Around midnight tonight Donald Trump the politician will either turn into President-elect Donald Trump or a purse-lipped pumpkin. Either way, his unprecedented candidacy will have a lasting effect on the nation, as we’ve inched ever closer to the possibility of a POTUS who’s spent more time in a wrestling ring than a library.
Not only would Trump be the first president to cut promos for the WWE, he’d be the first whose campaign rallies look like Raw. There’s a reason the video below, posted to Twitter only two days before the election, has steamrolled its way to meme status as the polls close. It’s not only funny — it’s believable. No, Trump didn’t close out his campaign by appealing to voters with the help of Stone Cold Steve Austin. But would you be surprised if he did?
A decade ago, a presidential candidate with a pro-wrestling past would have sounded like the plot of a dumb Hollywood comedy. And it was! But when screenwriter Etan Cohen and director Mike Judge made Idiocracy in 2006, they didn’t expect their fictional commander-in-chief, a foul-mouthed wrestler-turned-president, to seem so prescient, so soon. “I never expected #idiocracy to become a documentary” Cohen tweeted during the primaries. “We just thought it would take much, much longer to get to this point,” he told BuzzFeed earlier this summer.
But here we are, on Election Day 2016, and there’s a chance that the next president will be a man who was once on the business end of a Stone Cold Stunner.
A man who once participated in an event billed as the “Battle of Billionaires,” which ended with him and a sweaty man in his underwear shaving the head of WWE CEO Vince McMahon.
A man who once shared seats at WrestleMania with a high-rolling horse trainer who dropped millions at Trump casinos only to later be banned for his mob connections.
In Idiocracy, President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho is a meathead moron, but he’s only able to ascend to his role as leader of the free world because of an American populace whose minds are diluted by TV shows like “Ow My Balls.” Same goes for Trump, who could never have gotten this close to the White House without a voting block that barely reads, preferring its news televised at a fourth-grade level.
Idiocracy was meant to satirize the American obsession with big brands, celebrities, and mindless entertainment. But as Cohen told BuzzFeed, extending these politics was just a “crazy joke.” Now, it seems like anything but. When it was originally released in 2006, 20th Century Fox abandoned the film, letting it die in a limited, seven-city theatrical run with zero ad promotion, for reasons that have spawned much speculation. Last month, Judge’s once-forgotten satire returned to theaters for a 10th anniversary engagement, its cult status cemented, and with its creators likely feeling a tiny bit vindicated.