Brooker has often been described by commentators as prescient in his scripts for Black Mirror. In 2015, G. Clay Whitaker of The Daily Beast called the show a Magic 8-Ball. The first episode, "The National Anthem", features the UK prime minister blackmailed into having sexual intercourse with a pig. Four years later, the Daily Mail published allegations that the then-prime minister David Cameron had placed a "private part of his anatomy" into the mouth of a dead pig as an initiation rite at university. Brooker later said that after hearing the news, he "did genuinely for a moment wonder if reality was a simulation, whether it exists only to trick me". In "The Waldo Moment", a 2013 episode, the animated cartoon Waldo places second in a UK by-election. The US presidency of the media personality Donald Trump (2017–2021) and the Ukrainian presidency of the comedian Volodymyr Zelenskyy (2019–) were compared by journalists to the platform of Waldo. Brooker described Trump as "an anti-politics candidate who's raucous and defensive" and "offers nothing", like Waldo. Adrian Karatnycky of Politico stated that as with Waldo, Zelenskyy had few clear policy positions prior to his election.
