In case you’re just now waking up today, May 12, 2017, it’s been a crazy morning in Trumpland! Our 45th president woke up today and, as he does many mornings, wrapped his tiny hands around his smartphone and took to Twitter to make his various non-cases in the most incoherent and potentially troubling manner possible. Donald Trump claimed that his staff simply can’t always tell you the unvarnished truth. He daydreamed about canceling all press briefings. He cryptically threatened James Comey with talk of Nixonian “tapes” (this, days after hanging with Henry Kissinger). Trump’s like that kitten who knocks over all the trash cans and vomits on your grandmother’s rug while you’re still trying to climb out of bed, only if that kitten wasn’t cute and had the nuclear codes as well.
Anyway! You know what might make you feel better? That time he got AIDS in last year’s “The Brothers Grimsby.” No one much liked this film, Sacha Baron Cohen’s failed latest attempt at recapturing his former Borat glory. We, however, will argue for its merits. Yes, we — highbrow snobs who swore the best movie last year was a three-hour comedy from Germany — will proudly admit in public spheres that we cackled like slack-jawed morons at a prolonged set piece in which Cohen and respected British thespian Mark Strong, pursued by baddies, hide inside an elephant’s vagina and then almost get banged to death by giant elephant weens.
But one of the gags at the end should truly make “The Brothers Grimsby” a cultural touchstone. During its ridiculous climax — in which a bunch of commoners, who in real life would have voted yes on Brexit, help thwart an explosive apocalypse — a person who happens to have AIDS is shot in the arm. And we follow that AIDS-tainted blood as it spills into the gaping mouth of then-Republican presidential hopeful Donald J. Trump. It’s then reported that he indeed contracted AIDS.
To be fair, the same thing happens earlier in the film to Daniel Radcliffe, and no one wants to see that happen irl. But when “Grimsby” came out over a year ago, the scene received scores of applause. Who knows how big the reaction would be now that he’s making every day feel like the water supply has been laced with LSD? So from now on, every time you feel like Trump is going to kill us all, or simply drive us mad, watch the below clip and feel just a teensy bit better. Art really does serve a valuable, therapeutic good after all.
Follow Matt Prigge on Twitter @mattprigge
