According to Variety, Sacha Baron Cohen told a 92Y audience that Donald Trump has "elements of brilliance" and that "we were too easy to dismiss him as a nincompoop," while promoting Ali G: Who Iz I?, the new movie about a guy who pretends to be a fool.
The press tour for a movie about a guy who pretends to be a fool has one job: compliment the fool. Cohen did the job. Every powerful person Ali G ever interviewed "was punctual," he said, except one. "Donald Trump kept us waiting for about 40 minutes."
The anecdote is from the 2003 interview. Trump Tower, the waiting room, the phone call in the next room. "It really was a power move," Cohen said. The story has aged well. The 40-minute wait is a fact now, verified by a politician's standing habit of being 40 minutes late to everything.
The new part is the second half. "How has he survived a second term? People underestimated him. We were too easy to dismiss him as a nincompoop. There are elements of brilliance to him." Then the follow-up the machine always hands out: "I won't say positively or negatively." That sentence says nothing and is built to look like it says something. It is the written version of a shrug with a hand on the heart. You cannot screenshot a shrug.
On the Pivot podcast he went further. Trump is "amusing," Cohen said, and "there's a huge amount of comedy in the way he speaks. He's intentionally being funny." From the man whose career is built on that exact mechanism, that is a compliment with the serial numbers filed off.
Here is the machine running full speed: the comedian who made a career on the prank is now, mid-press-tour, crediting the pranked with brilliance, because "the man who mocked Trump now respects him" is a headline and "Ali G movie" is not. The prank was the 2003 trick. The 2026 version is the compliment. Same tracksuit. Same pause. Same look at the camera.
YOUR TURN: Is the compliment the new apology tour, or did the press machine just run out of tricks?
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