The Finales of "The Boys," SNL, and Colbert Stand Up to Trump
You're already the most powerful person on Earth, and you're a lonely, miserable piece of s**t. ... scaring people into calling you God doesn't make you God, and deep down, you know that."
(Son Ryan to Homelander in the finale of "The Boys")
Well, we have a new historically worst president at least. His reign was bloody, if fictional, and ended this week.
Fair warning that here follows the first of many heavy spoilers regarding the the shows s cited above in the headline. The fictional chief executive in question is a corpse, killed extra dead by a growling William Butcher using a crowbar. His moniker in the manic, televised world of “The Boys” is Homelander.
As played by with scary elan by raised-in-New Zealand actor Antony Starr across five seasons of the Amazon Prime series , “The Boys,” Homelander fully earned this above rebuke from the son he raised with casual cruelty.
Show runner Eric Kripke was smart enough the conclude the show’s much celebrated if at times knock-kneed run in decent form with last week’s stomp-fest, showing said bad-autocrat-turned Fake-Jesus knocked humiliatingly to his knees.
The comparisons between the show’s Horrible Boss and our own real-life ruler have been obvious since well before this week in which, to cite one example of what the New York Times has called on online "slopaganda" battle, an Iranian general posted a faked meme of our own President genuflecting before the Ayatollah. Using versions of Lego figures and other cartoonish visuals, the Iranian loyalists and operatives seem to be winning the men war that, as the Times noted, was "arguably started by " American social media operatives.
Shown in various mocking poses, the blows Trump figure faces not the old Ayatollah, killed on February 28, but the more obstinate and youthful newer leader. Another sneering response came via an Iranian meme showing Trump kneeling before a bas-relief of an ancient Iranian king.
Taking out the former theocratic head man has come to be seen as one of the failures of Trump's `strategies' in his unacknowledged if somehow much-bragged-about war, an `excursion' in which Trump later threatened that, if Iran missed his deadline to reopen the Strait of Hormuz on April 7, “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
Statesmanship, Trump 2.0. And so Homelander.
Of course, Trump’s supposed punishment-by-holocaust didn’t happen; instead, Iran effectively took control of the Strait and started the cascade of oil shortages that brought $7/gallon gas and extreme consequences worldwide, undercutting Western economies and alliances but increasing the wealth and leverage of Russia, China and Iran’.
Yesterday, grasppling to shift perceptions that his bluffing (mixed with a war criminal's ethos) had produced naught but a quagmire, Trump posted on Truth Social that negotiations were promising. After the war hawks led by Ted Cruz and other bloodthirsty advocates of “finishing” the conflict protested the toothless nature of the supposed deal, especially in how it kicked the key nuclear enrichment can down the road. Precious few pundits have opined that the extant deals points represent anything but a subtraction from the status of the Obama negotiation that preceded it.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, intending optimism, then issued almost pure gobbledy-gook about “an outline” of a deal that , “if it works” might give the administration an exit ramp.
As always, Trump managed to show a lack of ordinary manners and family values. Explaining he’d be skipping Don Jr.’s nuptials on the 21st ”circumstances pertaining to the Government, and my love for the United States of America, do not allow me to do so.”
We get it , he was going to be presidenting that day rather than toasting the bride (with her vague ties to Epstein via her rich daddy) ; nor would he be reaching his tiny hands around his corpulent middle to whack golf balls. But why the grandiosity?
Presumably he’s also no-showed for the larger guest list on a celebration on a private island (I wonder what gas costs there?) in the Bahamas.
Said retreat is not to be confused with `Epstein Island,” the tag for the two small properties in the U.S. Virgin Islands where, for example, Howard Lutnick and family yacht’ed over to as snivel around Jeffrey E. years ago. (Don Jr. and Eric getting filthy rich on daddy’s shell games, please—which one should play Beavis and which Butthead in the Hell City production of “Real Housecats of Global Grifting?”)
The fact that Trump hinted he was busy with deep affairs of state may have been enough to frighten families of un-bunkered schoolchildren from Iran to—well, Cuba seems to be in play. Could a Venaezuala-style inetic coup we so much worse than the current starvation scheme? Any day Marco may convince a distractable Trump to go all in with a Venezuals-style showtime invasion to assuage his beef with Cuba dating back to his parents’ migration from that island to Miami.
