The new 'Borat' movie is a master class on how to blackmail a politician

Even in today’s blizzard of breaking news bombshells, that should be a front page story. But it’s just a tabloid blip, because that foreign agent happens to have a silly mustache and a very funny way of saying “my wiifffeeee!”

That’s right, Borat is back. “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” premieres today, two days after the review embargo broke and the world learned about how comedian Sacha Baron Cohen tricked Rudy Giuliani in what a Twitter Moments caption referred to as a “compromising position.”

In the original “Borat” film in 2006, Cohen plays a gonzo disgraced Kazakhstani journalist whose man-on-the-street antics expose some of America’s worst prejudices. In this new film, viewers learn that Borat returned to his home country in disgrace and was basically forced into slavery. Fourteen years later, his shot at redemption is a mission back to the States in order to win favor for his country with the Trump administration (hence the subtitle: “Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan”).

The plan is to offer up his 15-year-old daughter, “Sandra Jessica Parker Sagdiyev,” to “Michael Pence.” In Kazakhstan, Pence’s reputation with the ladies is so legendary that it’s said he’s not allowed alone in a room with any woman who isn’t his wife.

Borat blitzes America in a fashion that will be familiar to fans of the character, with a series of goofy stunts where he entraps racists, pedophile sympathizers, plastic surgeons and just plain terrible humans in “compromising” situations. If you want to somehow remain spoiler free, stop reading here.

After transforming his daughter from pauper to Instagram-worthy princess, Borat makes his way to a conservative event to bribe Pence. He’s ejected, then concedes to return to Kazakhstan to face his death. But his daughter continues the quest, posing as a journalist in her own right and successfully scoring an interview with former New York City mayor and personal lawyer to President Trump, Rudy Giuliani.

The interview takes place in a hotel room. It’s just Sandra and Rudy alone, under a professional lighting setup. He offers her a glass of liquor and insists she drink it. They speak for a few minutes, in which Giuliani explains COVID-19 as an insidious plot hatched by the Chinese.

Then the interview ends, and the pair enter a second room, alone. Giuliani asks for her phone number and email address, sits down on the bed, and places his hand on her lower back as she removes the microphone cable under his shirt. Then Rudy leans back on the bed and reaches into his pants. Borat sympathetically barges in at that moment, and tells Giuliani that his daughter is only 15, and therefore too old for him.

Giuliani’s defense for the scene is that he was just tucking his shirt back in. The video doesn’t show any conclusive evidence of Giuliani making an overt sexual advance, but he sure does look like he’s flirting with her the entire time, and anyone who has tucked in a shirt before knows that’s not the most effective way to do it.

But whether Giuliani was ready to make a sexual advance on this woman isn’t really the point here. Even if he does have very complex shirttails, just the appearance of misconduct could be used as kompromat, the Russian term for compromising blackmail material.

Sure, Borat is not a Russian spy. But if he weren’t planning to put this footage in his subsequent moviefilm, he sure could’ve used it to influence someone at the highest level of the U.S. government. If Borat and his daughter wearing ridiculous disguises could pull this off to someone so powerful, it sure does seem like it would be pretty easy for someone not wearing a ridiculous costume.

It’s easy to write the film off as a joke, especially when it is one of the funniest movies of the year. But the power of comedy is more than just the sum of its laughs, it exposes dangerous truths. And in one of the most saturated periods of political news in American history, it’s downright terrifying that the recklessness of one of our country’s most powerful political figures could be exposed by a sketch comic posing as Kazakhstan's “fourth best journalist.”