On Wednesday, the leftist humor site Funny or Die unleashed an interminably unfunny 50-minute fake biopic of Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, The Art of The Deal.
The cast is star-studded: introduced by Ron Howard, with Trump played by a not-very-good Johnny Depp, Merv Griffin by the execrable Patton Oswalt, and Ivana Trump by Michaela Watkins (the only thing worth watching in the piece). Variety praised the “sheer gall” of The Art of The Deal, but even they had to admit that it’s a “slim construct” and that “mocking him in this fashion amounts to preaching to the liberal choir.”
The Art of The Deal plays like an inside joke among a bunch of drunken Hollywoodites who spent the evening digging rejected Saturday Night Live sketches from a flaming dumpster. I’m no Trump fan – I think he’s vulgar, empty and egomaniacal, with a significant authoritarian streak. But the fact that an Oscar-nominated director convinced Johnny Depp to spend four days imitating Trump circa 1986 – and doing it badly, by the way – demonstrates just where Hollywood puts its heart. ABC can refuse to release The Path to 9/11 at the behest of the Clintons, but top-billing stars will waste their off-hours on drek like this. They’ll leap at the chance to call Trump a racist, sexist, bigoted Nazi sympathizer.