Donald Trump and his administration are diving deep into Bond villain territory. The primary difference between real life and cinematic spectacle, however, is that what we are currently witnessing in the White House is much worse than anything screenwriters might have imagined or producers would have permitted to be filmed.
A criminal has taken over the government of the most powerful nation on earth and is actively and openly using it to advance the interests of a network of other sinister characters worldwide. There are slavering over-the-top ghoulish henchmen and women, sex scandals, flamboyant displays of vulgar excess and, wait for it, the prospect of nuclear power plants on the moon.
Yes, that’s right, as if incipient fascism was not enough, our fascists are also a combination of the villains of SPECTRE and Quantum from the Bond movies, the Apostles from Mission Impossible, the High Table from the John Wick franchise and the nasty financiers who hired the Jackal in the Day of the Jackal TV series. And who knows, depending on what Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel are up to, we may even have a little bit of Treadstone from the Bourne movies going on in some form or another?
The Trump Administration and the dark forces behind it are not just dismantling our institutions and stripping away our rights and freedoms, they are also seeking to use the power of the government they have hijacked to advance their criminal plots—whether over-the-top scams that seem more worthy of Dr. Evil than any of the more self-respecting villains on the above list to outright collaboration with companies that seek to destroy the environment for profit or to unleash new dangerous planet-altering technologies without a hint of government control.
Notably, this has included using the Department of Justice and the State Department on behalf of other malefactors on the world stage, along with any number of sex traffickers, coup plotters and violent thugs who can do their dirty work behind the scenes. Just this past week, we have learned that the Department of Justice is targeting Jack Smith as part of their on-going efforts to harass and punish those who were involved in investigating Russian interference in the 2016 and 2020 elections.
While no doubt some of this is just old-fashioned revenge (a big reason why Bond was periodically dropped into pools filled with swarming sharks or hungry Komodo dragons) make no mistake that attempts to discredit those investigations advances no one’s interests more than it does Vladimir Putin’s. Seeking to criminalize protecting America from our enemies’ well-documented efforts to undermine our democracy (which seem to be going pretty well thus far) will just make it much easier for those enemies to keep coming after us. Yes, Trump is complaining that Putin won’t help him by accepting his very pro-Russia terms for a ceasefire in Ukraine, but notice that he is not actually restoring aid to Kyiv to Biden-era levels nor are he is or his team backing away from diplomatic stances that are actually pro-Russian.
This week Trump has also sought to use the State Department to intimidate both Brazil and Israel from prosecuting Trump cronies Jair Bolsonaro and Benjamin Netanyahu. Such efforts are an outrageous violation of diplomatic norms and pose threats to the sovereignty of both places but hey, it’s what you do for the people with the secret handshake.
Of course, there are a few problems with real life compared with movie franchises. First, our villain is both more powerful and, in many ways, more odious than the ones we usually see in movies. Most of the biggest baddies on the big screen were greedy, power hungry or seeking to advance anti-American agendas. Trump is all those things plus he is a racist, misogynist, fraudster and convicted criminal.
Fortunately, while the good guys don’t always win, they often do—especially when the villains are over-reaching idiots. Trump is seeking to sound menacing when his attorney general launches a grand jury investigation into the likes of Jack Smith. But does he really want an indictment that will require him to go to trial? Where he will be forced to prove there was no Russian interference in the elections or that his campaign had no ties to the Russians?
No. No, he does not. Because that wouldn’t end well.
Nor is he going to be successful force Brazil to bend the knee. The Brazilian government is, after all, doing what we should have done and prosecuting their coup-plotting ex-president Bolsonaro. They are not intimidated. Nor are many of our allies—they are choosing to play along with Trump’s extortionate tariffs in the moment, yes, but while waiting out this universally reviled crook in the knowledge that there is one hero that will ultimately come to all our rescue. It’s one who has a much better record than Bond, is more difficult to deter than Ethan Hunt and who has produced a much higher body count than John Wick.
It’s Father Time. In this particular drama while he will not save us from every threat we face, but he can leave us all relatively assured that he always gets his man. Or as he might put it, channeling Pierce Brosnan’s Bond in The World is Not Enough—“I never miss.”
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