The Bob Roberts conspiracy: Why ‘deranged’ Democrats are rewatching an old Tim Robbins satire

Amidst the international reaction to the near-fatal assassination attempt on President Trump on 13 July came one unpredictable voice. While countless figures in the entertainment industry weighed in on the event, the reaction of the Oscar-winning actor Tim Robbins was unexpected.

Robbins, who has always been on the Left of Hollywood, put out a virulent post on X in which he attacked Left-wing conspiracy theories claiming that the assassination had been staged, saying “What happened yesterday was a real attempt on a presidential candidate’s life. Those that are denying the assassination attempt was real are truly in a deranged mindset. A human being was shot yesterday. Another killed. They may not be human beings that you agree with politically but for shame folks. Get over your blind hatred of these people. They are fellow Americans. This collective hatred is killing our souls and consuming whatever is left of our humanity.”

Robbins’s angry and heartfelt words were met with approval from Trump supporters, who rushed to praise the Shawshank Redemption star for his sentiments. One commented “I think I disagree completely with your politics. And agree with you completely on this. God bless the USA”, while another wrote “Tim Robbins: one of my favourite actors, one of my least favourite when it comes to politics. But obviously a great empathetic human and a patriot.” Few would disagree with the substance of what Robbins said, but amidst the approval, the long and curious relationship between the progressive actor and the alt-Right is one that deserves to be unpicked.

Robbins and Trump, unsurprisingly, are not close. Robbins recounted a story in 2020 of how he had been hosting a private birthday party for a friend and received word that Trump, then long before his political career had begun, would like to attend. As the actor said, “His guys said ‘Mr. Trump wants to come party,’ and I said ‘No, he’s not invited.” Robbins objected to him on both personal and political grounds, saying “He seemed to be corrupt, he was thuggish, and he made ugly buildings, and they seemed to be popping up everywhere. He was that kind of guy, always in the nightlife, always trying to ingratiate himself with people.”

Therefore, his recent defence of him should be viewed as a genuine example of humanity, rather than with an eye to his thespian stock rising in an increasingly likely second Trump presidency. (At the time of writing, Trump has not commented on Robbins’s statement of support for him, but he undoubtedly has other things on his mind.)

Robbins may have a reputation as one of the most bleeding-heart liberals that Hollywood has ever produced, but he has never been afraid to kick against the traces, especially recently. In 2023, while promoting his new TV series Silo, he stated that “I think we’ve been through three and a half years of extraordinary and questionable choices made by people that are supposed to be leading their countries”, and then railed against the “lack of freedom of movement, lack of freedom of assembly, lack of freedom of speech” that existed during Covid-19 lockdowns. He then went on to echo many of the concerns of Trump supporters when he said ‘until we have the guts to look at what really happened and we question and maybe even hold people accountable for irresponsible leadership, if we don’t do that, we’re gonna repeat it again. It’ll happen again.”

Three decades before Robbins became such an outspoken defender of civil liberties, he wrote, directed and starred in the 1992 mockumentary Bob Roberts, about a Right-wing folk singer who runs for the presidency, despite a lack of any obvious political experience. The film contains a wide assortment of conservative-themed songs sung in character by Robbins, such as Retake America, Drugs Stink and Times Are Changin’ Back, and many of the lyrics are gleefully subversive: a verse of the song Complain is something along these lines:

This is not very far from Mick Jagger’s notorious Thatcherite anthem Let’s Work (sample lyrics: “No sitting down on your butt/The world don’t owe you/No sitting down in rut”), but Robbins was adamant that no official soundtrack album would be released from Bob Roberts. He said “I don’t want that money… I didn’t want them played out of context. I didn’t want to be riding in my car and hear some Right-wing shock jock playing my music and hearing my voice.” With the advent of YouTube, such a thing is not only possible, but positively likely. Yet this should not subtract from the subversive anger of Robbins’s picture, which, as time goes on, appears to be taking as many pot shots at liberal complacency as it does at Right-wing hypocrisy, albeit perhaps inadvertently.

