How could the press have missed it?
Super Tuesday is upon us and — somehow! — lying, cheating, swindling, xenophobic racist Donald Trump is the frontrunning Republican nominee. Amid all that hair, he proudly displays the worst of America’s unchecked id, and he’s just the alpha male leading the rabid pack. For months we’ve let this slide, avoiding the most logical ways to attack him and now the Republicans shit their pants over it acting as if this wasn’t somehow inevitable.
But the jig is up. The political system in which Trump rose to prominence is as much to blame as any verbal egesta he uses to tar his opponents. It’s just not funny anymore. It’s time to shine a light on the maddeningly obvious truth about every single one of these scumbags, Democrats and Republicans alike: They are all secretly villains from your favorite ’80s cartoons (and a few you’ve probably never heard of!), hiding in plain sight this entire time.
13. Biden, Joe
Char Aznable, Char’s Counterattack (1988)
Like the classic primary antagonist of the long-running Mobile Suit Gundam series, Joe Biden is obsessed with two things: looking fly in sunglasses and inserting himself into suggestive photos with women many years younger than he is. Whatever it is, it’s not a good look — especially since, otherwise, Joe Biden’s known as the cool guy in town.
12. Carson, Ben
Mumm-Ra (Mummified), Thundercats (1985)
Ben Carson hasn’t quit yet, and may the Ancient Spirits of Evil bless him for it. That’s despite his staffers quitting several key campaign positions. That’s despite vomiting up ever-less-relevant swill for months and turning the spigot back on ahead of Super Tuesday. That’s despite his campaign likely being a scam, maybe, he’s not sure. Ben Carson is Mumm-Ra in his desiccated, bandaged state, a slave to the Ancient Spirits of Evil with none of the mojo they offer. He will sometimes emerge from his pyramid, but mostly keep to it and his mummified brains. After all this is over, we will pretend he never existed.
11. Christie, Chris
Carface Carruthers, All Dogs Go to Heaven (1989)
Future series installments of All Dogs Go to Heaven redeemed him, but Carface Carruthers doesn’t deserve it and neither does Chris Christie. Making hell for our angelic canines, showcasing a murderous streak several times over, treating his henchmen like slaves, and putting children like Anne Marie in peril, Carface is evil through and through. Chris Christie’s latest morally reprehensible trick — after definitely having something to do with Bridgegate, after definitely bullying everyone in his path, after breaking New Jersey while pretending to stand for it, and after losing in another presidential race — was endorsing Donald Trump as president, in what has widely been seen as an insipid play at staying relevant. As Jennifer Rubin pointed out, it’s on him because “Christie knows better.” Heaven help us all.
10. Clinton, Hillary
Princess Kushana, Nausicaa and the Valley of the Wind, (1985)
Hillary Clinton — candidate of feminists, establishment Democrats, women young and old, and voters more enamored by familiar evils than revolutionary idealism — is not a very good candidate. She’s got several separate scandals running against her, her record is pockmarked with problematic turns on everything from “super-predators” to the Iraq War and the Defense of Marriage Act, history is not on her side, and Bernie Sanders offers a drastically different American vision that Clinton cannot. A couple of years ago, Glenn Greenwald, in an acidic interview, called her, among other things, “a fucking hawk and like a neocon, practically.” If there’s a villain that embodies Clinton’s hawkishness as well her pragmatism, it’s Hayao Miyazaki’s cold, ruthless Princess Kushana from Nausicaä. An invading military commander from a neighboring country, Kushana is willing to do whatever it takes, including resurrect an ancient unstable weapon of mass destruction, to raze her enemies. In Kushana’s own words, “I’ve chosen the bloody path.” She fails, though, and the film’s conflict ultimately gets resolved by someone more empathetic and less fanatical. Still, when swarms of giant bugs start invading your home, desperate times call for desperate measures.
9. Cruz, Ted
Slithe, Thundercats (1985)
Ted Cruz’s campaign problems all sprout from the same seed: he makes you uncomfortable, because he, himself, often looks uncomfortable. His odd resistance to wearing clothes that fit him may be an attempt at looking approachable, but it just makes him look incompetent when the competition knows that politics is a spectator sport. This puts Ted Cruz in good company with the slimy and equally unpleasant Slithe, leader of the villainous Mutant faction in Thundercats. Like Slithe, Cruz may be cunning, but his arrogance combined with his out-of-step demeanor turn most people off except for the loyal followers like Monkian and Jackalman who share his vision. Slithe never wins either.
8. Kasich, John
Jenner, The Secret of NIMH (1982)
John Kasich wants you to think he’s a good guy. A rock ’n’ roll candidate (if Linkin Park were rock ’n’ roll). Kasich could be your dad, right? That is, if your dad wanted to make his children dumber, bust unions and ask for their support, remove a woman’s right to choose, and uphold bigoted views on marriage for as long as it was politically convenient. Stay out of my room, Dad! Kasich is the worst kind of evil, pretending to hold reasonable opinions when he’s just better at hiding his worst tendencies. A likable-enough figure who deceived his fellow rats into thinking he was a team player, Jenner revealed himself to be an aggressive killer, caricaturized with gaping wild eyes and gnashing teeth. Like Kasich, he presented himself as the sane alternative to Nicodemus, an old man with a lot of dreams. Jenner’s brand of sanity amounted to killing Nicodemus and attempting to kill an unarmed Mrs. Brisby with a wicked curved sword. That plan luckily didn’t pan out. Will Kasich’s?
