While Trump fans align him with The Godfather, Kamala Harris supporters idealize her as Wonder Woman.
On Oct. 23, 2024, Tucker Carlson, warming up the crowd at a Trump rally, compared Trump’s anticipated rule over the nation as akin to a father telling a rebellious 15-year-old daughter that she is a “bad girl” and giving her a “vigorous spanking.” This abusive, demeaning and implicitly incestuous scenario was met with approval and cries from the crowd of “Daddy” and “Donfather.”
These honorifics, likening Trump to an all-powerful father figure and Mafia don, show their face in commercial popular presidential items—now on view in the “Political Circus 2024” popular culture exhibit that I curated for the Schmidt Center Galleries at Florida Atlantic University.
One poster hails Trump as “The Donald” and quotes his famous 2016 statement about being able to shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue and not lose any voters.
Other items include the label of a hot-sauce bottle and a coffee package that dub Trump “The Don,” an appellation hearkening back to the 1972 film The Godfather.
This classic film was made at the precise moment that the women’s liberation movement was challenging patriarchal values and power structures. The Godfather romanticizes just those regressive elements with its heroic portrayal of an alternately tender and violent, protective and threatening strong man, dwelling in a family compound (named for himself), where he alone rules, fixes things, and decides matters of life, death and “business.”
This Don is served by violent men who regularly lie to the women in their lives and demonstrate absolute loyalty to their Don—or else! The Don, his sons and his all-male cadre take it for granted that men are superior to women, that white people are superior to Black people, that gay men are failed men, and that it is the rightful way of the world that they enforce their power by deception, paid influence, beatings, maiming and murder. Such dirty deeds, audiences are told, are what “presidents and senators” regularly do, along with the criminals.
The few women in the film are sidelined as dupes, baby-makers and enablers.
While Trump fans align him with The Godfather, her supporters, since 2020, idealize Kamala Harris as Wonder Woman, the comic book character originating in 1941. Wonder Woman is the first female superhero and one who represents the power of love over hate, who refuses violence as solution, tries to get enemies to reconcile and upholds truth over lies.
In one sticker, Harris, depicted in Wonder Woman’s costume, is shown entwining Trump in her golden lasso that compels truth-telling. Wonder Woman fights for a more benevolent future, departing from violent hierarchies. In the 2017 hit film, Wonder Woman, she declares: “Only love can save this world. So I stay. I fight, and I give … for the world I know can be.”
Wonder Woman was imagined by her creator, William Marston, as a feminist hero, inspiring desire for women’s leadership. Wonder Woman is an Amazonian and born into a matriarchal culture on “Paradise Island”—a world away from The Godfather’s compound. One 1943 story line, set 1,000 years into the future, features Wonder Woman elected as president of the United States.
Gloria Steinem put Wonder Woman on the cover of the first issue of Ms. in 1972, just a few months after the release of The Godfather. The superhero appears under a banner reading “Wonder Woman for President” while a rooftop sign proclaims: “Peace and Justice.”
Fifty-two years later, the issues that the women’s liberation movement advocated—women’s right to equality, an education that includes women’s lives and ideas, healthcare, safety from sexual violence, dignity and peace over violence—are manifestly on the line in this presidential election.
While in office, Trump appointed three of the six Supreme Court justices who eventually overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that had guaranteed women access to abortion.
In 2023, he was found liable for sexual assault of E. Jean Carroll.
He bullies Vice President Harris with slurs like “retard” and “crazy.”
His candidacy is favored by the right-wing Heritage Foundation whose lengthy manifesto, Project 2025, claims to support free speech but demands that educators no longer teach most of the knowledge accumulated over the last 52 years regarding sexual, gender and racial equality.
While Trump and his supporters manifestly want America to go back to an era of patriarchal authority, Harris and supporters insist “we won’t go back.”
Our culture entertains itself through popular culture, but these vivid symbolic stories and characters also allow us to imagine, ponder and dream. Understanding that life is never as simple as popular culture, this 2024 electoral configuration of Wonder Woman vs. The Godfather still lays out the stark implications of the current election.
One candidate is aligned with a character who cuts off a horse’s head to get his way, who commits crimes and murders with impunity, and who commands a mix of fear, hate and worship.
The other one speaks to the desire for a world based in values of equality, peace, justice and love and the need to fight for these. If “Wonder Woman” wins, there will be, at the very least, some progress toward those “Paradise Island” type goals.
If “The Donfather” wins, the nation becomes his personal compound—and woe to those who are not under his “protection,” along with “bad girls” everywhere.
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