Can we please stop comparing Donald Trump’s America to ‘Idiocracy’?
It has become a cliché to point out all the parallels between the US under the second Donald Trump administration and the dystopian US portrayed in Mike Judge’s 2006 comedy Idiocracy.
From the mass dumbing down of the population to a White House run by an image-obsessed reality TV entertainer with only a handful of brain cells and a lot of gold kitsch, the connections aren’t subtle. The general tone when discussing the modern-day relevance of the film is a sort of gleeful reverence, an assertion that “they got it right”. But watch the first two minutes of the movie, and you’ll quickly realise that no, they did not get it right. In fact, they got it very, very wrong.
The premise of Idiocracy is spelt out in the first few minutes via narration. Joe is a military librarian of average intelligence who is selected to be part of an experiment in which he is cryogenically frozen in a pod and woken up a year later. The experiment is shut down within months, leaving Joe and his fellow test subject Rita, a sex worker played by Maya Rudolph, to stay frozen for 500 years until an avalanche of rubbish knocks open their boxes. They wake up to find a wasteland of garbage, branding, and fast food, and a population so dumbed down that they can barely string a sentence together, let alone carry on a conversation.
According to the narrator, this decline in humanity came about when intelligent people started having fewer and fewer children while people with low IQs bred mindlessly. Over multiple generations, this led to a catastrophically brainless population. Joe, who was merely average in 2005, turns out to be a genius in 2505.
Once the authorities realise this, he’s ushered to the White House, where he discovers that the president is a former WWE-style wrestler played by Terry Crews and his cabinet is populated by an illiterate teenager, a barely-verbal, minimally-clad woman, and a man with learning disabilities. Tasked with solving the country’s agricultural crisis, Joe stuns his new bosses when he swaps the electrolyte drink they’ve been using on the crops with water.
Most of what people seem to remember about Idiocracy is the idea of a steady decline in the intelligence of the American public, the spectacle of having a flamboyantly stupid charlatan as president, and the pervasiveness of mega-corporations and their branding. Beyond that, people remember specific catchphrases and jokes, like the store greeters who mumble “Welcome to Costco, I love you” and the rebranding of the restaurant chain Fuddruckers to ‘Buttfuckers.’
What people conveniently forget, however, is the premise of the movie. Idiocracy hinges on the idea that poor people are to blame for the steady decline of the country’s average intelligence. Never mind that, in the real world, it’s the wealthy who pour their money into wall-to-wall marketing, exploit the labour of poor people, and fill the coffers of a corrupt president. It was the world’s richest man who helped turn politics into an idiotic spectacle by doing a Nazi salute and leaping around a stage with a chainsaw. It is also the world’s richest man who is constantly procreating.
The central premise of Idiocracy is not just problematic; it’s wildly inaccurate. The irony is that people in poverty cannot afford to have children in America. In a 2025 survey, seven out of ten Americans said that they had capped the size of their family, or were planning to do so, for financial reasons. When daycare for one child can cost more than a month’s rent, even people who want children are forced to decide against it. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill has kicked about five million Americans off food stamps, sending more people into poverty and providing yet another reason to not have more children.
On the other end of the spectrum, conservatives are spearheading a “pronatalist” movement, encouraging people (as long as they are white and not reliant on welfare, of course) to have as many children as possible. As tech billionaires and Trump officials announce the arrivals of their latest offspring, the birthrate in the rest of the country is declining.
Although Idiocracy doesn’t explicitly conflate poverty with unintelligence, it does do so visually. During the opening narration in which we learn how Americans became so stupid, we are shown two couples – the first is childless and sitting in what looks to be an expensive home. The second is shown in a small, scruffy house on a dirt road with a broken-down car in the yard and children filling every part of the frame. It’s as explicit as you can get without verbally stating it.
Dumb poor people are the cause of a crass, commercial society, according to this movie, not greedy, corrupt rich people. The politics of this worldview is staggeringly out of step with reality, and is only becoming increasingly so with every passing day. The US is where it is because of people like Elon Musk and all the heads of universities and law firms that so eagerly turned themselves inside out to placate an 80-year-old narcissist who, it should be noted, has produced more than his fair share of moronic offspring. And we should be blaming the tech billionaires and their algorithms for the dumbing down of the population, not the people who download apps and go to Costco.
Even without the fatal fallacy of the premise, Idiocracy has not aged well. A white character uses the N-word, words like retard and fag are thrown around constantly, and the intellectually disabled character is clearly meant to be a punchline. Presumably, defenders of the movie would say that this criticism misses the whole point. Idiocracy is making fun of the ‘type’ of white person who uses the N-word or the ‘type’ of person who thinks homophobic and ableist slurs are funny. But of course, it’s always both. Sure, Judge and co-writer Etan Cohen might have been making fun of those types of people, but they also expect their audience to laugh when they hear the N-word.
Idiocracy is a movie that is profoundly pleased with its supposed provocations, even though eugenics and racism were two of the defining movements of the 20th century. The creators might have predicted the explosion of consumerism and the stunning stupidity and lack of qualifications of the second Trump administration, but it’s hard to credit them with forward-thinking when the key idea is so woefully backward.
