I owe Mike Judge an apology.
When the brilliant satirist behind Beavis and Butt-Head and Office Space came out with his 2006 masterpiece Idiocracy, I enjoyed the film but was critical of it. I thought it was too cynical, too cruel, that it took too low a view of human beings in general and of U.S.A.-American-type human beings in particular.
Eighteen years later, the Trump administration is plumbing the world of professional wrestling for the next secretary of education.
So, to the Prophet Mike Judge (peace be upon him), to President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho, to Frito Pendejo, to Beef Supreme and all the rest of the Idiocracy gang, all I can think to say is … Idiocracy was still wrong, damn it, just not in the direction I thought it was. Incredible as the fact may be: Mike Judge took far too generous a view of boobus Americanus.
It’s like we jumped off the ledge, landed in the world of Idiocracy, and then started digging until we were 20,000 leagues underneath whatever muck it is that is morally and intellectually beneath Idiocracy.
As an American, I mourn this. As a journalist, well, it’s awesome. I have a vision of the 2028 presidential election, and it is going to be a hoot.
Like Luke Wilson’s everyman hero in Idiocracy, J.D. Vance is now the smartest man in the world he inhabits—Trumpworld—and he’s a ruthless, hungry, amoral operator. People close to the Trump team say he wasn’t the boss’ first pick. Might he be tempted by some skullduggery? We can only hope.
The obvious thing would be to give some sub rosa help to the Democrats in the impeachment they are sure to try to launch if they win big in the 2026 midterms, which is likely. But with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. running amok throughout the executive branch, maybe a nice lukewarm glass of unpasteurized raw milk swimming with some mutant strain of Mycobacterium tuberculosis would do the trick.
Either way, right now Vance is the man to beat. But there will be competition, of course. There’s the pro-wrestling roster to consider, and the UFC roster, too.
I do hope Matt Gaetz hasn’t left the scene entirely. He should definitely run in 2028—as Donald Trump could tell you, running for president as a Republican turns out to be a terrific way to stay out of jail. But Gaetz needs something to do in the meantime. I think he was a terrible pick for attorney general, but he’d be a great replacement as secretary of education once that nice pro-wrestling lady burns out. Think about it: Republicans insist that the Department of Education is a cabal of woke bureaucrats who should be kept as far from our locally controlled public schools as is humanly possible—and if anybody on the current Republican scene is going to end up with a court order mandating that he cannot go anywhere within 500 yards of a school, it’s going to be Matt Gaetz.
If we can’t have education reform, we can at least get a restraining order.
Sure, secretary of education is not the most obvious launchpad for a run at the presidency, but, then, World Wrestling Entertainment isn’t where you’d think you’d find a future secretary of education, either.
But Republicans are now all about We the People and against Them the Elites. And Republican anti-elitism is just a goddamned glory to behold: Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson of La Jolla Country Day School and whatever Swiss boarding academy it was that expelled him has taken off the bow tie and put on the flannel shirt. (Nice! J. Press?) He’s running around with the everloving moose up there in Maine, no doubt ruefully meditating on the fact that he has been supplanted as the biggest voice on the right by Joe Rogan, a meathead stand-up comedian and Ultimate Fighting Championship commentator who spends his days spreading imbecilic disinformation and his nights high as a Georgia pine. The editors over at William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review (my journalistic home for many years) have rendered their verdict on future director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard: crazy as a bedbug, but hot. Beavis and Butt-Head could not have said it better.
These are weird times, ladies and gentlemen, especially for Republicans.
Whatever happens to Trump, the Republican scramble in 2028 is going to be bananas. Obviously, nobody in the erstwhile Party of Lincoln gives one half of a rat’s fuzzy patootie about big policy ideas just now—I mean, Pete Hegseth wasn’t even intellectually serious enough for the weekday version of Fox & Friends and was relegated to weekends—but they do care a great deal about celebrity, and it would be something to see the House’s sergeant at arms intone in that grandiose way “Ladies and gentlemen! The president of the United States!” as President Kid Rock pimp-strolled down the ol’ congressional aisle in a lime-green fur coat and coonskin fedora. The problem is that, middle-aged and long-past-his-prime as he is, Kid Rock is still a little too hip and way too literate (he can be a clever wordsmith) for today’s Republican Party.
You know who I’d like in the 2028 mix? Booker T. No, not Booker Taliaferro Washington—who was a Republican back when that meant something very different!—I mean Booker T the pro-wrestling guy. He has it all: the pro-wrestling connection, which apparently is now a GOP sine qua non, he’s a felon (armed robbery, and, unlike all those nice white Republicans, he actually did his time), he has a radio show like any good Republican would, and he already has been a candidate, albeit a kind of half-assed one, throwing his hat into the ring for mayor of Houston, America’s most interesting city. And he knows what’s expected of a Republican in our time: He went on Fox News in 2016 and affirmed that Donald Trump is “a man’s man first and foremost.” That’s kind of a weird thing to say about a guy who wears that much makeup, loves the Village People, and goes all misty when somebody plays “Memory” from Cats, but that’s Mr. Manly McMan’s Man for Republicans today.
I know what it feels like to take just a little too much LSD. This is a whole lot weirder.
A couple of weeks ago, I saw former Sen. Phil Gramm, Sen. Mitch McConnell, Betsy DeVos, and a bunch of other old-school Republican types at an American Enterprise Institute event, and it was like I’d traveled into the past in that time machine they’re looking for in Idiocracy, a long-ago world in which Kennedys were respectable Democrats who left women dead in the bay in Massachusetts instead of Republican-adjacent populist crackpots who leave children dead of measles in Samoa. This was a lost world of blue blazers and … well, not exactly sobriety, but a kind of Chamber of Commerce three-martini buzz at most.
A few days later, I’m in a betting pool for when we’re going to have the first GOP-affiliated Cabinet member with face tattoos. (Doug Burgum needs to do something to establish his populist bona fides.) We have a former game-show host and quondam dabbler in pornographic films as the Republican president, while Republican former House Speaker John Boehner is your weed guy. Where do you go from there?
If you think things are going to be any closer to normal the next time around, you weren’t paying attention to the last episode of Trumpworld. This installment—Trumpworld 2: This Time It’s Personal—is loopy enough already, but when they start setting things up for the next season, it’s going to go off the rails in a spectacularly glorious way.
Just drink the raw milk and enjoy the show.
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