Sacha Baron Cohen’s interview with former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski on “Who Is America?” wasn’t Baron Cohen’s most ridiculous interview, but it did have some pretty ridiculous Bob Marley-related jokes baked in.
Playing his right-wing journalist character Dr. Billy Wayne Ruddick, Baron Cohen interviewed Lewandowski about his sense of Donald Trump. Baron Cohen’s Ruddick started with a question about whether Trump is racist.
“Is Donald Trump a racist, or is he the least racist man alive?” Ruddick, Baron Cohen’s pro-Trump character, asked Lewandowski to start the segment.
#BillyWayne asks #CoreyLewandowski about his former boss, #DonaldTrump. #WhoIsAmerica #SachaBaronCohen #Showtime pic.twitter.com/lDkfcN3oMg
— Who Is America? (@SHOwhoisAmerica) August 13, 2018
“I can tell you this: I had the privilege of standing and sitting next to candidate Trump and now the president for thousands of hours over my tenure running his campaign,” Lewandowski answered. “Never ever ever did I ever hear him utter a racist word in his life. Ever.”
Accusations about Trump were back in the news this week after former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman said Trump was racist, and claimed she had recorded Trump and members of his administration during her time working with them.
Baron Cohen’s Ruddick later pivoted to one of Trump’s favorite talking points: the “fake news” media. He started by asking Lewandowski if he thought Americans should be worried about who really owns the media — to which Lewandowski replied that he thought it was corporate shareholders who actually owned media companies.
Baron Cohen’s Ruddick continued the line of argument by pulling up a PBS logo, then showing an altered version so that it looked like one of the faces in the logo was smoking a marijuana joint.
When Lewandowski looked confused, Ruddick explained that PBS was owned by the “biggest force in politics,” the “Rastafarian lobby.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Lewandowski replied, looking bewildered.
“The Rastafarian lobby is behind a lot of the major military decisions of the last 30 years,” Ruddick explained while Lewandowski listened. “The invasion of Iraq as because the Rastafarian lobby, their leader, Gen. Robert Marley suggested that they had — they developed over 45,000 Buffalo soldiers. These dreadlocked Rastas who were marching through Africa into the heart of America, and then the plan was to take them into Iraq.”
“I don’t know if that qualifies as conclusive evidence. I’ve never seen that before,” Lewandowski told him.