Donald Trump is an actual supervillain. We’ve known it all along, of course, but now he’s not even trying to hide it, given that he’s evoking evil schemes from superhero movies for yuks. Yes, it turns out the orange wannabe overlord has a lot in common with Lex Luthor. Everyone, pretend to be shocked.
Just when you thought the man could not come up with anything freshly appalling to say — surely, after eight years of his galling gasbaggery, we’ve heard it all? — Trump goes and pulls off a belter by joking that he’s all for climatic change and rising sea levels as it’ll mean there will be “more beachfront property.” No, I’m not even taking this out of context. For proof, here’s the quote in context:
Amid mocking President Biden for his insistence that rising sea levels is a serious threat facing the whole planet — Trump attempts to ridicule Biden for using the word “existential” but not knowing what it means, even though it’s very clear that he’s talking about himself — Trump does indeed quip that the extent of climate change is that “basically, you’re gonna have a little more beachfront property, OK?”
Trump loyalists will no doubt accuse anyone criticizing his comments as taking his joke too seriously. And, yes, he is joking here, but the fact that he would make a gag about something as serious as climate change, belittling it simply to get in a dig at his opponent, shows how apocalyptically dangerous his egocentricity and selfishness really is. Also, it doesn’t even make sense — rising water levels will mean there is less beach, not more of it!
It’s highly ironic that Trump can talk about the end of the world and think of the real estate benefits, though, as this is literally the evil scheme concocted by Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor in 1978’s Superman movie, in which the baddie attempts to set off the San Andreas Fault with stolen missiles, so it will destroy the country and he can sell the resultant wasteland for profit. Presumably Donald is the only person who has ever watched that film and wanted to be Lex, not Superman, afterward.
We shouldn’t be surprised that Trump and Luthor are one and the same, however, as the signs have been there all along. I mean, they both hate aliens that have made the U.S. their home, they both have an airheaded blonde sidekick (Miss Teschmacher versus Miss Taylor Greene)… The list goes on. At this point, Trump could start posting Hackman quotes in all-caps on Truth Social and we wouldn’t even blink. “I AM THE GREATEST CRIMINAL MIND OF OUR TIME,” he could write, and we’d just go, “yup, sounds about right.”
Of course, at the end of Superman, Christopher Reeve turns back time, reverses the damage Luthor has done to the country, and sticks him in jail. Unfortunately, here in the real world, we’re stuck with the aftermath of everything Trump has done, but at least for the moment we can dream that he could go to jail and then, à la Hackman, whip off his hair to reveal he was wearing a wig this whole time.
