We review those viral ‘America First, Fill-in-the-Blank-Country Second’ videos

Feb. 11--Have you seen those "America First, Fill-in-the-Blank-Country Second" videos that are all the rage?

Various countries, starting with the Netherlands, have poked fun at our President Trump by asking, essentially, "What if The Donald -- or a Trump wanna-be -- wrote, produced and narrated a promotional video about our nation?"

This is genius because the video authors can extol the many virtues of their countries while subtly sticking it to an American leader they clearly dislike. In most of the videos, using a Trump impersonator as a narrator is part of the shtick.

Maybe the biggest revelation of the videos is that virtually every country in Europe -- yes, even Lithuania -- seems to have a "Saturday Night Live"/"Daily Show"-style comedy program. The satirical videos have, in many cases, been aired or even premiered on such shows.

This online trend, of course, began with the "America first" promise declared in Trump's inaugural address, which is shown in many of the videos. With mock humbleness, the video authors offers up their nations as second only to the great U.S. of A.

But are these videos any good? Hey, I'm a film critic, so I watched and reviewed a bunch of 'em.

Simultaneously confrontational and self-effacing, the first video from the Netherlands sets the tone for most of the rest.

Its narrator is no Alec Baldwin, but his vocal impression of Trump is pretty darn good (although it sets a confusing precedent: Why is someone we're supposed to believe is Trump addressing Trump?), and the presence of a live audience helps soften up those of us on YouTube who are watching the video.

Like many of the videos to follow, Netherland's touches on Trumps's greatest hits -- a wall to separate countries, "grab the p---," controversy about crowds at the inauguration, paying (or not paying) taxes -- but it's the only one where we get this zinger: "We also have a disabled politician you can make fun of."

For a neutral country, Switzerland proves surprisingly mean in its Trump parody video, which crows about the country's history of demeaning women ("We didn't let them vote until 1971!"), its whiteness ("We have no Mexicans here!") and implies that the country supports the idea of eliminating Medicare because it has other ways of dealing with the elderly, via a program called EXIT: "If you're old and sick, they come and kill you. It's great!"

EXIT sounds like something out of the dystopian novel and movie, "Children of Men," but it's an actual assisted-suicide organization.

Amusingly, the Swiss clip -- whose narrator does not sound much like Trump, by the way -- ends by telling Trump, "We don't even want your money. We already have it."

If you crave evidence that Germans don't have a sense of humor, look no further than that country's submission.

Hosted by a smug, unfunny commentator who cracks himself up with dated "Wayne's World" references, the clip segues into a passable Trump impersonation but includes puzzling references to the undefined FKK (some sort of nudist group, maybe, but what does that have to do with Trump?) and bold but flat Hitler jokes.

Also, when will European countries get that nobody else cares about the Eurovision songwriting competition?

Visitors sometimes note the visual similarities between Copenhagen and Amsterdam and, indeed, this Danish parody video is a near-exact copy of the one from the Netherlands. Not a good copy, though.

Misspelled subtitles, alternative facts, weird bragging about rye bread and a juvenile joke about the energy company named Dong make for a video so tepid that even the applause from the Danish TV studio audience is wan.

Give the Portuguese credit for having the only female host of one of these comedy shows.

But Portugal's Trump impersonator mostly reveals that reading off lists of synonyms ("it's great, it's huge, it's tremendous") is not synonymous with good comedy.

And the reference to American football as "fake" seems unlikely to sit well with the Oval Officeholder who is also Tom Brady's alleged good buddy.

Even though it's the shortest -- less than two minutes -- the Belgian video feels long. The Trump impression is awful, the "alternative fact" joke about Swedish ABBA being from Belgium isn't funny and the pedophile gag is just plain creepy.

Maybe the worst Trump impersonator in the world, this video's guy sounds like he has a head cold. But Lithuania's entry is one of the better parody videos, maybe because the Putin-hating country has more skin in the game than some other nations.

The linguistic humor is on point -- "'trumpas,' in Lithuanian, means 'short' but there's nothing short in your body. We know it." The argument that Twitter-loving Trump would enjoy Lithuania's super-fast internet is sound. And the footage of "The Baltic Way," a non-violent protest in which Lithuanians created a human wall in 1989, is genuinely inspiring.

One of the nastier entries, boasting a too-soon 9/11 joke, Luxembourg's video seems confused about the possible impact on the U.S. election of Wikileaks (which it suggests were not in Trump's favor), but it does features perhaps the most inventive filmmaking of any of these videos in a sequence that matches Luxembourg's phony Trump voice with footage of the real thing.

This Trump impersonator sounds like he was recorded with a bad cellphone connection in an echo chamber and his material isn't much better, mostly consisting of bewildering non-sequiturs.

Also, Croatia came so late to this parody-video game that, like a few of these videos, it doesn't even plead for second place but goes straight for third.

Sounds like the same "Trump" as Croatia, with an even worse phone connection.

The "joke" about Melania Trump and domestic violence is vile and several previous videos have already used the gambit of showing an aerial image of the wrong country to tell Trump where to bomb if he decides he hates their country.

The use of the poo emoji is a clever callback to when Trump's twitter account was briefly hacked last year but that's about all this Borat-embracing clip has going for it.

By this point, it's probably wise for a country to avoid using a Trump impersonator -- the device never made much sense and it's been done to death.

But what's French for "half-assed?" Because this robot-voice clip is only three minutes long and more than half of that is taken up by "Dallas"'s Patrick Duffy singing a weird disco number with a tiny French chanteuse.

Italy basically steals France's bit -- no Trump voice here, either -- and they should have picked a funnier nation to swipe from. The boot country's tedious clip, in which spelling issues abound, deserves to be kicked to the curb.

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