Whoa, we’re going off track here. (Sir, we can't stand the winning!) The theme this week is how that the three late-May finales cited up top form a packet of blows, however hard to measure for impact, against the Trump empire.
“I absolutely love that Colbert got fired,” said Donnie this week. He has renewed his earlier forecasts that the entire array of late night hosts could be effectively targeted, implying that the recumbent Ellison family as they destroy what was good about CBS (remember "60 Minutes", anyone?) is just the first to knuckle under in his campaign of fear applied to frauds-cat media oligarchs.
Sad as it is to say goodbye to Colbert’s “Late Show,” the anger surrounding its marginally mournful last hurrah will reverberate.
In its steadily amusing, deeply informed skepticism as to what Trump has done to our democracy, it shares space with both “The Boys” and the longtime model for its brand of comic pushback, “Saturday Night Live.”
The question that hangs in the air through the holiday weekend is whether the brand of mockery that this MAGA-leaking, befogged administration seems to invite can be weakened with comedy punching a few rips in its spreading authoritarian fabric.
And indeed, animating this spate of culture wars via TV has been one of Trump’s very worst weeks on the PR front, even, in a couple of instances, joined by some promising pushback from a group previously unified in lickspittle mode –the wanna-be-rogue Senate Republicans.
Having previously shown themselves to be not only bereft of courage but even more deeply immune to shame, the GOP finally read the political optics on what the Dems are calling rank corruption: Trump’s proposed nearly $1.8 billion boondoggle aimed at rewarding cop-beating January 6 thugs.
As former Republican legislator Jeff Flake told NPR, “there seems to be concern about the idea that the president could come up with a $1.776 billion settlement in a lawsuit against himself…Republicans have been pretty supine when it comes to exercising authority."
Points, Mr. Flake, for the use of supine. (We'll bet you have an adjective in your pocket for House Speaker Mike Johnson--maybe weasely?). Flake continued: “In this case, however, that is just so wholly unpopular - to have a fund to reward your political allies - that no Republican wanted to be anywhere near it. They've been running from it…it's almost certain Republicans will lose the House, and Democrats will have subpoena power and everything else that comes with it. And I don't think anybody wants to be on the wrong side of this argument with this fund.
“Americans are hurting out there, particularly gas prices and inflation. And when that is coupled with you see the president's family and friends doing very well, that just --that has some political potency.”
One tactic of the administration's richly under-qualified appointees has been to duck hearings, and until recently such was the dodge of director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought A self-professed Christian Nationalist, he's infamously the architect of the Project 2025 manual for autocrats that set the stage for Vought and Elon Musk to strip away government programs that previously sought to aid the poor, the sick, and the disadvantaged. The pain was immediately felt in America and in the global nations that, in particular, had relied on our once proud and effective Agency for International Development. (Ebola outbreak, anybody? It’s worse than measles.)
At a glance, it would seem ever so likely that the engulfing and greedy monster corporation known as Vought in “The Boys” took its name from this guy, He is in some ways the summiting example of that durable oxymoron of American polity--a merciless Christer.
It’s a type of who invades the secular economy with a dispalynsupposed religious zeal that, when you scratch deeper, enables the grasping of the executive branch for money and power. (An exemplar is the sappy marketing for “The Trump bible”, typical branded-trash-from-Satan fare).
But the name’s coincidental. When the makers of the source comic book series that is “The Boys” created their cast of characters in 2006 (running 72 issues through 2012), newly minted lawyer Vought was still 30 and freshly on the Hill being mentored by Texas senator Phil Gramm--the supposed second policy savant who sponsored measures stripping consumer protections and helped usher in the 2007 and follow-on 2008 global economic crisis.
So he’s villain enough to stand on his own, but in what may be the dawning of a second chance for Kripke to score a popular if subversive series, plans are going forward to take two delicious characters—Jensen Ackles’ Soldier Boy and Aya Cash’s Stormfront—and put them in a Fifties-era scenario where the crypto-fascist Vought conglomerate brings their dark warfighting science to the American political scene. The sassy, hot Stormfront and the gruffly obscene, hard-to-kill Soldier Boy should make for an intriguing watch. Putting aside the genetic and personal complications of the lock-jawed Soldier Boy’s core relationship with Homelander, the spin-off promises certain depths that could summon up a social critique to meet the current moment in the sprawling growth of American war-by-robot machinery.
