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There's a moment in Jordan Peele's social horror film Us when Adelaide Wilson (Lupita Nyong'o) asks her doppelgänger Red (also Nyong'o) who she and her family of "others" are. Red's response––"We are Americans."––is on the nose, but nonetheless prescient.
That line no doubt inspired Funny or Die's parody trailer that imagined what the film, already a statement on the demonization and confinement of the lower classes from members of the entitled upper echelons, would look like if it took place at President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort rather than the deceptively carefree Santa Cruz boardwalk.
The reworked trailer includes shots of white nationalist rallies and includes cameos from Fox News personalities Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, and Sean Hannity. Donald Trump is front and center, of course.
Watch it below:
Us, but about U.S.www.youtube.com
It appears to have struck a nerve...
...on both sides.
You can watch the original trailer and compare notes here:
Us - Official Trailer [HD]www.youtube.com
Trump's history of racial animus is well documented. A few examples, all of which have galvanized white nationalists throughout his presdiency, are listed below
- In the 1980s, he insisted that the Central Park Five, four African American juveniles and one Hispanic juvenile who were convicted of a rape and assault they did not commit, were guilty anyway, even though a convicted rapist and murderer already serving a life sentence in prison confessed to the crime and DNA evidence confirmed his guilt.
- In January 2018, he was criticized for making disparagingly racist remarks calling Haiti and African nations "shithole countries."
- In August 2018, he was accused of taking a talking point straight from the playbook of white nationalists when he said he'd asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to "closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures."
Land reform––more specifically "land restitution"––was one of the promises made by the African National Congress when it came to power in South Africa in 1994, in response to the Native Lands Act of 1913. which "prohibited the establishment of new farming operations, sharecropping or cash rentals by blacks outside of the reserves" on which they were forced to live. White nationalists have claimed that the movement has sparked a "genocide" against white farmers who've opposed redistributing lands.
- Trump also came under fire on the campaign trail for referring to Mexicans as "rapists" and "murderers." In the days after the body of Mollie Tibbetts, a Brooklyn, Iowa college student was found, Trump and many conservatives seized on the fact that the suspect, Cristhian Bahena Rivera, is a Mexican national who authorities say was in the country illegally, and have used the murder to make the case for harsher immigration legislation.
- Last summer, the president and his administration created a crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border when he and Jeff Sessions, his former attorney general, announced their "zero tolerance" family separations policy. The president blamed Democrats for the policy, imploring them to "start thinking about the people devastated by Crime coming from illegal immigration."
The president denied that he or Sessions had anything to do with the policy, even as he admitted that the policy was a negotiating tool to get Democrats to cave to his demands (which include tougher border security as well as a wall erected along the nation's southern border).
The president's racially charged statements have prompted commentators such as CNN's Don Lemon, whom Trump once derided as "the dumbest man on television," to observe that he "divides by race and tries to conquer decency by smearing and besmirching the truth."