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Sacha Baron Cohen Brought Back Borat and Duped a Bunch of Trump Voters

"It’s up to Kazakhstan to swing the midterms for Premier Trump. I come to California to do election tampering."
Drew Schwartz
Brooklyn, US
Sacha Baron Cohen as Borat
Screengrab via ABC / YouTube

Fortunately for the sanctity of our democracy, there's no evidence that Russia hacked the midterms—so to pick up some of the slack, Borat Sagdiyev returned to America to try to swing them on behalf of the glorious nation of Kazakhstan.

Sacha Baron Cohen dropped by Jimmy Kimmel Live on Tuesday to talk about his killer Showtime series Who Is America? and, more importantly, to reprise Borat 12 years after we last saw him wrestling naked with Azamat and severely disappointing an etiquette coach. On the eve of the midterms, he took to the streets of California to do a little "election tampering" for Trump and talk to a handful of his supporters, who somehow believed they were speaking with an actual journalist.

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After getting one MAGA fan to high-five him in celebration of immigrant children being locked in cages at the border, Cohen-as-Borat managed to weasel his way into another Republican's living room, engaging him in a dialogue about the "fake news who say" Trump "is not a racist."

"What is the problem with being a racist? I am a racist and it's nice!" Borat says, which seems to make his subject deeply uncomfortable. "He is a racist against Muslims and a racist against Jews. He is a racist against all of peoples, yes?"

In what's probably the best bit of the whole segment, Borat winds up using the guy's bathroom and inexplicably emerging half naked, which, you know, pretty much ends things there. Then he moves on to some DIY election meddling, messing with a few signs pointing to a polling station and trying to prevent a Jewish man from casting his ballot by chasing him around with a bunch of bacon.

It was all a welcome reprieve from the unbearable stress of watching the midterm results roll in, and an unexpected revival of Cohen's most classic character—not to mention a cause for hope. Given that he was down to reprise Borat, even if Who Is America? really isn't coming back for a second season, maybe Cohen will bring back Colonel Erran Morad or OMGWhizzBoyOMG someday, too.

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