(An aside might be apt here., on Memorial Day . As much as I may deplore where Trump has steered the military by undercutting its moral principles and defenestrating its savviest and most independent minded top brass, my admiration remains with the ones `War Department’ head bro Pete Hegseth insists on calling war fighters. As a journalist, I have ridden in the back seat of an F-14, for Rolling Stone, as well as cruising at depth in the Pacific on a boomer sub and reporting from Navy SEAL training regimes for Men’s Journal. So, may our miliary personnel thrive. (With healing wishes for those wounded while serving in ill-protected Middle East facilities., and may we lose to more lives.) But don’t’ feed us the posturing Pete Hegseth, whose biggest risk may have been from scarfing from the beer bong one imagines as an Officers’ Mess feature of his tour at…Gitmo prison camp. If you want a veteran to look up to, try this guy as a better option:
https://www.dogtown.press/the-muskrat-mess-paul-reickhoff-isnt-having-it/
Let’s return to our own resistance stalwarts, show biz chapter, in their own televised one battle after another. As “Saturday Night Live” sped towards its own (season) finale in Season 5’s twentieth episode on May 16. In the cold open, we saw Colin Jost shout “Cut the jukebox!” as he bellied up to a nicely set-decorated version of a bucket-of-bluster, D.C. saloon. We at once know he’s doing his Hegseth impression, which recently shot right to the top of his c.v. alongside his Weekend Update work, and he nails it here: “Can you believe I started a war?”
And who turns up to spoof boof-er bro Justice (“I still like beer”) Kavanaugh . Played by Matt Damon with a gavel and robe, he brags to Pistol Pete, “can you believe I ended abortion? Your body my choicer!” He cites memories of s dudes Squee and Gang Bang Gary, and simperingly, chokes forth a pained call-out to…” male loneliness”.
And yet there’s more. You ask yourself, who’s the most arse-faced boozehound, in a tight race for worst appointee, but Kash Patel? Aziz Ansari takes up the challenge and just about steals the great bit (and kudos to the writers for sure!) with his bug-eyed touting of his “F.B.I. Bourbon”. ”
^Watch it right here. I know, maybe for the sixth time?:
https://www.nbc.com/nbc-insider/snl-may-9-kavanaugh-hegseth-patel-bar-cold-open-matt-damo
With the late night talk show hosts and their programs increasingly under threat, here’s a bravo to stalwart hosts Fallon, Kimmel, Meyers, Olive and Stewart for their solidarity with the big-hearted Colbert, who is maybe the true heart of the entire cabal.
When we first encountered him he was Second City alum working with fellow improv smartie Paul Dinello and Amy Sedaris on the 72 often gem-like episodes of Comedy Central’s “Strangers with Candy.” Colbert, played a rather haywire history teacher and had colleague comically closeted gay relationship with Dinello. (The students twittered, but the subtrefuge played more laughs—never more honkingly than the episode in which the guys banged into an empty utility room of and smashed the light bulb frantically, the better to get busy. The show was a bit transgressive for its day; as Collbert’s Chuck Noblet offered up in visiting an alcoholics support group meeting, “Dear God, please give me the strength to blame those who did this to me, to accuse those who didn’t and the wisdom to know the difference.”
You can see the blithe jabbing at convention right there, prefiguring the extended gag that became the nearly 1500 episodes that became “The Colbert Reportt” from 2005-2014.
Perhaps the most winning aspect of the craft shown by all the shows and performers detailed here is how they not only keep pace, but somehow almost preordinate the manifold absurdities of the current government takeover.
Leave it to the comic masters to understand you can’t always make this stuff up when often it’s right in front of you? Colbert made the point neatly not long ago the ”Strangers” trio reminisced about those times for The Hollywood Reporter; they were baffled at how often plots they cooked up played out in real, if absurd, life. Colbert sums it up: ““It happened multiple times on the show that we couldn’t think of anything wrong enough to do [that] the world didn’t beat us to the punch.”
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