JD Vance, A Comic Book Villain Without Enough Shame To Wear A Scary Mask
JD Vance, A Comic Book Villain Without Enough Shame To Wear A Scary Mask
He keeps finding new depths of depravity.
Donald Trump and JD Vance have adopted a Nazi-inspired playbook in the presidential campaign. They’ve spread absurd yet nonetheless dehumanizing lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, that have endangered residents.
Springfield Mayor Rob Rue, a Republican, said last week that the city had received multiple bomb threats via email, containing “hateful language towards immigrants and Haitians.” The threats were serious enough that Springfield City Hall, two elementary schools, and a local Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles facility were evacuated. The Haitian community have had their windows smashed and acid hurled on their cars.
Sunday, during a shameless display on CNN’s State of the Union, Vance expressed zero remorse for the impact of his words. When Dana Bash called him out on his lies and hateful rhetoric, Vance seemingly admitted that he’d made up the libel about Haitians stealing and eating people’s pets.
“The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes,” Vance said. (That’s another lie.) “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
Vance has deliberately caused suffering to further his own ends. When Trump and Vance talk about Haitian immigrants “invading” Springfield and spreading disease, they sound like a comic book villain, specifically Captain America’s Nazi foe the Red Skull. Although recent stories focused more on the villain’s world-conquering fascism, writer Nick Spencer put the villain’s white supremacy front and center in a 2016 storyline. Trump had just clinched the Republican nomination with an openly nativist platform, which scapegoated immigrants for the nation’s problems, but it still seemed possible that our non-fictional America would take a different, better path from what the Skull offered.
“I have just come from Europe — my homeland, in fact. And do you know what I saw there? It was an invading army. These so-called ’refugees’ — millions of them — marching across the continent, bringing their fanatical beliefs and their crime with them,” the Skull declares in what sounds like a standard MAGA stump speech. “They attack our women, and bomb our cities. And how do our leaders respond? Do they push them back and enforce the borders, as is our sovereign duty? Of course not. They say, ‘Here, take our food. Take our shelter. Take our way of life, and then take our lives.’ Despicable.”
“Your entire culture is under siege,” the Skull warns a receptive American audience. “The principles your country was founded upon lost in the name of ‘tolerance.’ Your religion, your beliefs, your sense of community — all tossed aside like trash. And you cannot even speak out against it, lest you be called a bigot!”
Compare the Skull’s words to what Vance posted on social media last week:
"It is racist," they tell us, to get angry at being unable to afford a home, or to complain about being unable to drive a car safely down the streets paved by your neighbors, or to call 911 because strangers are slaughtering geese in a public park. They have ignored this town’s problems for years. Now, they pay attention — not to focus their considerable wealth and power on helping their fellow citizens.
But to use their platform as a weapon against those who dare to notice that their lives have gotten worse.
Many conservative comics fans objected to Spencer giving the Red Skull a speech that, to them, made perfect sense. They didn’t reflect on the fact that the Skull was speaking fluent Nazi, slightly but not significantly updated from the 1930s.
A modern villain for a modern threat
The Red Skull is a villain who modern media has mostly avoided, perhaps because he’s so relevant. A 1981 episode of the Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends cartoon, “Quest of the Red Skull,” was later either removed from syndication or was heavily edited to erase any overt Nazi references (e.g. Adolf Hitler and images of the swastika).
The Marvel Cinematic Universe would similarly scrub the Skull’s Nazi background. Johann Schmidt (Hugo Weaving) is the leader of Hydra, a fictional terrorist organization that has infiltrated the Nazis. In the comics, Hitler recruits Schmidt to serve as the living embodiment of Nazi evil and intimidation. He is such a fearsome propaganda tool that the U.S. sets in motion the project that turns Steve Rogers into a super soldier. Captain America is not simply a patriotic symbol but a direct response to white supremacy, a truly “woke” hero. The Skull often expresses his simultaneous confusion and disgust with Rogers’s fundamental decency, specifically his innate tolerance for people the Skull dismissed as his “inferiors.”
