I’m watching Harry Potter and I can’t help thinking of Donald Trump. Severus Snape. We know him and love him. Correction: We know him and ended up loving him. Mean-spirited bastard, jealous, petty, and carrier of a chip on his shoulder that should have made him a hunchback.
Oh, he had small moments of kindness. He helped Harry when it the sly Professor Quirrell tried to harm him during the Quidditch match. And when he did, I raised an eyebrow and went “Hm…OK.”
But the thing about Snape is that I wanted to like him. He was a flawed character with baggage, pain, and lots of issues. A past of mockery, unrequited love, mistakes. If you take away the wizardry school and the ability to see memories, lots of us could kind of relate. But we want characters to do good, to redeem themselves, and come out on the positive side.
But boy did he blow it. When Snape killed Dumbledore, I thought: oh you son-of-a-bitch; you’re going down hard. And, like most of you, I suffered through the dark period of a Snape Hogwarts. We only end up really loving Snape when we realize that all along he was a good guy. He was not only on the good side, but taking a huge brunt of hate from the wizard world for killing Dumbledore and being Voldemort’s puppet. As Harry himself said it, “he was the bravest man I ever knew.”
I know it’s a reach to compare Donald Trump to Severus Snape, but I’m going to do it anyway. President Trump has consistently drawn ire and hatred from an enormous variety of the people he ostensibly claims to lead and represent. In many people’s view, he has made move after move to incite hate, fear, and disbelief. He’s mocked disabled people, veterans, he’s made massively disrespectful comments towards women, Mexicans, and Muslims. Every time he speaks, I think that there’s no way he actually feels this way! It’s impossible. The first month and a half of his presidency has been marked by one Draconian executive order after the other, attempts to gag governmental agencies and news outlets that disagree with him, and ordering the ban of refugees from essentially Muslim countries
He’s pathetically obsessed with his image, obviously delusional, highly inept. He has gone out of his way to criticize people far more capable and intelligent than he is and when he’s called on anything, he simply lies about it or points the finger at someone else to lay blame on them. He is a coward who has never taken responsibility and it’s clear that he would throw his mother under a bus to save his own hide. This is your president. Just like Snape did, he pushes the envelope more and more with his hideous self.
And I want desperately for this to be an act. I can only hope that at the end of this whole thing, whenever and however it ends, President Trump rips away his mask and says, “Nope. I’m a good guy, America! And I have been teaching you an important lesson.” This, of course, would be followed by Bernie Sanders and President Obama coming out on stage to verify the claim, that this had been a set up the whole time. Hillary Clinton would then step out, shake his hand, and take the oath of office. And he would be a hero for making us see our ugly selves and how bad it can truly get with a racist, alarmist fuckwad in the oval office. Some of us would be ashamed, but all of us would be mind-boggled at the genius of the role.
But that ain’t gonna happen. So I think I’ll go to my local pub instead.
