The people behind Cards Against Humanity, the parlour game famous for making Chris Morris’s darkest Jam sketches seem like Lenny Henry at the Royal Variety, have decided to out-troll the troll-in-chief.
This week, the company began buying up the Arizona desert. For $15 (£11.40), you can get in on the act (or, rather, you could have done, had you bought one of the limited number of slots before they sold out – and only if you lived in the US or Canada).
“We’ve purchased a plot of vacant land on the border,” the company explains on a dedicated website, cardsagainsthumanitysavesamerica.com, “and retained a law firm specialising in eminent domain to make it as time-consuming and expensive as possible for the wall to get built”. Those who coughed up the 15 bucks will receive six “America-saving surprises” in the post in December, as well as an illustrated map of the land, a certificate enshrining the company’s promise to fight the wall and new cards for the game (this is a seasonal promotion, after all).
In one sense, this is no more than a savvy pre-Christmas marketing campaign, but Cards Against Humanity has been bashing the US’s tartrazine God-emperor for a long time now.
In 2016, co-founder Max Temkin launched the Nuisance Committee, an independent political-action group, which began paying for funny billboards across the country. In Dearborn, Michigan, the city with the highest Arab population in the US, it erected one that read, in Arabic: “Donald Trump can’t read this, but he is scared of it anyway,” and advertised a website, trumpisscared.org.
The group raised more than $430,000 for a campaign in which billboards were emblazoned with Trump’s slur on John McCain in the popular senator’s home state of Arizona: “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
Outside a university in Florida, it ran with: “Donald Trump mains Hanzo and complains about team comp in chat.” This is a reference to the video game Overwatch and translates roughly as: “He picks the worst character, then complains about the composition of the online gaming unit” – a deadly insult in certain gamer communities.
“If Trump is so rich how come he didn’t buy this billboard?” led to trumpdoesntpaytaxes.com. When Obamacare repeal shot to the top of the agenda, a billboard campaign targeted at an Illinois congressman – “Pete Roskam voted to take away my healthcare” – pointed to roskamvotedtotakemyhealthcare.com.
The company has been accused of partisanship by the right. But attacking Trump isn’t political correctness, it points out on the anti-border-wall website; that is just “regular correct”.