“You do perplex me,” a dying Skull lashes out at his enemy in Captain America No. 298. “How can so superior a man surround himself with such trash? Jews! Fops! Blacks! Children! What is the fascination these creatures hold for you?”
The Skull’s essential racism is ignored in the MCU. Hydra is equal opportunity evil with room for villains played by both Robert Redford and Garry Shandling. Yet, it’s not as if modern media studiously avoids villains whose motivations are rooted in real world politics. The Catwoman from 1992’s Batman: The Animated Series began as an extreme animal rights activist, who robbed from the rich so she could give to her poor feline friends and, of course, herself. Originally a basic femme fatale in the comics, the villain Poison Ivy on B:TAS was a botanist turned ecoterrorist who prefers plants to people. She’s so unhinged that when she has Batman at her mercy, she grudgingly spares him after he threatens to “kill” a rare plant.
When she tries to kill millionaires whose companies leveled forests, Batman dismisses her as a murderer with the “convictions of a fanatic.” She’s also set up as a strawman feminist who targets the stodgy members of an all-male social club.
B:TAS’s Ra’s al Ghul justifies his megalomania with a self-appointed mission to restore the planet to its lush, pristine glory. (Christopher Nolan’s whitewashed Ra’s al Ghul is a slightly more rightwing villain who’s not interested in preserving the environment but seeks to punish a decadent society.)
Superman: The Animated Series introduced the villain Livewire, who was obnoxious shock jock Leslie Willis. She physically resembles her voice actor Lori Petty and comes across more like Howard Stern but without his 1990s-era misogyny. We never got the satisfaction of seeing Superman take down a Rush Limbaugh-inspired villain. However, the Darkseid agent G. Gordon Godfrey, a propagandist who turns people against superheroes in the 1986 Legends miniseries, is eerily similar to Putin-booster Tucker Carlson.
It is strange that in the MCU the only overtly race-based villains are men of color, Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) and Namor (Tenoch Huerta) in the Black Panther movies. I can imagine it’s harder to depict a straight-up Nazi as sympathetic, so white nationalism and xenophobia are usually addressed through fantastic metaphor. On the CW Supergirl series, Lex Luthor (a brilliant Jon Cryer) loathed (literal) alien immigrants, and his personal final solution for them is what he calls “vile and viable.” He even quotes the infamous line from Hitler: “I don’t see why men shouldn’t be as cruel as nature.”
This Lex is Stephen Miller with better hair, but conservative viewers are free to ignore the obvious metaphor. The Red Skull would force them to confront their own sincerely held beliefs. After all, he shares MAGA’s contempt for a diverse, multicultural society. In Captain America No. 14, written by Mark Waid, the Skull’s literal hell is freedom and diversity: “Thanks to our leader, Germany has become infested with strange cultures, inferior people.” Replace “Germany” with “America” and these are sentiments that Trump and Vance regularly express.
The Red Skull, in a 2021 Ta-Nehisi Coates storyline, radicalized alienated young white men with anti-feminist verbiage that seemed all too familiar. “He tells them what they’ve always longed to hear,” Cap explains. “That they’re secretly great. That the whole world is against them. That if they’re men, they’ll fight back. And bingo — that’s their purpose. That’s what they’ll live for. And that’s what they’ll die for.”
Jordan Peterson took personal offense over the story, which he thought attacked his own views. He posted on social media, “Do I really live in a universe where Ta-Nehisi Coates has written a Captain America comic featuring a parody of my ideas as part of the philosophy of the arch villain Red Skull?”
More accurately, he exists in a reality where the Red Skull’s animating principles live on in Donald Trump and JD Vance.
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Fantastic.
Thank you for this. I have no direct exposure to any of the stories you referenced but hearing your descriptions I now appreciate the medium for its relevance
Loved that page of the Red Skull from 2016. Makes me wish I hadn’t stopped reading Marvel. Someone worked their ass off on the art, too. How the hell did he come back from the grave?