Succession’s Trumpian election episode lays bare the damage of the right-wing media machine

The HBO drama’s latest episode may be one of the definitive satires of the controversial US president’s rise to power. ‘America Decides’ hits close to the bone, writes Louis Chilton – and knows exactly where to place the blame

Roman Roy (Kieran Culkin) in season four, episode eight of ‘Succession' (HBO)

Back when Donald Trump was in office, there were a number of common refrains you’d hear. “What will be the first great piece of art about the Trump administration?” “Who will portray him in the inevitable biopics?” “Which actor will one day win an Oscar for playing US president Donald J Trump?” Well, it may not be the first great piece of art about the tumultuous Trump era, but with its antepenultimate episode, “America Decides”, Succession has produced one of the definitive artistic statements on the rise of Trump. And – what’s more – it didn’t mention his name once.

The episode picks up hours after the close of its predecessor. In the world of Succession, it’s election night, with bland liberal frontrunner Daniel Jiménez (Elliot Villar) coming up against right-wing firebrand Jeryd Mencken (Justin Kirk). We already know from last season’s “What it Takes” that Mencken is seriously bad news. He’s racist. Sexist. You name it, he’s probably said something depraved about it. He’s worked his way up to become the Republican presidential nominee, thanks in part to the backing of the late Logan Roy (Brian Cox) and his Fox News-esque right-wing TV network ATN. He enters election night as an underdog. By the morning, and against all odds and polling predictions, he’s been declared president. Sound familiar?

Of course, this is Succession, and the story does not revolve around Mencken. Instead, we follow Tom (Matthew Macfadyen), who’s taking a breather from his imploding marriage to head up coverage of the event on ATN. Barking (often contradictory) commands in Tom’s ear are the Roy siblings, Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Roman (Kieran Culkin) and Shiv (Sarah Snook), with the trio tussling over where to throw ATN’s weight, and how vehemently. An apparent firebombing in Wisconsin appears to swing things in Mencken’s favour – with thousands of majority-Democrat votes lost – but throws up an ethical storm for the media: how do you declare a winner when it appears that the election was sabotaged? In the end, for a mix of conflicting political and personal reasons, Kendall relents to Roman’s pressure, and has Tom declare Mencken the new US president. Democracy be damned.

The parallels to Trump are unmissable. Like Mencken, he was an incendiary underdog, reviled by the left for his racist and sexist outbursts, and his far-right stances on everything from immigration to education. Like Mencken, he defied the polls to win the presidency, with the ardent backing of Fox News. The apprehension voiced by characters like Shiv and – less coherently – Greg (Nicholas Braun) echo the very real fears people voiced when Trump got in. “Mencken’s the nightmare,” Shiv says. “Plausible in a decadent era. He says the bad s***... he believes the bad s***.” Looking back on the Trump administration, and its ongoing aftermath of abortion bans and violent insurrections, it’s hard to accuse anyone of catastrophising.

What Succession keenly understands, in its cynicism, is that a person like Trump, or Mencken, does not ascend to office on the strength of their political beliefs. Those holding the levers of power – the Roys, in this instance – are motivated not by any particular right-wing agenda, but by naked, greedy self-interest. Indeed, by smoothing the path for Mencken to take power, Kendall is acting both against his conscience (such that it is) and the pleas of his family – his daughter, who is of south Asian descent, has been harassed, seemingly by hard-right Mencken supporters. Ultimately, he decides that emboldening racists is a price worth paying to try to block the impending GoJo merger and keep his hands on the corporate tiller.

Where art deviates from life is in Mencken himself. Succession is an uproariously funny series, often more comedy than drama. For all his myriad flaws, Trump was, and is, a profoundly comic figure, a man of such innate, unfettered ludicrousness that all attempts to parody inevitably come up short. And yet Mencken is no such clown. Stripped of all Trump’s foibles, his braggadocio and physical buffoonery, Mencken is just a repellent husk of toxic ideology: his acceptance speech at the episode’s close is ominous and not funny in the slightest. His televised address is peppered with antisemitic dogwhistle language, as well as disconcerting references to “purity” and “polluted land”. Succession knows that, underneath it all, there’s nothing funny about watching the American elite shepherd a man like this through the corridors of power. But it knows something else – it’s fascinating, and chilling, to watch.