Being a Marvel Comics fan, I hate to disrespect Thanos, but the comparison must be made.
I don't know whether to attempt some dark humor or just lay out the dry and frightening social psychological resonance between our American president and the comic book character. Times are too serious for the former, I suppose, so I'll just go with the facts.
I have always said that Donald Trump is the first American president with the public persona of a classic pop culture American villain. He's a bully. He uses wealth as some kind of self-measure and a measure of others. He treats women without much respect. He lies all the time. He brags. He thinks that he's a genius. If you wrote screenplays with John Wayne's characters on one side, or Clint Eastwood's, or Chuck Norris's, or Sylvester Stallone's, or Bruce Willis's, the Donald Trump character would clearly be on the other side. He is an iconic American villain.
Why Americans elected a president who appears to be a villain is a question best left to hundreds of 22nd century cultural anthropologists. For now, I want to point out the chilling and obvious intersection of pop culture evil and COVID-19 politics. Marvel Comics' Thanos is not your usual villain. His goal is to wipe out half of all sentient life in the universe. He's called "The Mad Titan" because of this, but he sees himself in a different light.
Thanos perceives himself as doing the universe a great favor by halving the population. Resources are scarce, he argues, and he refuses to watch people starve or die from overpopulation. His solution is to wipe out 50% of everything that lives so that resources will last and everyone will have enough to eat. He kills half the universe, in other words, for the economic good of all. Depressions are therefore averted and no one starves, at least until eons pass and populations once more infringe on their resources.
Life imitates art, I suppose.
With the pandemic here, and the strategy to re-open America without testing in place or guidelines being met, President Trump is not playing just any villain role, he is playing Thanos. He is making the same exact economic argument as Thanos. Tens of thousands will die, but it's for the economic good of all. In American comics spanning 50 years, such an argument has always been considered evil, mad, and to be fought against at all costs. In the 2020 GOP, this argument is embraced as prudent and the way things need to be.
American character, more than 200 years in the making, is at stake here. And no Avengers are in sight.
Bob Dietz
May 6, 2020
