It’s been said that Donald J Trump, the shiny-faced phenomenon currently stealing a march on the White House, is impervious to satire. But anyone who’s been following Tim Heidecker’s exploits at this year’s Republican National Convention on Twitter will surely beg to differ.

The Tim & Eric funnyman was in Cleveland with video editor Vic Berger to get the inside scoop on the four-day political smackdown, which saw Trump confirmed as the Republican nominee for the US presidency, for an election special on Super Deluxe (you can watch the whole thing below). Berger, in case you didn’t know, is the genius whose online video shorts have neatly skewered the unfolding horror of the presidential race – witness Trump delivering his swaggering put-downs from a sinister floating pulpit, and the late, unlamented Jeb Bush portrayed as a playground victim whose comments are perpetually drowned out by a chorus of klaxons.

Now Berger and Heidecker are peering, Sam and Frodo-like, into the political Mordor of Trump’s America. “It was kind of like Comic Con,” offers Heidecker, “but for stuff that really matters.”

What was the idea behind going to the convention?

Tim Heidecker: I just feel like this is a very special, unique, absurd moment that we’re all living through (in America right now), and Vic and I wanted to refract that through a lens where people could watch it and not feel so alone, because sometimes you feel like you’re going crazy. When you see Vic’s videos it releases the tension, it just feels like a relief.

It’s been said that Trump is basically satire-proof, would you disagree with that assessment?

Tim Heidecker: Trump offends everybody but that’s kinda what his supporters are into, as long as they’re not on the receiving end. If you look at something like (Jimmy) Fallon, or even what SNL did, they used the old formula of bringing the candidate in and letting them be in on the joke. But that just doesn’t work with Trump, it’s too much like giving him a pass on all the horrible things he’s said.

How do you go about working on the project together? 

Tim Heidecker: There’s an element of finding the darkness. I mean, Trump’s speech last night was super-dark. It can generally go two ways – one is to amplify that darkness and make it feel even crazier and darker than it is, and the other is something like we’re doing with (Trump special adviser) Newt Gingrich, who we treated as this absurd clown.

Vic Berger: In the editing, I like to get rid of the public persona in a way by bringing out some of the more human aspects, with nervous twitches or blinking, just revealing those little things… Even with Trump there are moments, like when that protester started screaming, there were parts there where you could see he was like, ‘Oh shit, what’s going on? How do I handle this?’

What was the atmosphere like at the convention? Was it what you were expecting?

Tim Heidecker: The first stop we made when we rolled into Cleveland was this (talkshow host and conspiracy nut) Alex Jones rally, that represented the most fringe, tinfoil hat-wearing types of the party, which intersect nicely with Trump’s followers. All the stereotypes were there – guys packing heat, ‘Hilary for prison’ shirts... It was a real carnival-esque atmosphere. There was a little antagonism with the people in the crowd, a little anger, but pretty quickly we saw there was no intention to stoke violence – it’s like everybody felt kind of afraid of everybody else who was there. As you got into the main drag around the convention, you just saw a lot of middle American chubby white guys in their most patriotic suits, and it was fairly respectful. It was kind of like Comic Con, but for stuff that really matters.

Walking around the place, was it hard to shake off a feeling of impending doom? Or were you able to find the humour in it all pretty easily?

Tim Heidecker: Well, we had a good time. There’s just a feeling that we’re in the middle of this mad, potentially nightmarish, Weimar-pre-Hitler moment, and it was like, ‘We’re here, so we might as well have some laughs.’

Vic Berger: There was a lot of gallows humour.

Did you speak to a lot of supporters? What kinds of things did they have to say?

Tim Heidecker: The mood from the Republicans we spoke to was very anti-Hilary as opposed to pro-Trump, it was more about running against her than supporting Donald Trump. I actually think a lot of Republican people stayed away, ’cos they had no interest in being around this party right now. There were a few wackos. There was one lady who was very into Trump and kept telling me how intelligent he was – I was almost buying into it for a while, she seemed fairly reasonable. Then she told us that Trump was living in the fourth dimension. 

It seems like there was a lot of ‘all lives matter’/ ‘blue lives matter’ rhetoric from some of the speakers and supporters at the event, is that something you saw a lot of?

Tim Heidecker: There were a lot of speeches mentioning ‘all lives matter’, it’s just embarrassing. One thing I noticed was how the GOP’s embrace of gay people last night (tech billionaire Peter Thiel said he was “proud to be gay” during his speech at the convention) was such a pertinent example of how they’re always 20, 30 years late to any civil or cultural change that happens, so they can be proudly applauding when someone says they’re proud to be gay, and it’s like, well, fuck you, we were there 30 years ago. So when they’re screaming all lives matter, they’re gonna be late to that party too, but they’ll catch up in 20 years and they’ll act like they’ve always understood the true sentiment of the black lives matter movement. But a lot of people are just scared to see their version of what America is changing in a way that affects their supremacy.

Tim, you have a character, Jack Decker, who is partly inspired by Trump, would it be fair to say he’s a figure that has fascinated you for a while now?

Tim Heidecker: Yeah, I’ve been doing a stand-up routine for years. There’s this video of me giving a Trump endorsement speech from 2011, which, not to sound like Trump, but I was ahead of that before everybody! I was the first one to believe. But his tone, his arrogance and his narcissism are comic tropes that I’m very comfortable swimming in. His main speech (at the convention) was too rehearsed (to do much with), but he actually came out this morning and gave an hour-long speech that was more like his classic rambling (style), just throwing mud around, so maybe we’ll present that as his convention speech instead. We have no interest in presenting the truth, but neither does he.

Who were your favourite speakers at the convention?

Vic Berger: I’d say (former New York City mayor) Rudy Giuliani, hands-down. He’s like this screaming old man telling you to get off his lawn. 

Tim Heidecker: I’ve been thinking about Newt Gingrich a lot, he’s got this Kermit the Frog voice. And if you pitch it up just a little bit it becomes really, really funny. At the beginning of his speech he thanked his wife for maybe ten, 20 seconds and then moved on, so we just made his entire speech this long list of her accomplishments and then that was it. He’s considered the intellectual of the party, he’s quite academic and a good debater, but his speech was very dark and painted the world as apocalyptic. So we had him coming out to this Oompa-Loompa music.

Vic Berger: I think all of the speeches were pretty dark. There was nothing inspirational, nothing that could make you feel like it would be OK if this guy actually wins.

Do you think he could win?

Tim Heidecker: Yes, I do. He’s in a good position to win, because Hilary Clinton has to play defence the whole time, she owns the state of the country to some degree. From my perspective, things are better than they were eight years ago, but Trump is very good at manipulating information and there are a lot of people out there that are easily scared and swayed by a loud, somewhat entertaining bully. It’s (Clinton’s) to lose, but she’s a very weak candidate, and is very capable of making huge mistakes over the next few months.