Hillary Clinton summed it up best: “It’s funny, but it’s also really troubling.”
It’s easy to laugh at or even laugh with Donald Trump, the rare politician who speaks his mind, but it’s equally worrisome to think how many people conflate loudly opinionated with presidential material. Just ask “Masha,” a member of Russian feminist-punk band Pussy Riot: “When [Vladimir] Putin came to his first term or second term, nobody actually thought that this is serious. Everybody was joking about it. And nobody could imagine that after five, six years, we would have a war in Ukraine, annexation of Crimea, and these problems in Syria.”
She continued, “Everybody [is] joking about Donald Trump now, but it’s a very short way from joke to sad reality when you have a really crazy president speaking about breaking every moral and logic norm.”
In the music video for “Make America Great Again,” the third single from their xxx EP which comes out Friday, Pussy Riot imagines what America would look like if Donald Trump became President Donald Trump. The police are now the Gestapo, women are stripped and branded with “FAT PIG” and “PERVERT” and “SHE MADE AN ABORTION,” and Trump News Network is the country’s only source for news. It’s not exactly subtle, but neither is Trump.
Pussy Riot co-founder Nadezhda Tolokonnikova told Time that “of course we wanted to just say ‘F*ck Trump.’ But we didn’t do that. We wanted to get our message across to people who might not be as aesthetically radical as we are at Pussy Riot.” She added, “We already have a macho president in Russia. We don’t need a world where the American president is also a macho.” (There’s no way Donald Trump wouldn’t be shirtless in his presidential portrait, right?)
Watch the “Make America Great Again” music video above.
