There's nothing clever about comparing Trump to Idiocracy

In February, on Truth Social, Donald Trump posted an AI-generated video responding to Team USA’s victory over Canada in the Winter Olympics’ ice hockey final. Accompanied by Survivor’s song Eye Of The Tiger, the clip shows the president as the star of the team: wearing suit and tie, he scores a goal, hip-checks an opponent into the boards, and (inevitably) drops his gloves for a fight in which his adversary lands not a single punch.

For me, watching the video was like finally gaining entry to a party that has been raging off and on since the first time the American electorate permitted Trump entry to his present digs on Pennsylvania Avenue. At last, I saw what people had been getting at on social media. “This,” I thought, “is like something out of Idiocracy.”

As a paragon of upstanding moral virtue, I no longer use X; but a glance at Bluesky reveals 159 references i. the past 24 hours alone to the dystopian comedy, made in 2006 byBeavis and Butt-Head creator Mike Judge. Almost all suggest it predicts current happenings in the United States.

“Skated the State of the Union last night and watched Idiocracy instead. Kind of felt it was the same,” was one comment. “I remember watching Idiocracy and remarking that we were headed there, years ago. We’re there,” said another.

Described elsewhere as “a movie that was originally a comedy, but became a documentary”, Idiocracy’s plot involves lazy soldier Joe (Luke Wilson) and lady of the night Rita (Maya Rudolph) who, having volunteered to be put in a state of suspended animation, are mistakenly transported to 26^th century America. The sight of complete ruin that greets them upon their arrival can be best explained by the speed with which the citizenry recognises Joe, a once workaday grunt, as the smartest man in the country.

Suffocated by authoritarianism, onscreen, the America of 2505 is a cacatopia of bareknuckled capitalism and environmental disarray. Corporations spirit away children from parents who are unable to afford food. Like a barometer of decay, the White House is the colour of plaque; behind the Resolute Desk, with his every move, the president insults democracy to a degree unprecedented in fact or fiction. (I’m joking. Trump is worse.)

Alas, though, this persuasive setup is quickly squandered. In painting its story with a brush as wide as an electronic billboard, the trouble with Idiocracy is that even on its own daft terms the film barely makes sense. In just one of numerous examples of asinine storytelling, the population has been rendered so stupid that crops are dying in the fields due to being watered with a sports drink. Okay.

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But the viewer is expected to believe that these very same dumbasses possess the wherewithal to successfully manufacture complex irrigation systems that cover the land as far as the eye can see. Mike Judge, it seems, thinks we’re all thick.

Rewatching Idiocracy this week, I also noted that for a film in which the characters are presumably facing famine, a noticeable proportion of the supporting cast was carrying a great deal of weight on its bones. I suppose this might be explained by the amount of beer that is guzzled onscreen, a beverage presumably not brewed from a sports drink. More likely, though, is that in this telling, poor people must be both stupid and fat.

Idiocracy, then, mirrors Trump in its contempt for blue collar Americans. In a slice of classism worthy of Jacob Rees Mogg, at the start of the picture, the decline in the nation’s IQ is attributed to smart people umming and aahing about having children while their indigent brethren – high school quarterbacks, trailer park residents – are knocking ‘em out like pancakes. Really, it’s little more than a version of the Great Replacement Theory in which race has been substituted for income.

Another problem facing the many people who bracket Idiocracy with Trump is that, right now, “stupid” is not the right word to describe what’s happening in and to the US. Martin Amis may have been correct to note that, grammatically, there are “six or seven things wrong” with everything Trump says, but his venal and atavistic grasp of the darkest aspects of his nation’s character is anything but dumb.

As for the electorate, according to a recent study by the Center for Working Class Politics, one fifth of the 55% of non-college educated voters who turned out for Trump favour “left-leaning” policies such as a wealth tax on millionaires and a raise in the minimum wage. As plummeting approval polls suggest, barely a year into his second term, many more supporters are showing strong signs of buyers’ remorse. At the very least, the bond between the country and its president reminds me of a “relationship status” option on Facebook. It’s complicated.

None of which has anything to do with Mike Judge. Given the anarchy on display in Idiocracy, I don’t think he can be expected to have anticipated the involute shadows of a Trump presidency. His jaundiced view, though, well that’s another matter. As someone who’s lived in America, the director’s low regard for his fellow citizens brought me up short.

He’s wrong, too, I think. From Minneapolis to Los Angeles, those manning the barriers in resistance to current calamities is drawn from as a wide a spectrum as the country itself.

In a way that Idiocracy failed to predict, its people are refusing to fall without a fight. All joking aside, a film as submissive as this is a luxury for which we don’t have time.

Ian Winwood is the best-selling author of Bodies: Life and Death in Music