Groucho Marx, Mel Brooks and Stanley Kubrick envisioned Trump 2.0's first 100 days

You don't really need to listen on cable TV to those pundits prattling on about the first 100 days of the criminal-in-chief's second term. The utter madness of Trump's presidency already was envisioned in comedies by Groucho Marx, Mel Brooks, Stanley Kubrick and others. And what was once comedy has turned into our national tragedy.

So let's start with the 1933 Marx Brothers classic "Duck Soup" which mocked dictators. In fact, fascist dictator Benito Mussolini - to whom Trump was compared in a 2005 episode of "The Simpsons" – felt so offended that he banned the film in Italy, which thrilled the Marx Brothers.

"Duck Soup' takes place in the bankrupt country of Freedonia, where officials ask a wealthy widow Mrs. Teasdale (Margaret Dumont) for a $20 million bailout. She agrees but only if a new leader is installed – who turns out to be the totally incompetent Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho).

And then Firefly introduces "The Laws of My Administration" – some of which are quite apropos to Trump:

The last man nearly ruined this place
He didn't know what to do with it
If you think this country's bad off now
Just wait till I get through with it ...

I will not stand for anything that's crooked or unfair
I'm simply on the up and up, so everyone beware
If anyone's caught taking graft and I don't get my share
We stand him up against the wall and pop goes the weasel

And then Firefly chooses an even more incompetent Secretary of War, Chicolini (Chico Marx), who turns out to be an inept enemy spy. Chicolini goes on trial after being caught trying to steal Freedonia's misplaced war plans.

And what about tariffs? At his first Cabinet meeting. Firefly evades any talk about his tariff policy.

Regarding tariffs, last week Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, speaking at a meeting of business owners in Northern Kentucky, referred to the Trump tariffs as "a tax on everybody." Speaking in a monotone, McConnell referenced the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Bill, signed into law by President Herbert Hoover, which he said "was widely thought to help move the Depression worldwide."

McConnell's remarks evoked comparisons to the scene from the 1986 comedy "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" in which an economics teacher (Ben Stein) lectures a bored high school class about the disastrous impact of the Smoot-Hawley tariffs. Stein, a conservative economist, had previously served in the Nixon and Ford White House.

In January 1940, The Three Stooges released a short film "You Nazty Spy," which was the first film to openly mock Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime. Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator" did not have its premiere until October 1940.

Three oligarch munitions manufacturers in the country of Moronika, upset over declining profits due to the king's peace policies, conspire to install a dictatorship. Moe Hailstone, a wallpaper hanger, eagerly takes the role after being told that a dictator "makes love to beautiful women, drinks champagne, enjoys life and never works. He makes speeches to the people, promising them plenty, gives them nothing and then takes everything."

And in his first speech to an outdoor rally, Moe proposes a Trumpian agenda of annexing neighboring countries and even makes a promise about eggs. And there's even a slogan to match "Make America Great Again."

We must throw off the yoke of monarchy and make our country safe for hypocrisy. Moronika for Morons.

Trump and Vice President JD Vance treated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy disrespectfully during his White House visit. In the short, Moe invites ministers from neighboring countries to a "peace" conference, insults them and makes absurd demands of their countries, and then Curly starts hitting them with golf balls. At least Trump hasn't done that yet.

And what about all those executive orders. Trump has signed 142 executive orders in the first 100 days of his second term, far more than any other president in U.S. history over the same period, according to data compiles by the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, CBS News reported.

Just watch videos of Trump signing these executive orders – many of which are drawn straight out of Project 2025. For example, Project 2025 calls for eliminating disparate impact liability, which relates to DEI programs, and Trump signed an executive order last week. Watch this video of Trump signing the executive order. Do you think Trump has a clue what disparate impact theory is? Obviously not. His aide said the order directs schools to get out of "the whole sort of diversity, equity and inclusion cult." And Trump responded, "It's getting out of that, huh, after being in that jungle for a long time."

Remember this scene in Mel Brooks' 1974 film "Blazing Saddles" in which the idiot Gov. William J. Le Petomane just signs whatever bill his villainous and corrupt Attorney General Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman) puts in front of him.

And it's Lamarr who sets in motion the plot to stoke racial tensions by sending a black sheriff to the town of Rock Ridge to create chaos and force local residents to leave, enabling him to make a killing by buying up their land on the cheap when a new rail line will be rerouted through the town. The plot is foiled when the white townspeople join with the Black, Chinese and Irish railroad workers to fight Lamarr's army that includes Klansmen and Nazis.

Trump also signed numerous executive orders on immigration with the aim of carrying out his draconian policy of mass deportations. ICE agents have been acting increasingly thuggish, even detaining and deporting U.S. citizens.

And that's what happened in Cheech Marin's 1987 film "Born In East L.A." in which his character is accidentally swept up in an immigration raid without any identification documents and winds up being deported to Mexico. Here's the scene in the immigration office, which might as well be a training film for ICE under DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.

