WARNING: THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS.
It’s election night in the ongoing saga of America’s favorite dysfunctional dynasty, the Roy family. The eighth episode (“America Decides”) in this final season of HBO’s “Succession” is in many ways what liberal audiences have long been waiting for: a full accounting of what they believe is conservative media’s — namely Fox News — complicity in poisoning our most sacred democratic institution.
With the Roy family patriarch, Logan Roy, no longer alive to oversee his American News Network’s (ATN) coverage of the night’s main event, it’s up to his children and business lackeys to steer the information ship home for their preferred Republican candidate, Jeryd Mencken.
With his German surname, flamboyant speaking style, and Kanye Westian affinity for Adolf Hitler, Mencken was perfectly built by series creator Jesse Armstrong and the writers to channel an authoritarian figure from our dark past. In these days of total absence of nuance and historical accuracy from the left, that meant he was a surrogate for their favorite boogeyman: President Donald J. Trump.
But it’s not only the Mencken-Trump personality allusions that were designed to trigger leftist audiences. The episode conjured the real-life Democrat ballot incongruities of the last three elections and flipped the script against the Roys and Republicans in the show. Ballot chain of custody is suddenly now of the utmost importance. Government buildings set on fire — a tactic used solely by Antifa in the 2020 summer of George Floyd and Jacob Blake —
