The New Captain America Film Has Important Lessons for Trump and Biden Stans
In Captain America: Brave New World, a power-hungry president makes reckless choices and withholds vital information—but even he looks competent compared to Biden and Trump.
At the time that I write this review, Captain America: Brave New World is one of the least popular Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) films of all time. It has a mediocre Rotten Tomatoes critic score of 53 percent and, at the box office, is underperforming last year's flop from the studio, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Anecdotally—but perhaps more ominously—I've seen all four Captain America movies in theaters, but this is the first one I can recall viewing in a nearly empty auditorium.
Personally, I enjoyed the movie—I rank it as better than the first installment, inferior to the second, and on par with the third—but more importantly, it is fascinatingly relevant. When director Julius Onah and his six cowriters crafted this screenplay, they could not have foreseen that a president from one of America's major parties would drop out of the election in disgrace while the other party's candidate would prevail only to abuse his power in a spectacle of chaos and retribution.
I refer, of course, to former President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump, respectively. But first, let's review the actions of President Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross (Harrison Ford), who, despite turning into an angry red monster in the third act, is still a far superior president to either Biden or Trump.
Warning: Spoilers follow!
Captain America: Brave New World tells the story of Captain America/Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) as he attempts to stop mad scientist Leader/Samuel Stearns (Tim Blake Nelson) from starting an unprovoked war on America's allies as vengeance against Ross for imprisoning him. In order to achieve this goal, Stearns taints Ross's heart pills with gamma radiation, which means he can be involuntarily transformed into the Red Hulk during pivotal moments.
A would-be terrorist launching a coup against America by messing with our nation's foreign policy has some real-world parallels from Trump's actions in Ukraine that got him impeached the first time to Biden's messy extraction from Afghanistan. Plenty of other movies have tackled similar foreign policy subjects, including the three previous Captain America installments.
However, I can't think of a single other MCU movie that has been this explicitly political about the specific issue of exercising presidential powers. Like Biden, Ross is shown to be hiding a serious medical condition from the public (in his case, a fatal heart condition), one that not only raises questions about his longevity but also his mental fitness to be president (because of the whole, you know, Red Hulk side effect from his medication). Yet much like Biden, Ross repeatedly chooses his professional vanity over his responsibilities to the American public.
In showing this, Captain America: Brave New World offers a lesson for Biden supporters, albeit one the filmmakers likely never intended. The character of Ross has always been morally ambiguous, right from his original introduction in The Incredible Hulk, but by this installment, we are meant to sympathize with and even respect him. As such, it is painful to learn that he has been deceiving people who believe America's future depends on his success. Yet unlike many of Biden's real-life supporters and media backers who refused to face reality until outrage from rank-and-file Democrats over his abysmal debate performance left them no choice, Ross and those who support him ultimately do the right thing: step down from power so that individuals who aren't medically unfit can try to step up in their place.
A similar point can be made about Trump and his supporters. There are a number of signs that the 78-year-old 47th president is suffering from cognitive decline, given his struggles staying on subject and his oft-incoherent speech patterns. Unlike Biden, Trump has also attempted a literal coup, refusing to accept his 2020 loss and instead trying to seize power through mass chaos on January 6, 2021. Trump, at his worst, is easily the inferior of Marvel's Ross since his motivation for not accepting the election results was pure ego. Just like Biden (and unlike Ross), Trump refused to do the right thing and give up power until he was left with no other option (on his occasion by the judicial system).
Both Biden and Trump could also learn a thing or two from how the movie shows centralized power to be dangerous. If there is one consistent theme that emerges when rewatching Captain America: Brave New World, it is how Ross never grapples with the danger of centralized power until it is far too late. Just as Biden and Trump made some of their biggest mistakes because presidents in America are generally too powerful, so too does Ross repeatedly err because he won't admit that he has more power than he can handle. He wishes to stop Stearns despite relying on him for medicine; he aims to prevent war even though his own inner rage is a literal unstoppable beast; and, at the film's end, he is only stopped when an even greater force for violence wears him down.
As Ross hulks out and goes on his destructive rampage, the historically-minded may recall this passage from the farewell address of America's first (and greatest, in my estimation) president, George Washington.
All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency.
Now that Trump is in the process of overawing the branches of government meant to check his power and behaving as if his will alone should determine public policy, it is hard to overstate the gravity of the threat he poses to the security of American democracy. Yet if Trump one day relinquishes office (a terrifyingly dubious prospect at this point), other democratically-elected presidents will similarly be torn between their egos on the one hand and their public responsibilities on the other.
It is a sad reflection on the quality of our current political leadership that the fictional President Red Hulk passes this test while our real-life leaders consistently fail it.
