After reading today's piece by TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy, I searched the bookshelf in my hallway where I knew I had some old cartoon and comic books from my distant past and found Ariel Dorfman's classic How to Read Donald Duck (published in 1971), which was aptly comic-book-sized with cartoon illustrations. Its first chapter started with this line: "It would be wrong to assume that Walt Disney is merely a businessman." And that was true. He was so much more. He was distinctly an imperial cartoonist or, as a question on the back cover of Dorfman's book asks, "How come the natives and the savages always give up their riches to the Duck invaders?" And at a time when the Vietnam War was still raging, "What are Huey, Dewey, and Louie doing in Vietnam?"
What indeed! Of course, the duck comics (and cartoons) of my younger years were definitely influential and distinctly money-making in their moment. As Dorfman put it then, "The names of presidents change; that of Disney remains." And even today, as McCoy makes clear, in the age of Uncle Trump (the true Donald of our moment), what, you might ask, is his family doing making money (as Disney once did) across the planet while he's still president? And what a president he is! As he told New York Times reporters recently, when asked about what limits there might be on his global power, "Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It's the only thing that can stop me."
What a relief, right? And with all of that in mind, more than half a century after How to Read Donald Duck first came out, let McCoy consider the Donald of our moment, someone it's all too hard to duck, and his comic book version of foreign policy. Tom
Trump's Foreign Policy, the Comic Book Edition
How to Read Scrooge McDuck in the Age of Donald Trump
By Alfred McCoy
Writers often try to gild their tawdry times or dignify their flawed leaders with lofty literary analogies -- notably, America as the New Jerusalem; Lincoln as Moses leading his people through the wilderness of the Civil War; the Kennedy White House as an incarnation of King Arthur's "Camelot"; or Lyndon Johnson living his last years as a latter-day King Lear, cast off by his ungrateful children into the moors of south Texas.
But what are we going to do with Donald Trump? Wouldn't his vanity, his vulgarity, and his relentless pursuit of money and minerals in every corner of the globe turn any literary analogies into soggy cliche's? Like the showman P.T. Barnum, Trump is an American original, whose true metaphors can be found only in comic books (America's one true art form), not literature. As Ariel Dorfman reminded us once upon a time in How to Read Donald Duck, that classic guide to U.S. cultural imperialism in Latin America, there was always more to a Disney comic book than gags.
To understand Trump's America, we need our own comic guidebook to his global misadventures, which might be titled something like "How to Read Scrooge McDuck." After all, in case you never had the pleasure of his acquaintance, Scrooge McDuck was the predatory billionaire in Disney comics, who was amazingly popular among teenagers in Cold War America. In that era when American corporations scampered around the global economy extracting profits wherever they saw fit, Scrooge McDuck put a friendly face on U.S. imperialism, making covert intervention and commercial exploitation look benign, even comic.
From 1952 to 1988, a period coinciding almost precisely with the Cold War, the comic's creator, illustrator Carl Barks, filled the country's magazine racks with more than 220 comic books celebrating Scrooge's schemes to accumulate ever more billions by dispatching Donald Duck and his triplet nephews (Huey, Dewey, and Louie) to scour the world for riches -- gems, minerals, oil, and lost treasure. No place on the planet was too remote, not even the Arctic or the Amazon, and no people too poor or obscure, not even Hondurans and Tibetans, to escape his tight-fisted grasp. And yet in that innocent world of the comic book, every adventure, no matter how twisted the plot, always ended with a light laugh for those duckling heroes and the diverse peoples they encountered on their global travels.
Let's visit a few of my favorite comic books from my Cold War childhood, starting with the 1954 story "The Seven Cities of Cibola." Its initial panels show a butler showering the billionaire duck with coins while he swims around in his Money Bin's "three cubic acres" of cash. At first, Scrooge McDuck seems content as he gloats about making money from "about every business there is on Earth" (from "oil wells, railroads, gold mines, farms, factories").
Suddenly, however, saddened by the realization that he's exhausted every possible domestic path to profit, Scrooge decides to lead his nephew Donald and the triplets into the desert borderlands between Mexico and the U.S. There, they come upon a lost Eldorado, a towering, multitiered city with gold-paved streets and a cistern filled with opals and sapphires. But caution intrudes when Huey, Dewey, and Louie discover that the whole edifice is poised dangerously atop a spindly stone pillar. Then, at their moment of near triumph, the ducks are denied any treasure by Scrooge's recurring nemesis, the comically criminal Beagle Boys, who break in and grab the city's bejeweled idol, triggering a hidden mechanism that fractures the pillar. As those fabled cities collapse into a heap of rubble, our duckling heroes escape unharmed, ready for their next adventure.
The first panel in a 1956 comic book, the "Secret of Hondorica," shows Scrooge McDuck pointing to a map of the Caribbean as he dispatches Donald Duck and his three nephews deep into tropical jungles near -- yes, how sadly appropriate almost seven decades later -- Venezuela to recover his lost deeds to the region's rich oil wells. After crossing steep mountains and crocodile-infested creeks, the Ducks happen upon a Mayan temple filled with spear-carrying "savages" arrayed around their idol. By translating the "picture writing" on the temple walls with the help of their handy encyclopedic "Junior Woodchuck Guidebook," the nephews deceive the natives with incantations in their own language and escape with the idol's crown of gold.
President Donald Trump is, of course, our real-life Scrooge McDuck. Mar-a-Lago is his Money Bin. And the world is his playground for schemes to add another billion or two to his and his family's growing fortune. Just as Scrooge McDuck scoured the world in a relentless, even ruthless search for wealth, so our real-life Donald has made mineral deals everywhere on the planet his top presidential priority -- rare earths from Ukraine, oil from the Middle East, and (someday perhaps) a frozen treasure trove of minerals in Greenland. And just as Scrooge dispatched Donald Duck on a mission to recover his lost oil wells from the jungles of "Hondorica," so our real Donald did indeed send U.S. special forces to capture President Nicola's Maduro and win yet more of Venezuela's oil fields for American companies.
Back to the Reality of the Old Cold War
Alas, my innocent childhood is long gone. The world is no backdrop for comic book adventures and imaginary heroes don't flit from frame to frame to amusing endings. In the real world of 2026, we are already deep into a "new Cold War" against nuclear-armed powers, and President Donald J. Trump's comedic foreign policy is dragging us toward a dismal defeat.
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