Dick Chibbles and James Bartholet, who could be found hobnobbing at last week’s AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas, have plenty in common.
Both are male porn actors. Both are politically engaged. Both have acted in several of the same movies. And both—good chums, by the way—have recently taken on the role of Donald J. Trump in pornographic comedies.
Chibbles says he was a Trump fan months before he stripped down to play the Republican presidential frontrunner in a porno.
“I was a Trump supporter before playing him,” Chibbles told The Daily Beast. “I was honored to play Donald Trump… I really like that he’s not a politician. And he’s a billionaire, so he cannot be bought…And he doesn’t candy-coat shit. He has the New York mentality of ‘Let’s get shit done, and today.’”
Chibbles is not, as you might guess, a fan of the “New York values” attack line Republican rival Ted Cruz deployed against Trump. “Honestly, I haven’t paid much attention to Ted Cruz because I don’t think he has the balls to do what needs to be done to become president,” Chibbles said, comparing the Texas senator to Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley. (Ouch.)
Chibbles’s friend Bartholet couldn’t disagree more about the man they’ve both had the honor—or dishonor—to play.
“I’m a Democrat,” Bartholet, who’s been in the adult industry for 12 years, told The Daily Beast. “But I don’t mind playing the villain in films.”
Bartholet played The Donald in Megyn Gets Trumped, a parody produced by an interracial-porn company lovably named Dogfart. The film, inspired by the (still ongoing) tiff between Fox News host Megyn Kelly and the real-estate mogul, involves “two muscular black guys coming in and having sex with Megyn Kelly,” the actor said.
“Dick Chibbles is a great guy, I’ve known him for many years, and we’ve butted heads on politics on many points,” Bartholet said. “Porn and politics shouldn’t mix…when on-set. We can get into pretty heated debates.”
Chibbles, who has been in the business for more than 15 years and has played Chewbacca and the Tin Man in other porn parodies, landed the role of Trump in 2015’s Donald Tramp—The XXX Parody.
“Welcome to one of my many homes built on poor people’s torn-down homes,” Tramp says, in a scene in which Chibbles’s character is getting grilled on political issues by a “moderator” played by porn actress Trinity St. Clair.
“Let’s have sex while I whisper racist comments in your ear,” Tramp says as he prepares to make torrid love to the lady moderator.
The porn parody is not the most flattering depiction of The Donald—but its leading man hasn’t been this excited about a political candidate in years. Chibbles was unaware that during the week of the Vegas porn convention, Trump was actually in Vegas speaking at a rally. The porn star said he regretted not rushing over to meet the GOP frontrunner. He has never met Trump but says it would be “awesome” to do so.
Chibbles and Bartholet have acted together in several movies, including a porn version of the Saw torture-horror franchise in which Ron Jeremy played a “Jigsaw killing off porn stars, and you had to do these crazy sex things to get out of the traps,” Bartholet said. They also did a pornographic Wizard of Oz together.
“I’m definitely a Hillary Clinton supporter,” Bartholet affirmed. “I like what she has to say, I believe she is a seasoned politician, that she has already proven herself on the international scene as secretary of state. I think she’s an honest, hard-working woman…[Porn actors] make a quarter of the money that we used to make. I think she will help the economy.”
The prospect of a Trump presidency, however, strikes fear into his lustful heart.
“He doesn’t know anything about politics, at all. Just because he’s run businesses, that does not qualify him to be the leader of the free world,” Bartholet said. “He’s a [prejudice-filled] bully. I think a lot of people might leave the United States if he becomes president… [Trump] might take us into another world war!”
“I don’t think people are looking at this very clearly,” Bartholet continued. “[Trump] knows nothing, nothing, nothing about politics.”
His buddy and sometimes co-star begs to differ.
“As soon as Trump announced [his campaign last June], I started to pay attention,” Chibbles recalled. “I can literally take you down to the border [where] there’s holes in the fences…For any politician to say the border is secure, they’re full of shit. So Trump’s idea to build an actual wall…is an incredible idea. And we all know he’s good at building stuff.”
Asked if some of Trump’s more human-rights-violating policy prescriptions (rounding up millions of undocumented workers, the Muslim ban, etc.) concerned him as a voter, Chibbles said desperate times called for such measures.
“We’ve done it before,” he said, referring to President Eisenhower’s Operation Wetback. “Yeah, we did it. Are we proud of it? No. But it was something we had to do.”
Those crossing the southern border illegally “should be punished as an invading army,” Chibbles suggested.
“Not shot on sight, but…held at gunpoint, and told to turn around and go back right now,” he clarified. “I’ve seen drug mules come across the border with big, huge bales of, I’m assuming, marijuana.”
Chibbles said he attempted to run for president in 2008 under his alter-ego of “Chibbles the Clown” as a publicity stunt to “completely mock the three-ring circus” that is our national and electoral politics. He is a fan of Rand and Ron Paul (“a true constitutionalist, and excellent for America,” he said of Ron), and even had a few kind words for 2016 Democratic contender and self-described socialist Bernie Sanders (“a great guy, and incredible candidate—but, once again, he’s a politician, the last thing you need is another politician”).
“My dream ticket, it would be Rand Paul and Trump running together, whichever one is president,” he said. “It’d be an Odd Couple.” (Chibbles said he is aware of how much Paul and Trump despise each other.)
As for the Clintons and President Obama? They’re his ultimate turn-offs.
“We’re in a financial war, and we need someone who can deal with finances [such as Trump],” he said. “There’s no more middle class; Obama has completely nixed out the entire middle class of this country… People in this country are all a bunch of sheeple.” (Chibbles describes himself as “a person that Obama has basically made poor,” when discussing Obama’s economic policies.)
Chibbles’s views are far from the political norm of the porn world. The porn-industry vote is heavily blue, bordering on Hollywood-liberal levels of loyalty to the Democratic Party—even if there is a bit of a libertarian streak in porn’s staunch opposition to expanded government regulation of their industry.
Clinton and Sanders have already secured a number of high-profile porn endorsements, with industry notables only rarely breaking for a Republican. (See: one-time “Queen of Porn” and Marco Rubio supporter Jenna Jameson, who recently said, “I certainly do not agree with [the left-wing] political views” of her former profession.)
This leftward tilt is largely because porn honchos and performers have not forgotten about President George W. Bush’s “summer of censorship” or Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s vow to crack down on porn, championing the “strict enforcement” of the country’s obscenity laws. No Republican administration since the dawn of the Reagan era has been a friend to “smut.”
“If Trump wins, I’m leaving this country, I’m going to Europe to shoot porn,” Dani Daniels, the 2016 XBIZ female performer of the year, told The Daily Beast at the convention in Vegas last week—where the politics were overwhelmingly pro-Bernie and viscerally anti-Trump.
Well, maybe except for Donald Tramp himself.
