The Stupidest Action Movie of 2020 Was a Dan Crenshaw Political Ad
Donald Trump ran for president in 2016 not as a politician with ideas or a coherent, coherent platform for how he would rule if elected but rather as a brash reality show persona. The persona was of course borrowed from The Apprentice and The Celebrity Apprentice.
It posited Trump as the boss of all bosses, as the ultimate real estate mogul, a swaggering alpha-male who bedded supermodels and porn stars, made billions and never lost a moment’s sleep thinking about the lesser souls he’d crushed on the field of battle.
The Apprentice presented Trump as the quintessential deal-maker, not so much a businessman as business personified. To borrow Jay-Z’s line, it accurately portrayed Trump not as a businessman but as a business, man, and business was forever booming.
So it’s unsurprising that Trump led like a reality show persona as well. For four years, Trump was the messiest bitch ever to hold office. Trump’s presidency was all about drama, drama, drama, sticking it to his many, many enemies and haters as publicly and personally as possible and of course boffo ratings.
Trump’s presidency was also about optics and narratives. Trump wanted to be surrounded by people who would make him look good, who would give him an aura of military authority he lacked due to his non-service in Vietnam or anywhere else.
So Trump gravitated towards respected military men like John Kelly. Trump hoped that the Kelly storyline would resonate with his military-worshiping base: two alpha males/uber patriots joining forces, Voltron-style, to cut through bureaucracy and political in-fighting and deliver for the American people.
Instead the general’s time in Trump’s White House played out predictably: Kelly immediately sized up Trump as a ridiculous man-child wildly out of his element and tried unsuccessfully to work around him before inevitably quitting in disgust.
It’s gotta pretty goddamn flattering having a bunch of ambitious, attractive, insanely driven younger people competing wildly for your favor, which was the premise of The Apprentice and The Celebrity Apprentice.
Trump isn’t president anymore, thank God. And for the moment at least he has not rebooted The Apprentice but there are nevertheless still a number of ambitious, attractive, insanely driven young people competing feverishly for Trump’s favor all the same.
These products of the Trump Revolution/De-Evolution unsurprisingly are similarly reality show personas rather than substantive politicians. Most notoriously there’s Marjorie Taylor Greene. In a reality show, she’d be “The Crazy One”, the true believer who is always up for a fight and never passes up an opportunity to remind the folks at home and her fellow contestants that she’s not here to make friends, she’s here to win.
Then there’s Lauren Boebert, the sexy, gun-toting spitfire who is pretty and packing, sassy and always willing to do what it takes to win any challenge put before her.
On the boys side, meanwhile, we have Madison Cawthorn, a model handsome Paralympian who doesn’t let being in a wheelchair keep him from living his best life and kicking the most lefty ass.
A good indication of how important Daddy Trump’s approval is to Matt Gaetz can be found in a Twitter bio that bragged that the former president described him as “handsome and going places.”
Beauty is inherently subjective but we can all nevertheless agree that Gaetz is ugly inside and out.
But the single most aggressive player in the wild battle for the approval of Daddy Trump and all of Daddy Trump’s followers has to be Dan Crenshaw, a former Navy SEAL and Republican congressman from Texas.
Crenshaw made national headlines when Pete Davidson said his eyepatch made him look like “a hit man in a porno movie” on “Weekend Update” even though he had lost vision in one of his eyes due to an IED during his time in Afghanistan.
Davidson was forced to apologize and to really drive home just how sorry Saturday Night Live was for accidentally being satirical Crenshaw was invited on the show to fling some zingers in Davidson’s direction and prove what a great sense of humor he had.
The appearance went so swimmingly for Crenshaw that some folks said it helped get him elected, the same way Trump was so hilarious and lovable during his stint hosting Saturday Night Live that it single-handedly got him elected president in angry defiance of god’s will.
Davidson pushed back on that assertion in a stand-up special, insisting, “I did not make that guy win. That is America’s fault. The only thing I did do, which I am guilty of and I apologize for, is I did make that guy famous and a household name for no reason.”
Crenshaw wasted no time in leveraging that household name fame as a bad-ass warrior for the American way to star in a clip that’s the single worst, stupidest and most self-indulgent action movie of 2020 despite being a political advertisement for Crenshaw’s fellow Texas Republicans.
It even has the title of a shitty Cannon movie from 1986: Texas: Reloaded. It opens with Crenshaw at “Crenshaw Command Center”, drinking moodily from a cup early in the morning.
