What Wonder Woman 1984 doesn’t get about Trump and Reagan
By Mark R. Whittington
When Patty Jenkins, the director of both 2017’s Wonder Woman and the newly released Wonder Woman 1984 announced that the film’s big baddy, Maxwell Lord, was based on Donald Trump, one could hear the groans coming from sea to shining sea. Why would Ms. Jenkins insult half of her audience by doing a thing like that?
Fortunately, having seen the movie, I’m pleased to announce that Maxwell Lord has very little resemblance to the Bad Orange Man who now occupies the presidency. Some minor spoilers may follow.
Trump is a man born to wealth who turned a small fortune into a much bigger one in real estate. He has had a number of other, lesser-known and not very successful business ventures (Trump Steaks, Trump Water, etc.) that sought to trade on his well-known brand. Trump also became famous in the late 1990s with a reality show called “The Apprentice” that pitted two teams of people to perform business-related tasks with the prize being a position in his organization. Then, having no other worlds to conquer, Trump campaigned for and won the presidency on a platform that combined conventional conservatism (tax cuts, increased defense spending, constitutional judges) with a fierce populism aimed at voters who felt ill-used by elites of both parties.
Maxwell Lord is, apparently, born in poverty. He pulls himself up by combining an oil company that, curiously, had no reserves of oil with a Ponzi scheme that would have shocked Bernie Madoff in its audacity. He also starts a cult by suggesting that people can get what they want by wishing it so. When he acquires a magical object that does just that, chaos ensues.
Trump’s secret to success does not involve wishes or magical objects. It involves hard work, intelligence, ingenuity, and no little willingness to bend the rules with remarkable frequency. He often seeks to keep his opponents off balance with outrageous insults, something that even his supporters find off-putting at times. Trump has a willingness to think outside the box, hence the Abraham Accords, the Artemis return to the moon program, and Operation Warp Speed. One has the impression that he would find a magical object that grants wishes boring. The effort to obtain great wealth, fame, and power animates him as much as gaining these things.
A true Trump-like villain would have made for a more interesting character than the unstable, ranting, and not very good at his job Maxwell Lord. Why Patty Jenkins decided to make the comparison, which alienated much of Wonder Woman’s fan base, is hard to understand.
In any case, in 1984, Donald Trump was a rich playboy whose adventures were more likely to be depicted in the tabloids than in more serious journalistic venues. He was as much beloved by the media and the entertainment industry as he is loathed and despised now.
However, Patty Jenkins seriously gets President Ronald Reagan, the statesman who bestrode the 1980s like a colossus, wrong in every respect.
Reagan appears in a crucial scene in which he seems to be befuddled at the growing chaos brought on by Maxwell Lord’s machinations. Lord offers to grant the president a wish. Reagan wishes for more nuclear weapons, the idea being that more nukes would make “the Russians” listen to us. In fact, the sudden appearance of nuclear weapons panics the Soviets and starts a thermonuclear exchange that threatens to destroy the world.
In fact, Jenkins misrepresents what Reagan would have done. He actually had a horror of nuclear war and balanced his desire to bring down the Soviet Union with efforts to prevent the destruction of the world. Indeed, were he thinking tactically, if presented with a wish Reagan would likely have wished for a working SDI system that would make nuclear weapons obsolete. Were Reagan to think strategically, he would have wished for prosperity at home and the peaceful fall of the Soviet Union abroad.
Ironically, Reagan achieved those two goals, not with the use of magic, but with wise policy, hard work, and his communication gifts with which, during the year the movie was set, he won a 49-state reelection blowout against Walter Mondale.
Of course, Reagan had to be a war-mongering doofus because, even over 30 years later, Patty Jenkins thinks he was, and it was necessary for the plot.
To be fair. Trump and Reagan were not the first historical figures that Patty Jenkins slimed in cinema. In the first Wonder Woman movie, German General Ludendorff is depicted as a homicidal maniac who wants to gas his way to victory over the Allies. The real Ludendorff by the time of the movie was advising the Kaiser to seek an armistice.
Wonder Woman 1984, while it has its moments, is not being very well received by audiences and critics. If Patty Jenkins had treated historical characters a little more than two-dimensionally, she might have created a far more entertaining movie than the one that just showed up on the big screen and HBO Max.
Fortunately, Gal Gadot as the titular superhero carries the material and makes more of it than it truly deserves.
Mark Whittington, who writes frequently about space and politics, has published a political study of space exploration entitled Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon? as well as The Moon, Mars and Beyond. He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner. He is published in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The Hill, USA Today, the LA Times, and the Washington Post, among other venues.