And Noem wants to send some immigrants that she's deemed "dangerous criminal aliens" to the detention center at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Now where have we seen that before? In the 2008 film "Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay." Harold (John Cho) and Kumar (Kal Penn) board a flight to Amsterdam to smoke some legal weed. But Kumar's smokeless bong is mistaken by passengers for a bomb and the duo are tackled by air marshals.

A racist and paranoid Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security deems the stoners to be agents of a joint al-Qaida-North Korean conspiracy and sends the suspected terrorists to Guantanamo which they manage to escape from.

Penn later served for several years as a White House staffer engaged in outreach to the Asian Pacific American and arts communities during President Barack Obama's administration.

But surely no film could have envisioned someone like Elon Musk in a position of power. But in an op-ed for Le Monde, literature professor Bruno Chaouat wrote that "the parallels between Elon Musk and Doctor Strangelove are striking."

Just look at Peter Sellers' performance as an ex-Nazi mad scientist at the end of director Stanley Kubrick's 1964 Cold War political satire "Dr. Strangelove." The presidential adviser unsuccessfully struggles to prevent his arm from flashing the Nazi salute. Dr. Strangelove offers a proposal to save humanity from the impending nuclear holocaust by selecting several hundred thousand people to live in mines underground with a breeding program to repopulate Earth that would involve a ratio of 10 females to every male.

Of course, this scene prompted AI-generated Dr. Strangemusk videos.

What does the future hold? In a 2000 episode of "The Simpsons," a grown-up Lisa becomes the first female U.S. president. In the Oval Office, she tells her aides, "As you know. we've inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump." An aide holds up a now familiar economic chart, showing the arrow plunging down. He tells her: "We're broke." Lisa replies: "The country is broke. How can that be?"

And then. Trump himself proved remarkably prescient when he made a guest appearance with second wife Marla Maples in a 1994 episode of Will Smith's TV sitcom "Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" Trump is revealed as the mystery bidder to purchase the Banks family home.

Other family members fawn over Trump, but youngest daughter Ashley (Tatyana Ali) tells Trump: "Thank you for ruining my life." Maples asks her husband, "What did you do?" Trump replies: "Everybody's always blaming me for everything."

That certainly holds true after Trump's first 100 days.

Let's call it a wrap with "The Great Dictator," the anti-fascist masterpiece written and directed by Charlie Chaplin. BBC features correspondent Nicholas Barber described the film as "a masterpiece that isn't just a delightful comedy and a grim agitprop drama, but a spookily accurate insight into Hitler's psychology.

Barber wrote:

What's even more remarkable is that Chaplin didn't just capture Hitler, but every dictator who has followed in his goose steps. "It resonated at the time, and it continues to resonate," says Simon Louvish, the author of Chaplin: The Tramp's Odyssey. If you want to see a crystalline reflection of the 21st Century's despots, you'll find it in a film that came out 80 years ago.

In the film, Chaplin plays two roles. He's Adenoid Hynkel, the autocratic ruler of Tomainia, as well as s humble unnamed Jewish Barber, who is persecuted by the regime. Hynkel is portrayed as a cruel despot, but Chaplin also exposes his character's "vanity, stupidity and childishness," Barber observed.

Barber wrote:

The message is that Hynkel is not a brilliant strategist or a mighty leader. He is an overgrown adolescent – as demonstrated in the sublime set piece in which he dances with an inflatable globe, dreaming of being "emperor of the world". He is an insecure buffoon who bluffs, cheats, obsesses over his public image, manhandles his secretaries, revels in the luxury of his extravagant quarters, and reverses his own key policies in order to buy himself more time in power. "To me, the funniest thing in the world is to ridicule impostors," wrote Chaplin in his autobiography, "and it would be hard to find a bigger impostor than Hitler."

And today we have our own great impostor in the White House who displays many of the same character traits.

At the end of the film, Hynkel and the Barber get mistaken for one another. The Barber finds himself on an outdoor stage speaking to a mass rally celebrating the takeover of the neighboring country of Osterlich.

"The Great Dictator" premiered in October 1940 just several months after the fall of France and the evacuation by sea of British and allied troops from the Beligan port of Dunkirk. The United States was still neutral with America First isolationists pushing for the country to stay out of the war. It was a period known as The Darkest Hour when the British Empire stood alone against the fascist onslaught.

Chaplain's barber delivers an emotional plea for decency and tolerance in a speech that resonates today in our own dark times when Trump's fascists are trying to destroy our democracy as we approach the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.

Chaplin, who spent many months drafting and rewriting the uplifting speech intended to offer hope in those dark times, says:

Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost…

The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men - cries out for universal brotherhood - for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world - millions of despairing men, women, and little children - victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.

To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people.