What are you up to this weekend? If you’re American, then there’s only one right answer to the question: celebrating the 79th birthday of our lord and saviour, Donald John Trump. As you will know, and already have marked in your calendar, there’s a big military parade happening in Washington DC on Saturday 14 June. Nominally this is to mark the US army’s 250th anniversary, but thanks to the machinations of time and space it happens to fall on Trump’s birthday: the parade has been widely branded as a big boy birthday party for the president.
If you can’t get to DC to physically watch Trump’s parade then I’m sure you’re desperate to watch it on TV. ABC News, which recently dropped its correspondent Terry Moran for a social media post calling Stephen Miller, the Trump administration deputy chief of staff a “world class hater”, plans to cover the parade across programs and platforms, beginning 6pm on Saturday. Networks such as CBS and NBC seem to have relegated coverage to their streaming channels. Fox and NewsNation, meanwhile, will be going all out for dear leader’s celebrations. Which will be lavish: the event is costing as much as $45m, not including all the damage that military vehicles are going to do to the roads in DC. And the best part of all this? You, the taxpayer, are footing the bill! Who needs money for schools and infrastructure, eh? We the people want to see big tanks, goose-stepping soldiers and missiles that go boom.
In the event that you, in fact, do not want to see these things then I do have some alternatives for you. Please find below a helpful list of things to watch on Saturday other than Trump’s birthday parade. As I’m a little brown woman on a green card I’d like to make very clear that I am not encouraging you to snub Trump. Nope, all of the below are their own sort of homage to the man we are so lucky to have as president.
1. The Lives of Others (2006)
Ulrich Mühe’s Oscar-winning drama is set in East Berlin in the 1980s, before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Capt Gerd Wiesler is a Stasi (secret police) officer who is initially loyal to the regime until he starts to empathize with the people he spies on. Wiesler must choose between loyalty to an oppressive regime and being a good person. Eventually he chooses the latter. The movie reportedly had some real-life consequences. In 2014, 43 Israeli intelligence veterans refused to serve in Palestinian territories because of the widespread surveillance of innocent residents. According to the New York Times, one of the Israeli captains had a moral awakening after watching The Lives of Others. “I felt a lot of sympathy for the victims in the film of the intelligence,” the captain said. “But I did feel a weird, confusing sense of similarity, I identified myself with the intelligence workers. That we were similar to the kind of oppressive intelligence in oppressive regimes really was a deep realization that makes us all feel that we have to take responsibility.”
2. Dumb and Dumber To (2014)
Much like Trump 2.0, this Jim Carrey romp is a terrible sequel that should never have happened. There is a meandering plot involving a kidney transplant and a pork chop but the real drama here actually comes from how the film was made. From 2009 to 2015, more than $4.5bn was “misappropriated” from a Malaysian government fund and laundered in various ways across the world. In 2016 and 2017 the justice department claimed millions of dollars from that fund were funneled to a production company to make The Wolf of Wall Street, Dumb and Dumber To and Daddy’s Home. Now that “daddy” Trump (as Tucker Carlson likes to call him) is home in the White House, it looks like money laundering is going to be made great again. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s policy blueprint for Trump’s second term, calls for Congress to “repeal the Corporate Transparency Act”, which makes money laundering harder by requiring limited liability companies to disclose their owners.
3. 2073 (2024)
Asif Kapadia’s drama-doc takes place in (you guessed it!) 2073, 37 years after “The Event”, which is an unspecified disaster that changed the world. The film opens with dystopian footage from Gaza with the chilling insinuation that soon everywhere will look like Gaza; soon all of us will be treated like Palestinians. Trumps loom large in 2073: it features Ivanka Trump celebrating her 30th year ruling over a dystopian police state. “That [sequence] where Ivanka Trump is celebrating her 30th year in power is there because the idea of a two-term American presidency, I don’t think, will be around forever,” Kapaida told Variety. Big military parades, however? Those might be around forever even if we’re all living in bunkers or (as is the case in 2073), the ruins of shopping malls and trying to dodge drones trying to detect everyone undesirable to the state.
4. The Orange Man (2015)
A bunch of middle-aged friends go on a camping trip and are murdered by a disillusioned door-to-door orange salesman whose weapon of choice is his prosthetic hook and a bag of oranges. I know it sounds ludicrous but suspend your disbelief. We live in ludicrous times.
5. Children of Men (2006)
This dystopian thriller is set in 2027 when decades of pollution-induced human infertility have left society on the brink of collapse. “[W]hat would happen to us all, psychologically, if the end of the world was at hand?” the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw asked in a review of the film. “[One character says] that he personally gets by from day to day by simply not thinking about what is happening, and his stunned, bleak acquiescence in the creeping horror of global death is symptomatic of the vast spiritual sterility which ushered in the catastrophe in the first place.” If that sounds bleak then the good news is that, come 2026, we might get a remake called Children of Musk where humanity is saved by Elon Musk donating his sperm to everyone and sending all his kids to Mars.
6. The Front Line (1983)
This documentary on El Salvador’s civil war is available on a number of platforms. Probably good for people in the US to know a thing or two about the country in case you end up getting shipped there.
7. Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb (1964)
Stanley Kubrick’s famous satire deals with a mad-dog American general called Jack Ripper who goes rogue and initiates a nuclear attack (“Wing Attack Plan R”) on the Soviet Union. (Like many people in the Trump administration, by the way, General Ripper is absolutely obsessed with fluoride, believing it to be part of a communist conspiracy to “[pollute] our precious bodily fluids”.) An ineffectual president called Merkin Muffley convenes a crisis meeting to try and stop a doomsday scenario. I won’t tell you how it ends. But I will say that you should probably just stop worrying and learn to love all of Trump’s big, beautiful bombs.
8. Idiocracy (2006)
In Mike Judge’s anti-corporation cult hit, the meek don’t inherit the earth, the morons do. An average Joe called Joe is placed in hibernation via a US army experiment and wakes up in 2505 where the most popular show on The Violence Channel is called Ow, My Balls! and everyone is … how do you say in English? ... unintelligent. In a 2017 interview, Terry Crews, who played President Camacho in the film, called it “so prophetic in so many ways it actually scares people”. And its Urban Dictionary entry reads: “A movie that was originally a comedy, but became a documentary.” Elon Musk, meanwhile, has shared the opening scene to try and scare intelligent-identifying people into having kids. Perhaps Musk has watched the film too many times, however, because he appears to have morphed into one of his characters. When the billionaire, sporting sunglasses indoors, theatrically wielded a chainsaw at CPAC earlier this year it drew numerous comparisons to President Camacho’s machine-gun-waving showmanship in the movie. And that showmanship, of course, will be nothing compared to the big guns at Trump’s birthday parade. Goodbye the rule of law and a government of the people; hello dumbocracy.
