Over the weekend, the cast of one of the best-loved sitcoms of the ’00s created a social media stir with hints of a reunion.

Eric McCormack, Debra Messing, Megan Mullally and Sean Hayes, the erstwhile stars of Will & Grace, posted a string of Instagram photos and tweets showing them together again – alluding to the fact that the gang might be working on something new.

And now, we know just what that was. The first new Will & Grace episode since the show ended in 2006 is here – and you can watch it right now. 

If you were wondering what it took to lure Messing, McCormack et al back to Will’s Manhattan apartment for the first time in a decade, the answer can be found in the orange form of Republican presidential nominee and world’s first human-Wotsit hybrid: Donald J. Trump.

In the new episode, it transpires that Karen (Mullally) – never a woman renowned for her impeccable moral radar – is one of Trump’s “oldest friends”. She tells a stunned Will and Grace (McCormack and Messing) that she fully intends on voting for The Donald in the US presidential election in November, adding that she has been helping Trump with his controversial immigration policy.

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Naïve goofball Jack (Hayes), an undecided voter, has always been easily influenced by Karen – and she does her best to push him in the direction of Trump.

“Honey, if you don't vote for Trumpy, there will be wars and monsoons and locusts and hordes of brown people pouring over our borders from every direction,” she tells Jack, using rhetoric only slightly more hyperbolic than the Republican nominee's. 

When Will and Grace tell Jack that he should vote for Hillary Clinton, he replies, “Yeah, but I don't like that she wears pants.”

However, Will eventually manages to convince Jack to vote for the Democratic candidate by telling him that Katy Perry is a Clinton supporter.

The video ends with the cast pleading with viewers to #votehoney. 

In the aftermath of the Orlando nightclub shooting in June, Trump described himself as a “friend of women [and] the LGBT community”. However, this statement was roundly dismissed by LGBTQ advocacy groups.

“Donald Trump has vowed to roll back marriage equality, pass Kim Davis-style discrimination and allow governors from coast to coast to pass laws like North Carolina’s HB2,” Jay Brown, spokesman for Human Rights Campaign, told Politico.

Kim Davis is a county clerk from Kentucky who refused to issue marriage licenses to same sex couples in 2015, prompting a sudden sweep of discriminatory anti-LGBT laws across the American South and Midwest. 

Read more: "No more jokes: if Trump wins, I may revoke my US citizenship"

North Carolina’s HB2, meanwhile, is the recent controversial so-called “bathroom bill”, a law preventing transgender people from using public bathrooms for the gender with which they identify.

Hillary Clinton has also repeatedly undermined Trump’s claims to be a champion for women – most recently using his past misogynistic comments against him in a striking campaign advert.

In the ad, a number of young women are shown anxiously looking at themselves in the mirror as Trump’s voice booms out. The sound bites have all been taken from Trump’s previous campaign speeches and interviews, and include remarks about one woman’s “fat ugly face” and another’s “fat ass” – before dubbing another a “slob” and a “pig”. 

After fading to black, the ad shows the text: “Is this the president we want for our daughters?”

Image: Getty