The Fall of Donald Trump documentary is no pre-midterm fantasy

Releasing a mockumentary called The Fall of Donald Trump just before the 2018 midterms seems like nothing short of a Krassensteinian call to arms for #Resistance Twitter. In that sense, the crew who brought you The President Show have honored their namesake by delivering a classic bait-and-switch.

Anthony Atamanuik’s The Fall of Donald Trump does deliver its titular promise, but not in a way that will satisfy many who are Still With Her. There’s no moment where Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller marches into the Oval Office, slaps Trump’s shadow-subpoenaed tax returns on his empty desk and says, “You, sir, are fired.” Trace amounts of delicious liberal fantasy are here, to be sure, but this special is mostly the fantasy we deserve, rather than the one we may want.

Even viewers who never saw one snippet of The President Show should be familiar with Atamanuik’s Trump. (Alec Baldwin’s way more famous version feels like an inferior riff on it.) Comedy Central started airing his weekly evisceration of the commander in chief roughly 100 days into Trump’s term. The show spent 22 episodes interpreting each week’s events and predicting the future, without ever officially being canceled. By the time the show ended its run, it had put together a rock-solid comedic ensemble, with co-creator Peter Grosz as VP Mike Pence, Adam Pally as Donald Trump Jr., Mario Cantone as Anthony Scaramucci, John Gemberling as Steve Bannon, and Kathy Griffin as Kellyanne Conway.

Peter Grosz (left) as Mike Pence and Anthony Atamanuik (right) as Donald J. Trump [Photo: courtesy of Brad Barket/Comedy Central]As funny as the show was, however, it couldn’t work forever as a weekly series. Traditional forms of political comedy feel redundant in the Trump era, and while The President Show could rehash the news with the best of them, there was scarcely a gaping need to immediately relive each fresh tragedy. (This is where Saturday Night Live too often goes wrong.) Atamanuik is so damn funny in the role, though, and he and the writers are so deft at calling Trump’s shots before he makes them, Comedy Central is smart to revive the show for occasional specials.

The premise of A President Show Documentary: The Fall of Donald Trump is right there in the title. It ostensibly takes place in October and November of 2030, a future in which Trump has been mercifully missing from public life for years, and looks back on when things first started to fall apart. While the future setting provides a chance to predict how this cast will look in 12 years (Gemberling’s Steve Bannon looks like a disease-ridden subway-flasher from the 1980s), it’s the past–or rather our present–that will be of most interest to many. Here is where the fantasy kicks in.

Anthony Atamanuik as Donald J. Trump [Photo: courtesy of Mark Bracamonte/Comedy Central]The 2018 midterms result in that much-anticipated blue wave after all. The Democrats take back the House and install Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as speaker over Nancy Pelosi. If that sounds like too left-leaning an outcome, you will not like what comes next. The Democrats, in the show’s telling, also give Ocasio-Cortez many other positions, the implication being that nobody currently in office is competent to fill them. The masterstroke of the special, though, and indeed the most cynical idea its writers offer up, is that following the midterms the eventual Democratic candidate for 2020 ends up being . . . Donald Trump.

The show uses actual old footage of Mitch McConnell and various CNN anchors inveighing against Trump the candidate, back when he was an unlikely sideshow, reminding viewers how ridiculous the prospect once seemed. Could Trump actually, conceivably, secure the Democratic nomination due to a lack of credible challengers? Of course not. However, the bold joke of suggesting as much is a face-slap that any complacent members of the electorate could use right now. No matter how the midterms shake out, it’s going to take more than what congressional Democrats have done in the past two years to win in 2020.

I won’t spoil exactly how the show’s version of the election ends, but it should suffice to say that the outcome will serve as the peanut butter that makes the medicine of the previous paragraph go down smoother. The final third of the special tracks what all the key members of Trump’s administration have been up to since leaving office, and it’s mostly a riot. (Save for a tired joke about Mike Pence’s lifestyle, which you can probably guess.)

Overall, The Fall of Donald Trump is a worthy addition to The President Show’s catalogue, and a nice way to whet the public appetite for Atamanuik’s imminent Trump book and for any future specials.

If there are no future specials to come, though, this one ends with a perfect callback to the show’s most famous catchphrase come to life: “I was the President. Can you believe it?”