The Roberts character was first developed by Robbins when he was a young actor appearing in a Saturday Night Live skit in 1986. The original incarnation of Bob Roberts was as a rapacious yuppie businessman, rather than a politician, but many of the film’s future songs were already in place, even if the satire was directed at the gentrification of previously bohemian areas such as Greenwich Village rather than national politics. Robbins, who quickly acquired a reputation as a leading man through such pictures as Bull Durham and Jacob’s Ladder, believed that the character was sufficiently potent to be worthy of feature-length treatment, but it still took five years to raise the picture’s relatively low $3.9 million budget – by which time George Bush had taken over from Ronald Reagan.

Speaking to Entertainment Weekly in 2017, Robbins laughingly discussed one of the film’s lines, in which a young Jack Black salutes Roberts as ‘prophestic’, and commented “Let’s say I was hoping I wouldn’t be prophestic.” He dismissed the idea that Bush was somehow less worthy of satire than his successors, saying “What was Machiavellian about that was that their messaging was anything but elite. The messaging was to the working class. At the time, it seemed like what they were doing was lying and creating division, where there was no need for division. And quite frankly, it worked. I think what the powerful understood at the time was that they were in the process of losing the majority that would support their agenda.”

In Robbins’s view, this was accomplished through the black arts displayed in his film, which climaxes in a faked assassination attempt on Roberts. Giancarlo Esposito’s crusading journalist attempts to expose this, only to be assassinated himself by a right-wing fanatic after Roberts, by now faking paralysis, attains the presidency (with, amusingly enough, 52 per cent of the vote: the cursed ratio was clearly a thing even back then.) As Robbins put it, “the way to [obtain a majority] is propagandize—propaganda that was going to be done on a daily basis to keep people divided and keep them stoked up angry about issues that were loaded emotionally, such as abortion, such as the tolerance for gay people.”

There are many moments in the film that now seem either hilariously or disturbingly prescient, depending on your perspective, such as when a young admirer of Roberts says “He believes in America. He believes in making money. Being rich. He’s not one of those sensitive liberals who makes you feel responsible for everything that’s gone wrong.”

Robbins commented that “I guess the film was a warning about that, and look where we are now.” He was aided in disseminating his message by an all-star cast that included everyone from his former partner Susan Sarandon as a news anchor to Alan Rickman – then hot from the dual success of Die Hard and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves – as Roberts’s campaign manager. The picture was glowingly reviewed by all but the most partisan conservatives, although it was a box office flop, probably not helped by its release being overshadowed by the real pending election battle between Bush, Bill Clinton and the third-party candidate Russ Perot.

In 2017 Robbins joked that, if Roberts was still around, “He’d be in the White House. And there would be some kind of fake healing to get him out of the wheelchair”, before suggesting that reality had long passed parody. Yet he did resurrect a version of the character, now called ‘Bobbo Supreme’, for a podcast in 2020, in which he took aim at Trump; he said that “I don’t think it’s enough to just do an imitation of him, I think you have to look deeper. That’s why we didn’t want to try to imitate his voice…satire must be a deeper truth by illuminating something that might be rude or offensive to some people.”

Even back then, Robbins was chafing against the restrictions placed on individual liberty. When asked whether he believed a Trump supporter might think twice about voting for the president, Robbins replied that “no one is checking your politics at the door, no one is saying you can’t come in. I think it’s important that we create forums of communities where you can listen to something, you can laugh and you can understand you’re not alone.”

While Bobbo Supreme has not had anything like the afterlife that Bob Roberts has had – which included Robbins and his brother forming a punk rock band called ‘Gob Roberts’ to perform rearranged versions of some of the film’s songs – it remains an interesting stepping stone in Robbins’ political journey, which included him explicitly admitting that his villain in last year’s Silo was inspired by pro-lockdown politicians.

Can we expect to see Robbins, in character as Roberts, introducing Trump as a future rally? Probably not, but in the words of Retake America: “This land is our land/Got to be proud in the land of the free/This land was made for us/This plan was made for me.”

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