Animal House, the Reality Show

Welcome to Trump's White House

In the last two months, representatives of Trump’s White House have:

• Met numerous times to have security briefings on the unsecured Signal app

• Accidentally invited a journalist to one of those briefings, as they were talking about a military attack happening in real time

• Randomly fired people who guarded our nation’s nuclear weapons, then scrambled to hire them back

• Fired scientists working on, among other things, life-saving cancer treatments, infectious disease monitoring and research, and curing Alzheimer’s Disease

• Gutted an entire program that fed starving children and that gave basic health care, leaving vulnerable populations to the whims of organized crime

• Fired about 10 percent of the staff of the Social Security Administration

• Took control of a building and gutted an agency that the federal government does not own or oversee

• Abducted college students in broad daylight

• Abducted and sent away hundreds of men with no due process - at least one of whom they are now admitting was mistakenly picked up

• Enacted a tariff policy that is going to plunge the world - but especially the U.S. - into recession; or a depression

• Lost, for generations, even the idea that the U.S. can be trusted

As I watch all of this unfold, I can’t help but envision the world’s richest man and his Muskenjugen laughing at their pranks like D-Day and Bluto in Animal House - just before the gun went off and the horse died.

Except, the two Delta House characters, played by Bruce McGill and John Belushi, had remorse when they realized that their prank had gone bad.

I don’t think Elon Musk has even a eighth of a teaspoon of remorse. Neither do the nuance-free college-age boys he hand-picked to break the government before the judicial system could catch up.

This is just one big, hilarious lark to them. A tech-boy frat party.

Lives are ruined, but they’re laughing and yelling the equivalent of “toga, toga, toga.”

What have I missed from the top list?

Animal House or White House?

Over the past week, I have been examining my assessment of this White House as being inhabited by characters from Animal House.

I went back and watched the movie. For the first time since 1978.

And I think my assessment is not quite correct. Yes, Trump and his cronies come from the film Animal House, but I think they are a blend of the two frat houses which are, themselves, characters in the film.

They are drunkards and partiers who break the rules, like the heroes of Delta House. AND they are sadistic bastards who revel in the suffering of others, like the villainous Omega House.

Yes. This is a clip from a comedy. Somebody shooting at a crowd of people during a parade.

Cruelty and Incompetence

Economist and columnist Paul Krugman this week evoked the Delta boys when he pointed out that the list of “reciprocal” tariffs have no basis in reality.

“You have to wonder whether Elon Musk’s Dunning-Kruger kids are now producing tariff numbers,” Krugman wrote.

Can’t you just see the boys of Delta House doing this? “Sure! Just write anything down! Nobody will check!”

The next day, Krugman confirmed that Trump’s tariff numbers were not only derived from “sheer malignant stupidity,” but that the Muskenjugen may have gotten their nonsensical formula for tariff rates for each country - even uninhabited islands - from AI.

These are the same people who decided that “probationary” employees were “on probation” and were therefore not very good at their jobs. So, they fired people who had recently gotten promotions, but were under the “probationary” category because they were new to their jobs.

Can’t wait to see what Grok comes up with when Musk feeds our Social Security and tax returns into it.

Rachel Maddow pointed out on Friday that Trump got his tariff idea when he asked Jared Kushner in 2016 to get him an economic advisor for the campaign. Kushner went to Amazon and browsed books, where he came upon a book by Peter Navarro that had no basis in economic reality.

The best part is that Navarro quoted a trade expert in his book named Ron Vara. Ron Vara turned out to be a fictitious anagram of Navarro’s name, so, Maddow says, he could “make it look like this was a serious issue being debated by experts.”

That’s the guy that Trump hired to come up with tariff policy that is now rocking the world.

“The key point,” wrote Krugman, “is that Trump isn’t really trying to accomplish economic goals. This should all be seen as a dominance display, intended to shock and awe people and make them grovel.”

Making people grovel isn’t limited to tariff policy.

