Review: Our Cartoon President “Culture War”

It doesn’t matter what your political beliefs are, old white men really are uninspiring.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

In the House of Representatives, Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are pressuring Nancy Pelosi to impeach Trump, but she refuses to budge. After making a number of excuses, she repels out of the statehouse on a grappling hook. Trump, after watching the debacle, sees an advertisement for a pizza chain that has taken a stand against him. After a closer look at the national corporate climate, Trump concludes that a number of corporations globally have done the same. Trump remembers when corporations were friendlier to him before he endorsed white nationalism, and he schemes on how to get them back.

Meanwhile, across the aisle, Joe Biden is the current Democratic front-runner, but he is polling horribly with progressives. He holds a meeting with his competition to attempt to strong-arm them into allowing him to get the nomination, but none of them are willing to budge and chastise him for his old-school views and lack of progressivism. He meets with Chuck Schumer and Barack Obama, but neither is able to give him the edge he needs to win out over his competition. As a result, Biden runs the first negative campaign of the election and draws ire from his fellow Democrats.

Back in the White House, Trump takes Mike Lindell—the owner of MyPillow and the only business leader who will still talk to him—under his wing. He gives Mike tons of government funding and starts businesses in a number of industries that have declared war on the presidency. Unfortunately for Trump, this backfires almost immediately. Not only are the products Lindell makes terrible, but the business community now sees the president as their competition. They have upped their attacks on the White House and have stopped contributing to Trump at all.

At the national debates, Joe Biden is thoroughly taken to task by his rivals. After an embarrassing rant on an Amtrak train, Obama tells Joe that he has to be himself. At the same time, a self-pitying Trump hears about a skirmish outside of a pizza place and joins the fray. As it looks like the country is about to enter a second Civil War, Joe Biden does all he can to break up the violence. He fails spectacularly, and Barack Obama comes in to diffuse the situation. He does so and then fails to pitch the nation on a new Netflix show. Things return to the status quo soon after with Biden remaining the front-runner and Trump accepting that business is no longer his friend.

Our Take

In its efforts to humanize the president of the United States, Our Cartoon President often opts to make him pathetic. One of its favorite ways to do so is by making Trump, a man who seemingly has everything and is still unhappy, pine after some ephemeral concept the way one might after an unrequited crush, to make the man seem more relatable. The season opened with Trump Tower Moscow as the object of the president’s affections, and this week we’ve returned to the well with Trump chasing after the support of the United States business community. While it’s a fairly clever conceit on its own, coming back to it so soon after beginning the season with it makes the show seem like it doesn’t have a lot of ideas in store for this go around.

This is furthered by the structure of the show mirroring the season premiere in other ways. Just like two episodes ago, Trump’s quest for fulfillment is broken up by Democratic infighting as their chance to unseat Trump in 2020 approaches. As before, I find this to be the home of the series’ smarter satire, as the caricatures of the Democratic candidates are better observed and actually funny. The trick, though, is less impressive the second time, and I do hope that the show has a few more up its sleeve. The two plots don’t really connect this week, and the Trump story doesn’t connect so much as fizzle out at the climax of the Democrat’s B-Plot. Come to think of it, Biden, too, relies on an Obama ex-machina to solve his problem.

Where this episode does succeed is on a joke level. The writing staff is a team of seasoned late night writers, and while they don’t crank out winners, the humor is dense enough that it’s hard not to get a few laughs in during the thirty-minute runtime. That length, though, maybe a double-edged sword, as the show’s density also means that it feels longer than it is. Without commercial breaks, it means that when the show is firing blanks, it feels like an eternity before it gets back on track again.

One thing that gives me pause as the show goes on is that it still fails to build on itself. The show is so slavishly dependent on the headlines that it seems to have a difficulty creating its own universe of characters for fear that the real-life versions of those characters will do something incompatible with Our Cartoon President’s version of them. This results in an entire universe of flat characters. While this is satire, so rounded character arcs are not strictly necessary, serialized satire is sure to get stale without some attachment to these characters other than as avatars for their real-life counterparts.

It’s hard to deny that I am consistently amused, but all my enjoyment makes me think is that these writers would be better served on something less weighty. This show is not really speaking truth to power (not that power would listen here if it did), and it makes the president seem human as often as it makes him feel like a buffoon, so it’s not really doing much work in one direction there. I guess it’s funny to have Nancy Pelosi make jokes about the defunct Goodwill Games, but I’m not sure it’s anything more than that, as much as Our Cartoon President tries to make me believe otherwise.