On Election Day, Elon Musk posted a video on X, his social media platform, presenting himself as an avatar of “Dark MAGA.” A blizzard of pop-culture memes evoking anime, comic books and action movies, the two-minute supercut bristles with a familiar chaotic energy. Donald Trump, in his trademark blue suit and red tie, strides across the frame in broad daylight, while Musk, in a black cap and T-shirt, cuts a gleefully diabolical figure. To date, the video has garnered 91.4 million views.
A visitor from outer space, versed in the semiotics of the internet but ignorant of the political context, might have guessed that the two men were adversaries rather than allies: hero and villain. Whatever archetype actually describes Musk’s relationship to Trump — minion, sidekick, wartime consigliere, “first buddy” — there is no question that he radiates supervillain energy. In his own way, Trump does too.
Let me be very clear: I mean this not as a moral judgment but as the description of an aesthetic, a matter of style rather than content. To observe that Trump’s opponents and Musk’s critics see them as villains would hardly count as much of an insight. What is interesting is that many of their admirers see them that way. More than that, the supervillain persona — world-dominatingly ambitious, wildly unpredictable, unbound by norms or rules — is one that both the president-elect and the richest man in the world have cultivated.
Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. As Steve Bannon — another exuberant self-styled prince of MAGA darkness — is fond of saying, quoting the late right-wing media gadfly Andrew Breitbart, politics is downstream from culture. Up there, where the snowpack of collective dreaming melts into the watersheds of commercial storytelling, the villains have been in the ascendant for quite a while.
The bad guys, reliable, sometimes interchangeable antagonists in our movie and TV morality plays, have been promoted to main character status. The second “Joker” movie, “Folie à Deux,” may have flopped, but that had more to do with the fact that it was a musical (and terrible) than with fan rejection of the titular clown. He has been joined this fall by another longtime Batman nemesis, the Penguin, who holds down a grim and gripping HBO series in the prosthetically uglified person of Colin Farrell.
