“Dorothy said nothing. Oz had not kept the promise he made her, but he had done his best. So she forgave him. As he said, he was a good man, even if he was a bad Wizard.”
While a wizard is typically depicted as a Gandalf type- a skilled and knowledgeable practitioner of magic, with a long beard, a robe, and a pointed hat who casts spells, wields a wand and possesses a deep understanding of mystical forces, and Donald Trump is a melon-hued moron deficient of skill, knowledge or wisdom and pretty much the opposite of the protagonist in the Lord of Rings, in many ways he is quite like one particular “wizard” anyway— the self-titled pretend one in the Wizard of Oz.
Only unlike L. Frank Baum’s iconic character, Trump is both a bad wizard and a bad man.
The Wizard was a regular dude from Omaha, Nebraska, who found himself in Oz by accident. But when he arrived there, the people thought he was a great wizard and gave him a job as their local sorcerer. Cool gig if you can get it, right? I mean so long as you can like, do magic and stuff, which of course Oz knew he couldn’t. So he knew if he wanted to keep that fancy “all-powerful” job with the color changing horses in the Emerald City, he was gonna have to make it LOOK like he had magical powers he did not possess. And so he used all those gadgets and gizmos, thingumajigs, knobs and levers behind that curtain and all the theatrics of thunder, smoke and fire associated with them, to create the grand illusion that he was “The great and powerful Oz”, when he was really just that ordinary fella from the Cornhusker state who had taken a wrong turn in a hot air balloon.
So you could say that it’s more like Oz kinda fell into the whole fake Wizarding business, and less like he set out to create a false reality of himself and his power in order to rule the world he had descended upon.
And in this way, he and Donald Trump are completely different. They reached the same destination, but took vastly different paths in getting there.
Donald Trump has wanted little more in all his life than to control the living mosaic of steel and glass that is New York City. And once upon a time, based on his businesses and buildings, he could have made the claim that he had in fact, “conquered” the city, but he never captured her heart. Not even to this day, which is why he moved to Florida. He was not built for that. Not capable of it.
He may have been born and raised in New York, but he was never a “New Yorker” something any true New Yorker would confirm.
The city that never sleeps and its symphony of honking taxis, echoing footsteps, and occasional subway saxophone serenades can’t really be conquered by anyone.
Certainly not by someone who doesn’t understand it.
It’s more than just a place— it’s a living, breathing thing— untamed and raw, a vibrant and diverse ever-evolving tapestry where millions of lives intersect and every street corner tells a different story of hopes and dreams, heartbreak and triumph.
Donald Trump is incapable of understanding any of that. Especially not from his view atop a gilded, unimaginative, charmless tower.
He’s purely transactional. He doesn’t operate in nuance. And New York is all about nuance.
He’s always resented the fact that New York refused to yield to his advances. He did to the city what he boasts about doing to women— he tried to force it to accept his dominance one uninspired skyscraper at a time.
‘When you’re a star you can do anything… Grab ‘em by the city block.’
New York was never going to be his, so what he decided instead, was to do whatever he could to make everyone think it was. And because his mind very much operates like a child’s — a cartoonishly over-the-top gold-plated gaudy spectacle, dripping in faux opulence was the end result. The “Trump brand”.
Tacky ostentatiousness cosplaying as elegance.
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