British comedian Ricky Gervais may not agree with all of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s policy ideas — but that didn’t stop the Office creator from telling Rolling Stone that it would be “amazing” if American voters put the billionaire businessman in the White House this November.
“I can’t imagine him being president, so I want to see it happen,” Gervais told the outlet. “I want to say, ‘In my lifetime, I was around when Donald Trump was President of the United States.’ It’d be amazing to say, ‘I was alive when they elected Donald Trump.’ You can’t spoof it.”
Gervais, the brains behind the hit crossover classic The Office and its bumbling lead character David Brent, said he initially didn’t think Trump entered the 2016 presidential race to win it.
“I thought, ‘This is a man who desperately wants to be famous and loved and he’s willing to spend half his fortune on running for president to become even more famous,'” the British comic said. “I thought he’d drop out and it’d be lovely, and we’ll all be happy. Then it started getting real.”
However, as Trump began collecting caucus and primary victories, Gervais came to embrace what might become America’s “amazing” fate.
The 54-year-old proudly politically-incorrect comedian said he sees a comparison between Trump’s political rise and the role that reality television plays in the democratic process.
“Democracy has thrown this up,” Gervais told Rolling Stone. “It’s not always voting for the right person; it’s voting for the most popular person. Recently, it’s like we haven’t got the intellectual with the pipe anymore. We’ve got the guy who puts on the sharp suit and says what people want to hear. It’s really odd. Charisma is quite a dangerous thing in politics.”
Gervais admits that he’s not sure if he wants his “leader to be the most charismatic,” adding that’s he’s in favor of someone “intelligent and fair.”
“I would never say that he would be the worst president,” he said. “But I think at the moment he’d be the funniest.”
A rare figure in an industry inhabited by overly apologetic, politically correct entertainers, Gervais has been known to poke fun at his “humorless” Hollywood counterparts.
He made good on his promise to offend Hollywood in January when he hosted the 73rd annual Golden Globes, lobbing stomach-churning one-liners at Mel Gibson, Bruce Jenner, and Jennifer Lawrence.
And when critics tried to chastise Gervais for his provocative Bruce Jenner joke, calling it “transphobic,” the Derek star unleashed a battery of blistering tweets shutting down his offended naysayers.
Clearly aware of his own ignorance about politics, however, Gervais says he humbly reminds himself that he’s “an entertainer.”
“We don’t know the right and wrong decision until 50 years time,” Gervais said about the choice Americans will have to make in November. “Trump could get in and he could make the world a better place. We don’t know. Since he’s a businessman, he could be looking at World War III and say, ‘This war is too expensive.'”
“There’s a realm of the unknown there that might as well be science fiction, because we don’t know,” he concluded.
Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter @jeromeehudson
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