The problem journalists face today is that the task of challenging powerful figures—of engaging with them in good faith, and of cabining them to an agreed-upon universe of facts—is really difficult when their counterparts have no interest in participating. (Ask any frustrated CNN talking head who spends 30 agonizing minutes trying to get Kellyanne Conway to respond to a question without rolling her eyes.) Egged on by the president's efforts to discredit journalism he doesn't like as dishonest, audiences have come to expect interactions between conservative figures and media members to be acrimonious. When sparks fly, it isn't because Conway is spouting outrageous lies, secure in the knowledge that decorum prevents her interviewer from calling it out as such. Those sparks are inherent in the process, and the heroes who eschew civility for honesty earn more criticism for dragging liars than the liars do for lying in the first place. (Ask Michelle Wolf.)

Cohen succeeds by taking the opposite approach, matching his subjects' depraved ludicrousness line-for-line and stunt-for-stunt until they feel as if they are outside the adversarial model altogether. (As Scott Meslow noted in his review for GQ, the first episode features a galling sequence in which a gun-rights activist laughs at a line about spousal rape, confident that Cohen's character, a like-minded patriot, wouldn't include their inside joke in the final cut.) If Jason Spencer says a heinous thing on Twitter, he can pass it off as part of an argument—as a component of his perpetual need to defend himself against insidious leftist attacks. Stripped of that context, he is just another amoral lunatic.

Victims of Cohen's set-ups usually complain that by being someone other than "himself," he fights dirty, as if the name he used to introduce himself somehow compelled them to shout racial epithets upon request. His code of journalistic ethics might be more up for debate if there were any separate forum in which his subjects were honest—and, thus, if putting them in a carefully-crafted scenario served no purpose other than the attendant shock value.

No such forum exists, though. On networks that are not Fox News, they sneer at the purported biases that underlie every ask. On networks that are Fox News, they say whatever they want, knowing that they will be held to no standard of integrity. Thanks to his willingness to fight dirty, Sacha Baron Cohen has prompted some of America's MAGA heroes to be truthful and transparent for once in their lives, which is more than his peers who offer more conventional snark can claim. (Hey, maybe the Drumpf thing will work someday! In the meantime, we should perhaps try other stuff.)

It is more than a little weird that one of the most talked-about pundits in political media right now is a man whose enduring contribution to pop culture, up to this point, has been conditioning men everywhere to scream "MAI WIFE" and dissolve into hysterical laughter a few seconds after making any reference to their wives in casual conversation. But in a country run by bullshitting chaos agents, maybe it is other, better bullshitting chaos agents who will finally expose them.