Fantasy, comedy … or horror? Team Trump as a movie script is hard to believe

Consider the likely reaction of a big-time movie producer if a script-writer brought him a storyline that began with a US President-in-waiting nominating as his health chieftain a fellow politely described as a “vaccine sceptic” who wants to remove fluoride from all US water supplies.

Oh yes, and the Prez-to-be, in this nutso script, had tapped as his “efficiency” chief a Dr Strangelove billionaire type, credited with losing $24 billion for himself and fellow investors after buying Twitter and renaming it X. Efficient.

Scriptwriters would struggle: Kennedy Jr, Trump and Musk.Credit: Michael Howard

The producer would surely be yelling for the scriptwriter to be removed from his damned office by the time he began outlining how the about-to-be defence secretary was a Fox TV guy, famous for tossing an axe, missing the target and hitting a military drummer.

Yes, the scriptwriter might cry: and how about the choice for head of the Justice Department, who had spent two years being investigated by that same department for sex trafficking before he escaped charges?

“Son, they already did the Cantina freak-show scene in Star Wars,” the producer might growl. “I’m too busy for fantasy. Or comedy. Or horror.”

Ah, but he would have missed the opportunity to make the most mind-blowing political documentary of all time.

Donald J. Trump is only just starting, we can be pretty sure, with his real-life revenge for being tossed aside after his first term as president.

If Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s nomination as health and human services secretary, Elon Musk’s for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE, geddit? just like Musk’s favoured crypto DOGEcoin, originally created as a joke), failed axe-thrower Pete Hegseth to head the Pentagon, and the oily Matt Gaetz for attorney-general – whose antics paralysed Congress for weeks last year – weren’t enough, Trump has plenty more where they came from.

Musk’s fellow chief of the DOGE – which won’t actually operate as a department of the government, you understand, it’s just for the acronym – is to be biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. He wants to abolish the Department of Education and the FBI. True story.

And try Kristi Noem, who is tagged as the coming secretary of Homeland Security.

She has no background in law enforcement, unless you count her treatment of her late pet dog and an unfortunate goat.

She recounted in her own book that she shot in a gravel pit her 14-month-old wire-haired pointer, Cricket, because she showed no talent for hunting, and right afterwards dragged a “nasty and mean” goat to the same gravel pit and shot it too - twice, because the first shot only wounded the animal.

Tough, see.

No one would believe it, our hard-nosed movie producer might have said.

He’d have been wrong. All America and the world will get to believe it in time … and what it all comes to mean.

If only it were just a movie.

Tony Wright is associate editor and special writer.