between the fictional Camacho and Donald Trump.
In February, Cohen took to social media to call attention to the perceived similarities between the film and this year’s real-life election. The writer told Buzzfeed he didn’t expect anyone to see the tweet, but it had been re-tweeted nearly 4,000 times as of early June.
I never expected #idiocracy to become a documentary.
— Etan Cohen (@etanjc) February 24, 2016
The response to the tweet inspired Cohen to reach out to Idiocracy director Mike Judge to request help in creating a series of anti-Donald Trump campaign ads that could satirize this year’s race, with Crews stepping back into the role of President Camacho.
“They both seem to be intent on destroying the world. But maybe Camacho more accidentally?” Cohen told the outlet.
“The most dangerous contrast to Trump is that Camacho actually realizes he needs advice from other people, and knows that he’s not the smartest guy in the room,” Cohen added. He also said he would “definitely” vote for Camacho before he voted for Trump, because Crews’s ficitonal character is “not a racist.”
“If you’re making Idiocracy 2, and you’re trying to write whoever’s the heir to Camacho, if you put in Trump, it would be too silly to be in a movie,” Cohen told Buzzfeed of the potential for satire in the new campaign ads.
Cohen told the outlet there’s just one hold-up in getting the ads made: the duo need permission from the film’s studio, Fox, to resurrect Crews’s character for the new spots.
Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum
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