7. Kerry, John
Sea Hawk, She-Ra: Princess of Power (1985)
Sea Hawk admittedly doesn’t stay a bad guy for long in She-Ra, a spin-off of He-Man, but it’s hard not to look at John Kerry’s life as anything but a bald-faced attempt at piracy. An already monied liberal with a history of naval combat marries into rich empires twice, then distinguishes himself in politics enough to become a major international player, all the while keeping yachts around that kick the pants off other politicians’ yachts. Kerry likes to troll the crowd when he can, and he named one of those yachts the Scaramouche after a film best known for its epic, six-minute fencing scene, so we’ll call it: man’s a wannabe pirate. Sea Hawk, whose whole mustachioed character was named after the classic Errol Flynn swashbuckling film, would be proud. Pass the Heinz?
6. McConnell, Mitch
King Haggard, The Last Unicorn (1982)
This clip says everything about Mr. McConnell that you need to know, only in the endlessly more palatable voice of Christopher Lee. Both McConnell and King Haggard obsess over an ideal neither of them can achieve. For Haggard, it’s literal unicorns, those he adores gazing upon even as he sweeps them into the raging sea. McConnell’s unicorn is clearly a unilaterally Republican America: hence the probably-unconstitutional delay to the Supreme Court nomination; hence the support for Rubio, a toothless robot who conveniently fits into multicultural holes. With Trump ascendant and Haggard dead by the end of The Last Unicorn, it didn’t work out for either of them.
5. Obama, Barack
Sauron, The Return of the King (1980)
As horrific as all these other bad guys are, Barack Obama, for just shy of another year, is still the most powerful of them all. Whether he likes it or not, drones will be his eye-in-the-sky legacy as much as marriage equality and Obamacare will be, and there are several reasons liberals should dislike him as much as conservatives do. Much of this is just a reality of the presidency in 2016, and mythologizing has always been a part of the job. Public relations was important to Sauron too. For almost all of Lord of the Rings he deceptively moves chess pieces across the board, convincing more and more to align with him before a gambit brings him down. With less than a year to go, Obama seems nearly free from enemies seeking to attack him directly at this point, but that doesn’t mean McConnell’s Fellowship of the Old White Dudes won’t cause him more than a few explosive headaches before the end.
4. Rubio, Marco
Starscream, Transformers (1984)
Marco. Failure. Marco. Failure. Marco. Failure. Marco. Failure. And Marco Rubio will continue to repeat his failures for the world to see and for more eloquent opponents to excoriate, just like the flying butt of all Decepticon jokes always does. Both Starscream and Rubio should be the future of their respective cabals, and both might actually have a chance, if they’d just shut up and do something helpful for a change.
3. Ryan, Paul
Tetsuo, Akira (1988)
“By some measure, he’s the most popular guy in Washington,” wrote Jonathan Chait of Paul Ryan in April 2012, four months before Mitt Romney tapped him as a running mate in that year’s election — and that wasn’t easy for a Republican serving for several years in both the Bush or the Obama years. After that race, Romney’s chances of future national prominence evaporated, but Ryan was just getting started. Now the new-ish Speaker of the House, the worst job in the world, Paul is obviously Tetsuo, the downtrodden nerd of his patriarchal teenage biker crew who goes mad with power after he rapidly gains abilities as a result of government experimentation. Then he starts demolishing Tokyo. He didn’t deserve what happened to him, but it doesn’t excuse his atrocities, and he never finds the messianic redemption he seeks, despite raging against all the machines. As Charlie Pierce put it: “Oh, Paul Ryan. Your zombie-eyed granny starving won’t get you into heaven anymore.”
2. Sanders, Bernie
Slade, The Fox and the Hound (1981)
Liberals love Bernie Sanders, sure, and his recent comments on gun control will keep him squarely within their camp. But it wasn’t always that way. In the ’90s, he voted to strip away funding for research on gun violence, and he held pro-gun opinions in Vermont for years. This is important to note because it actually proved a factor in South Carolina, where Clinton soundly defeated Sanders less than a year after Dylann Roof shot and killed nine parishioners in Charleston, SC. By the end of The Fox and the Hound, Amos Slade had learned a similar lesson, choosing to put down his gun in favor of letting Tod, the fox, live out his days. It took serious threats to Slade and his dogs’ lives from bears and trains to get him to that point, and at the end of the film the fox and the hound still live apart. Slade may have let Tod go at the end, but that doesn’t absolve him of his sins.
1. Trump, Donald
Ratigan, The Great Mouse Detective (1986)
Warren T. Rat, An American Tail (1986)
Taken together, these three creatures represent as complete a picture of broken American capitalism as any that exists, and only one is a real person. All three are pretenders: Ratigan is a rat pretending to be a mouse because he nurses a deep self-loathing; Warren T. Rat sees profit in exploiting the rat population, so he disguises himself as one instead of merely eating them; and Trump, a businessman whose businesses have failed several times over, is pretending to be an intelligent choice to lead a country. All three egomaniacs vamp in front of mirrors, often to their own annoying tunes, with goons present. When you tick any of them off, each reveals his true colors: Ratigan flies into a feral psychopathic rat rage; Warren crumbles in fear of a non-cat-controlled planet; Trump switches to name-calling. All three cling to their gold: Ratigan in his cane; Warren T. in his teeth; Trump in his tower. All three lust after wealth and power on the backs of those less fortunate: Ratigan wants to feed his cat with the incumbent Queen so that he can seize power over Mousedom; Warren T. Rat sells immigrants to sweatshops because he wants to make 50 cents; and, to list one example, Trump used illegal immigrants to build his tower before he started saying he’d build an impossible wall to keep them out. The good news is that these two animated villains suffered embarrassing defeats to mice with comparatively miniscule resources. If there is any justice left in America, so will Trump.
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