So, I was mindlessly scrolling through my Twitter newsfeed this week when I came across a story that I thought had to be a joke.
But incredibly, President Donald Trump’s campaign team did in fact tweet a video that depicted the president as Thanos, a supervillain in the Marvel Cinematic Universe films.
The video showed Trump’s face superimposed onto Thanos’ body, uttering “I am inevitable,” the same line the villain utters in “Avengers: Endgame” before attempting to snap his fingers and kill off all of mankind.
Like Thanos (because why not?), Trump, who I can only infer sees himself as a villain, snaps his fingers and wipes out the Democrats who are carrying out impeachment proceedings against him, led by his rival and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Like in the films, the people can be seen disintegrating before eventually vanishing into thin air.
The video was tweeted two hours after House Democrats introduced two articles of impeachment against the president, which call for him to be impeached for “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
“House Democrats can push their sham impeachment all they want,” reads the Trump campaign tweet. “President Trump’s reelection is inevitable.”
There are so many things wrong with this situation, the most obvious of which is that it’s completely insane. In the past, whether a president was liked or not, at least the office drew some measure of respect.
Now, our president is being portrayed by his own campaign as a mass murderer from movies based on comic books. And he’s using the portrayal as a way to mock a very serious impeachment process being carried out against him.
Not to mention, the line in the video is completely taken out of context. The snap from Thanos is unsuccessful at the end of the film and marks his downfall. He’s subsequently wiped out of existence following a snap from Tony Stark, or Iron Man.
So, therefore, another interpretation could be that he fully expects to be defeated, or in this case, impeached.
A president has not been at risk of being impeached since Bill Clinton in 1998. Clinton was in fact impeached by the House of Representatives, but was acquitted by the U.S. Senate, a scenario many seem to think will play out the same way for Trump.
Trump would be only the third president to be impeached by the U.S. Congress. Before Clinton, the last time a president had been impeached by Congress was Andrew Johnson, way back in 1868. No president in the country’s history has been impeached, then removed from office.
What I’m trying to get across, maybe in too many words, is that the situation is a serious one and should be treated as such. Instead, Trump opted to follow up the animated video to further belittle something that affects the entire nation. At a recent campaign rally, he described the articles as “the lightest impeachment in history.”
He may choose to downplay the charges, but there’s nothing “light” about them. According to the New York Times, he’s charged with “abuse of power” for pushing Ukraine to help him get elected by damaging the reputations of his Democratic rivals and for obstruction of Congress for trying to block parts of the impeachment proceedings.
What’s even more troubling is that because the presidency of Donald Trump has been one scandal after another, this all seems pretty normal. He regularly tweets outlandish things, so what’s new about a video depicting him as a murderous comic book villain?
To cope with all of this madness, many of us have chosen to try to normalize this behavior when it’s anything but normal. Before this administration, the occasional presidential scandal dominated headlines for days or even weeks, but now that the chaos is never-ending, a scandal is easily forgotten about or dismissed when another one comes along quickly to take its place.
Perhaps Jim Starlin, the creator of Thanos, described the nature of these times best. Starlin told The Hollywood Reporter he felt “violated’ from how his creation was being used by the president, but quickly came to another conclusion about the video.
“It finally struck me that the leader of my country and the free world actually enjoys comparing himself to a mass murderer,” Starlin said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter. “How sick is that? These are sad and strange times we are going through. Fortunately, all things, even national nightmares, eventually come to an end.”
For all of our sakes, let’s hope there’s some truth to that sentiment.