‘Idiocracy’: The movie that predicted Trump

The pollsters didn’t warn us that our country would be overtaken by a spray-tanned demagogue, but there were two screenwriters who foresaw Donald Trump’s rise to power.

In their 2006 movie,“Idiocracy,” Mike Judge and Etan Cohen offered their satirized vision of the future: a world full of decaying buildings, a rigid bar code system for tracking all citizens (not just Muslims, as Trump has proposed) and, most importantly, a bombastic celebrity president with no credentials whatsoever.

His name is President Camacho, and the fictional African American wrestler and porn superstar emerges on screen with an arsenal of talents that mirror that of our president-elect.

To begin (as Trump would) with looks, Camacho’s signature style — long flowing hair and a cut-sleeve tank exposing his protruding muscles — paint him as an incredibly desirable hunk. Perhaps that’s why he proudly enters his first scene with a slew of young, attractive women on both arms. We can only imagine that given his celebrity — he is, after all, praised as the “five time ultimate smack down champion” — that he too, might have been able to “grab them by the pussy.”

If Trump appeared thirsty for attention, then Camacho surpasses him entirely, choosing to sing and perform hisState of the Union Addressadorned in head-to-toe red, white and blue. Naturally, Trump chose to enlist the help of his wallet forhisgrand performance, namely, a January rally in Pensacola Florida where he hired the USA Freedom kids– three young girls in glitzy American flag attire who sang highly about the president in what seemed like an act of North Korean propaganda.

Hyperbole aside, many of Camacho’s methods eerily echo that of our soon-to-be leader. For one, Camacho’s White House committee, much like Trump’s developing transition team, emerges as a haphazard group chosen at whim: a teenager who won a contest, a redhead whose most notable achievement is her overly exposed “fun bags” and, the most mindless of them all, a cross-eyed man staring confusedly into a glass globe.

“He’s kind of stupid,” the fictional secretary of defense tells Joe, Camacho’s chosen vice president during the scene, “but he’s president Camacho’s step brother.”

After doling out positions not only to unqualified candidates and family members, but in the words of Eliot Cohen, as if they were “lollipops,” at this point, nobody would be surprised if Trump’s 10-year-old-son was awarded a lauded position of his own.

Camacho’s most telling scene, however, comes at the very end of the film, when he delivers his State of the Union address to a crowd as rowdy and violent as a one of Trump’s rallies. Reading off of a teleprompter, he lectures the audience with the same 3rd grade vocabulary and mindset as our president-elect.

“S—. I know s—’s bad right now, with all that starving bulls— and we running out of French fries and burrito coverings,” he bellows. “But I got a solution.”

He then proceeds to give his overly simplistic, yet in his mind, completely plausible “3-point plan that will fix everything.”

With no mention of details and a complete disregard forlogic, Camacho marches across the stage, strongly maintaining his position regarding the film’s biggest issue: the dying crops.

He’s going to make them “grow again.”