Tuesday night on FX, cable subscribers have the option of tuning into American Horror Story: Cult and watch Donald Trump unleash terror on helpless women and children.
“What’s the thing that scares you the most?” a voice whispers in the series trailer.
A voiceover announces Donald Trump wins the presidency and all hell breaks loose. In one house, a lesbian couple screams at the television in absolute horror. In another, a young man with blue hair screams as if his team won the game and begins humping his television — you know, just like a typical Trump supporter.
And then… clowns. Clowns everywhere.
TV critic Hank Stuever got a sneak peak at the episode and wrote about it in The Washington Post:
It’s the oh-so-long-ago night of Nov. 8, 2016, and a group of friends has gathered to watch election returns at the tastefully yuppified small-town Michigan home of Ally and Ivy Mayfair-Richards (Sarah Paulson and Alison Pill), a nice lesbian couple who run a successful locavore restaurant on a quaint Main Street nearby.
Stoked for a Hillary Clinton victory, the women and their friends are instead subjected to the live nightmare of Trump’s triumph — and it is indeed portrayed with such screaming and weeping and cursing of statistician Nate Silver that it terrifies Ally and Ivy’s nerdy young son, Oz (Cooper Dodson), who asks if his mommies will be able to stay married…
“Cult” also zeros in on the immediate blame and recrimination: How could this happen? What went wrong? Because they live in a district in which Clinton crucially lost by a mere 10,000 votes, one of their party guests blames his wife for surfing Pinterest all day instead of voting. Even worse (and I caution that the rest of this sentence merits a slight spoiler alert), it turns out that someone in the Mayfair-Richards household didn’t pull the lever for Clinton in the voting booth.
The outcome sends Ally, who has struggled with phobias and anxiety for years, on a downward spiral. Remember in 2016 when Americans were briefly gripped by a spate of coulrophobia (the fear of clowns) and started seeing and reporting creepy clowns stalking their communities? “American Horror Story” certainly remembers and considers the Trump victory a splendid time to capitalize on it. Not only have they brought back Twisty the Clown (a memorably murderous character from a previous season), but they’ve also sent in all the clowns, who act as a kind of Manson family, leaving smiley faces painted in blood at their crime scenes. Ally starts seeing them everywhere, even in her grocery store, where the only other person around is a gloating cashier in his red Make America Great Again baseball cap.
Across town, the Trump victory has electrified Kai Anderson (Evan Peters), a twisted young man who exalts in the moment, smearing his face with orange Cheetos dust and styling his dyed-blue hair into a Trumpian pompadour. Kai begins to menacingly assert his power as one of the president-elect’s “forgotten” Americans — free to taunt his community with politically incorrect remarks and aggressive behavior while he campaigns to fill a newly vacant city council seat, as the previous occupant has been gruesomely murdered.
Stuever thinks the show does an excellent job at also mocking the “anti-Trump worrywarts relentlessly crying those sweet liberal tears,” telling them to “Get a grip already and stop freaking out over every last Trump tweet and executive order.” However, he quickly backtracks and declares AHS: Cult to be “a literal manifestation of the bubbling, roiling evils of racism, homophobia, xenophobia and hate.”
Sounds riveting.
Watch the trailer below so you can see what you won’t be watching:
