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The more I compare Trump to comic book villains, the more aware I become of a paradox: real-life villains have more latitude to be cartoons than cartoons do.
For fictional bad guys to be interesting, they need depth and nuance. A supervillain who is gleefully evil for evil’s sake might be entertaining in a shallow way, but to stay entertaining, they have to evolve, for better or worse. All fictional characters share this obligation. Real people don’t. Trump and other fascists don’t have to change or self-reflect or give us a reason, however horrible, for the things they do. They are free to be vile in the most terrifying yet one-note ways possible.
That’s how we keep ending up with truly monstrous fictional characters with more empathy than Trump has. Like Doctor Doom, for instance.
On the surface, the two have many things in common. Both are egotistical in the extreme. Trump can’t even threaten the governor of Maine without stopping to brag, while Doom makes endless robots that look like him (and he kills anyone who points this out).
Both think screwing over American workers is an appropriate game plan. Trump has permitted the slapdash firing of thousands of federal workers — who are really important, actually — while Doom crashed all American industry when President Kennedy wouldn’t give him a cabinet position.
Both prefer to rule autocratically. Trump’s second term so far has mostly been a series of executive orders of varying degrees of legality. Doom…well, he IS the government of Latveria. More on that later.
Then, of course, there’s the war crimes. In Fantastic Four #54, Johnny Storm said that Doom’s “favorite hobbies are atrocities and genocide,” a descriptor that can just as easily apply to Trump, who is building concentration camps and thinks ethnic cleansing is a nice way to start a beach resort.
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But thanks to the fictional character’s obligation to be interesting, we have seen multiple instances of Doom doing the unthinkable: making the world a better place on purpose, if not always for the right reasons.
Part of this may come from the fact that Doom is a person of color (despite every casting decision ever) who has personally experienced the worst forms of government oppression and grinding poverty. Before taking control of Latveria, he was known to give away his ill-gotten gains to his fellow Roma.
Even after becoming dictator, Doom has been known to give out money or food without so much as a single journalist around to record his noble deed for the state-controlled press (a media model that Trump has also been trying to emulate).
This generosity/bribery, along with a hefty dose of government propaganda, explains why Latverians are generally pretty happy. You can imagine how Doom feels about the very few dissenters, though he occasionally manages to be more subtle about it than Trump’s attempts to deport pro-Palestinian protesters, if only because he knows how to play the long game.
Doom is not a good person, clearly. Except for that one time.
During Infamous Iron Man, Doom realized the many errors of his ways and made an actual, sincere attempt to become a superhero. He even tried to steer Latveria towards democracy.
Wow! Someone who does his homework to select the best people for the job in an effort to expand human rights rather than choosing unqualified media personalities with no respect for anyone!
Even before then, he showed symptoms of basic decency, like the time he helped Sue Richards deliver her second child, saving both their lives. In exchange, he demanded only the right to name the baby.
It’s not clear why he did this. Maybe his sole motivation was so he could have something to lord over Reed Richards forever. Or maybe even Doom is capable of feeling sympathy and protectiveness for an innocent baby — something that Trump, whose anti-abortion push has already killed hundreds of babies, knows nothing about.
In either case, Doom went out of his way to help his mortal enemies without any expectation of financial or political gain. I can, therefore, only conclude that Trump is a better dictator than Doom is, in the sense that he is a worse human being who cares less for humanity than the guy whose gut reaction to encountering happiness is, “How can I ruin this?”