Lee Gelernt, ACLU’s top immigration attorney, sees the same impulse in Trump’s immigration policy, which is intended to frighten law-abiding legal residents as well as citizens.

“I think when it’s all said and done, we’re gonna find out that many, many, many people are sitting in a Salvadoran prison - potentially for the rest of their lives - and were never gang members,” Gelernt told Ayman Mohyeldin on the Rachel Maddow Show on Thursday.

Potentially for the rest of their lives.

This is where the comparisons with Animal House veer to the “villains” who are trying to keep order. And who relish the cruelty.

Canceling foreign students visas without telling them, and then having plain-clothed, unidentified officers round them up is cruel.

Throwing people out of work in an arbitrary lottery developed in some emotionally challenged 25-year-old’s brain is cruel.

Enacting policy that is guaranteed to ruin businesses is cruel.

Taking over the Social Security Administration and then making wholesale, thoughtless changes that will leave seniors homeless is cruel.

It’s not funny. It’s not a joke. It’s not just something you try and then fix it if it doesn’t work.

These are peoples lives.

Know someone who would like this?

The World That Was

Watching Animal House was instructive to me in another way: This is the world Trump and his people want us to go back to.

While the film - and Belushi, in particular - retains its charm, it is just as sexist and objectifying as I remember.

The Tim Matheson character, Otter, did use the phrase “major league yabos” when he was describing his date.

I cannot imagine a world in which Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has not used this term.

I can’t imagine Trump hasn’t said something similar.

The John Belushi character did noisily hoist a ladder to the top window of a sorority house and then even more noisily jump the ladder over to the window next to it to watch the head sorority girl feel herself up and start to finger herself. Right in front of the window. Where he could see her, but she couldn’t see or hear him?

There were so many uses of the word “f*%got” and references to “closet cases” that I lost count.

And yes, in what has surely ranked as one of the most simultaneously racist and sexist scenes in movie history, the Delta boys used an obit of a dead student from an all girls school in order to trick the girl’s friends into going out with them out of pity… then headed to a bar catering to Black people, thinking that white frat boys would be welcome anywhere. Then they made jokes about how scary it was, and when two men stood menacingly at their table and asked the boys if they could dance with their dates, the boys said yes and ran.

There was a scene after the boys drove off that showed the previously terrified girls walking home unscathed.

Honestly, I would feel safer in a bar full of Black people than I would in a white-boy frat house. I would feel safer just about anywhere with Black men than white American middle-aged men who love Trump. And even quite a few who don’t.

Maybe that was writer Harold Ramis’ point? That white boys were either arrogant fools or sadistic “closet cases”? I mean, the movie is a parody. I’m just not sure of what.

I also want to point out the weird visual ties from the 1978 movie to today.

J-6 “Q-anan Shaman” Jacob Chansley was clearly influenced by Animal House.

The movie seemed prescient as it displayed the model for the float built by the sadistic Omega frat boys. I don’t know who it’s supposed to be, but it sure does look like today’s Donald Trump.

Then, of course, there’s the conceit at the end, where we learn that the most disgusting, rule-breaking character ends up being a U.S. Senator, married to the woman he had just kidnapped and thrown into the car in the scene before this shot.

Trump’s America is like Animal House’s America. Where men can take what they want and women compete with each other for their attention. Where everyone is trying to find an angle to get laid or to get money or to get power.

Where sadistic behavior is just part of every day life. And most of us are just trying to keep our heads down.

You’re Overthinking It examines politics and culture through
the unique lens of Carrie Kaufman’s mind.

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Carrie Kaufman is veteran print and radio journalist who has always been more interested in what people are avoiding than what they are talking about. She founded and published PerformInk, a Chicago theatre and film industry trade paper, which covered economics, jobs, politics, racism, sexism, power, real estate - all through the lens of the artist. She then moved on to public radio, where she hosted talk shows in Vegas and Wisconsin, which is when she realized she was too old to do bad journalism.

Check out past and present work on Muckrack.

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