Crenshaw picks up a package reading “Top Secret” and tears it open, revealing a cell phone inside. He pulls back his eye patch so that his “bad” eye can transmit a laser for some reason while a classy unseen English voice explains, “Your mission will be, should you choose to accept it, to SAVE Texas. To do so, you must recruit an EXCEPTIONAL team of congressional candidates. They must be courageous, PATRIOTIC and absolutely fearless. Time is of the essence. The nation’s future is dependent on your success.”
It’s a tongue-in-cheek homage to Mission Impossible that finds Crenshaw leaping out of an airplane and plunging to the earth against a backdrop of melodramatic music so that he can hit target “Wesley Hunt.”
When he touches down, superhero-style, Crenshaw magically changes into a suit so that he can recruit Hunt, who is smoking a cigar and channeling Mr. T to the best of his abilities.
“You still know how to fly one of these things?” Crenshaw asks his fellow patriot, to which the smiling Hunt can only reply, with a big Colgate smile, “Dan Crenshaw!”
“I’m putting a team together Wesley” Crenshaw rasps, testosterone and unhinged narcissism emanating from every pore.
“You know I wouldn’t miss this for the world, right?” Hunt replies as he gets out of a chopper. Then we get Hunt’s bona fides: he’s an Apache helicopter pilot and West Point graduate who is “Ready to make D.C work for us.”
But that’s not all! Underneath the helicopter where these macho studs are bantering is ANOTHER badass patriot in the form of August Pfluger, who is a F-22 Combat Pilot, U.S Air Force Colonel, National Security Council Advisor, 7th generation Texan and rancher as well as a husband, father and Christian.
Pfluger may have the last name of a 1980s bad guy but in this shitty b movie he’s part of Crenshaw’s A-team, so he slides out from under a helicopter and volunteers brightly, “You guys looking for a real pilot? Let me get cleaned up.”
In possible the single most obnoxious moment in a clip full of nothing but, Texas: Reloaded then has the unmitigated gall to suggest that, actually, it’s in on the joke and realizes how absurd it is to posit congressional candidates as members of The Expendables by having Crenshaw ask Pfluger, “If you're an F-22 pilot, what were you doing working under a helicopter?” to which he responds, “I have no idea what I was doing. Typical Air Force, fixing the Army’s problems.”
Then Wesley jokes that Crenshaw could have just texted him instead of jumping out of an airplane, forcing Crenshaw to concede, “It’s cooler to jump out of an airplane, never mind.”
Here’s the deal: you don’t get to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars making a four minute long advertisement about how Dan Crenshaw is basically the James Bond/Ethan Hunt of American politics, only cooler and more badass because he’s got an eyepatch (which I will be the first to concede is, in fact, cool and badass) and how his colleagues are nearly as badass, and then throw in ten seconds of meta banter so that you can pretend that the whole thing is tongue in cheek, an enormous goof rather than a campy but straight-faced bit of shameless military-industrial mythologizing.
I should probably point out that we’re barely at the halfway point of what certainly feels like the longest commercial ever made. Next up is Beth Van Duyne. Van Duyne is tragically not a veteran or a soldier. So to establish that she’s on the side of the heroes with guns Van Duyne is introduced giving medals to hero police officers before Crenshaw beckons, “When you’re finished over there, Texas could use your help.”
We still somehow are not done yet so Crenshaw then picks up “Tony Gonzales”, who is depicted as a “US Navy Master Chief, 20 Years” and a “Cyber Warfare Expert” as well as a “Hispanic Conservative.”
Even that, somehow is not the end of it. Next up we head to a dojo where “Genevieve Collins” is kicking a dude’s ass. A dude! And she’s fucking walloping him like Wonder Woman or something, if Wonder Woman were a Conservative representative of Texas’ 32nd district.
Collins isn’t in the military but we are informed she is a “Problem Solver”, “Business Woman” and “Athlete.”
Texas Reloaded teases the idea that the two distaff members of the crew will face off in a sexy catfight but it’s ultimately too classy for something like that, but just barely.
The six Texans then walk towards the camera all cool and swaggering and dramatic-like while helicopters swarm in the background and stuff blows up but good.
Texas Reloaded is ostensibly directed at Texas voters but its real audience seems to be Donald Trump. Like Boebert, Crenshaw works overtime to give the impression that he won’t just fight for voters in terms of legislation but also in terms of personally protecting them from the Antifa terrorists that want to murder their families.
Texas Reloaded erases the already thin line separating politics from entertainment and advertising from propaganda. But I suspect that it made Daddy Trump very happy and that, of course, is all that matters to the Crenshaws of the world and lesser bottom-feeders just happy to be in the same orbit and the same conversation as him.
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