Sacha Baron Cohen now says Donald Trump has “elements of brilliance” and should not be dismissed as a nincompoop, a sharp shift as the comic pushes a new Ali G film after years of open hostility.
Breitbart reported that Cohen made the remarks on the Happy Sad Confused podcast with host Josh Horowitz while promoting his latest movie, Ali G: Who Iz I?, which opened in theaters across the nation this weekend.
Cohen framed Trump’s second term as proof that critics got him wrong. He said people sold the president short and treated him as a joke figure instead of a serious political force.
On the podcast, Cohen tied that point to his own long record of needling powerful people. He recalled sitting down with Trump more than two decades ago for Da Ali G Show, when Trump was still a New York real estate mogul who had not yet run for office.
Cohen told Horowitz that most of the high-powered guests he met as Ali G showed up on time. Trump did not.
“As Ali G, I had the privilege of sitting with some of the smartest and most powerful people in the world, and all of them were punctual,”
Cohen said. He added that Trump kept the crew waiting roughly 40 minutes.
“Donald Trump kept us waiting for about 40 minutes.”
Cohen called the delay a deliberate show of force. He said Trump then walked in delivering an expletive-laden rant at staffers, leaving the comic feeling intimidated.
“It really was a power move,”
Cohen said of the late arrival and the entrance. That old interview now sits beside a very different public tone from the same performer.
Cohen’s newest comments go further than a colorful memory. He argued that writing Trump off as a fool never matched the results voters keep delivering.
“I mean, 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, otherwise. And that explains his appeal with the fact that he’s there for a second term, the fact that he’s transforming this country. I won’t say positively or negatively.”
That last line leaves the value judgment hanging. It still marks a clear break from the comic’s earlier posture, when he treated Trump as a cartoon villain rather than a durable national figure.
Trump’s second-term agenda has already drawn sharp fights over executive power, including coverage of how Donald Trump signs major orders that rattle other branches of government. Cohen’s “transforming this country” line lands in that same climate, whether he likes the direction or not.
Voters who backed Trump through setbacks after 2020 never needed a Hollywood explanation. They watched results on borders, energy, and bargaining power abroad. Cohen is only now catching up to what those voters already decided.
The same Breitbart account notes a much harder edge from Cohen in 2021. That year he celebrated Facebook and pre-Elon Musk Twitter for banning Trump and cast the then-former president as a “purveyor of hate.”
Cohen also said he timed the second Borat film just ahead of the 2022 elections. The stated hope, per the report, was to help wreck Trump and the MAGA movement.
In 2016 he joked that Trump would pick Bill Cosby as a running mate. Cosby had been convicted of sexual assault and was serving a long prison term at the time, making the gag a pure pile-on rather than policy critique.
Those episodes fit a familiar entertainment pattern: mock, isolate, and cheer platform blackouts when a Republican is the target. The new podcast tone softens the same target only after Trump won again and kept reshaping the national agenda.
That agenda has included hard pressure on foreign holdouts. One recent case showed Russia freeing an American prisoner after years in custody, with Trump saying no swap was required. Results like that are harder to wave away as clown-show politics.
Ali G: Who Iz I? arrives under a cloud. Screenings were canceled in September after critics accused Cohen of pushing racist stereotypes about Black people through the Ali G character.
The report also says the movie is widely expected to be a box office bomb. Against that backdrop, the podcast praise for Trump “appears calculated,” the Breitbart piece argues, as a way to cool Republican and conservative anger and protect ticket sales.
Cohen did not spell out a ticket strategy on the air. He did choose this moment, film opening weekend, national theaters, a friendly podcast, to credit Trump with brilliance and staying power he once denied.
Conservatives have heard this cycle before. Celebrities torch Trump for years, then discover nuance when the market or the map turns against them. The record still shows who spent a decade trying to shrink his reach and who kept winning elections anyway.
Trump’s focus on election rules remains a live fight as well. He has even put up $1 million for tips that help convict voter fraudsters, a concrete integrity push that sits far from Hollywood punch lines.
Foreign policy critics inside his own party have also tested him. Senate voices have cautioned that Trump’s Ukraine peace push will not automatically stop Putin, yet the broader point stands: he is treated as a serious actor because he keeps forcing real choices, not because comics finally noticed.
Cohen once hoped a Borat sequel could help finish Trump off. He now concedes “elements of brilliance” and a country already being transformed. The voters who refused to dismiss Trump as a nincompoop did not need the confession. Hollywood did.
