The Penguin Returns
"One question is how Cobblepot so successfully got minions of henchmen to do his evil work for him. The same could be asked of Donald Trump or Vivek Ramaswamy … and their bankers."
In early 2019 I published a satirical post featuring Donald Trump as The Penguin, the DC Comics Batman villain (true identity: Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot). I probably gave my readers more credit than I should have for knowing either the comic book history or understanding the comparison. Those posts, in April 2019, January 2020, and December 2022, did not generate high numbers of readers, but they were fun to write.
I called Trump “President Cobblepot” because of an uncanny resemblance to Batman’s nemesis who manages to get himself popularly elected Mayor of Gotham and then uses the position to continue building his crime empire and eliminating rivals. That first post opened with a quote from the authors of Limits to Growth, “We often recognize an untruth when we hear one, coming from our own mouths or those of others, and most particularly coming from advertisers and political leaders. Many of these untruths are deliberate, understood as such by both speakers and listeners. They are put forth to manipulate, lull, or entice, to postpone action, to justify self-serving action, to gain or preserve power, or to deny an uncomfortable reality. Lies distort the information stream. A system cannot function, especially in time of peril, if its information stream is confused or distorted.”
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One of the recurring themes in this space has been the growing difficulty of ascertaining truth when there are so many countercurrents. Another has been our improving awareness of neurobiological determinism and how embedded evolutionary traits drive whole societies toward bad decisions, bad public policies, and cascadingly disastrous outcomes.
I was 9 years old when I first came upon The Penguin in Batman #99 (April 1956; ten cents). The Penguin was turning in other criminals for reward money and then busting them out of jail to join his gang. Batman and Robin ended the operation, rounding up the gang, but Cobblepot relocated to Florida where he set up a legal gambling operation. He allowed patrons to win big and then his henchmen would follow them home and rob them. In a sequel comic, the Dynamic Duo foiled the Penguin’s scheme but the Penguin eluded capture.
Does this sound familiar?
In one of his more ruthless schemes, Cobblepot set himself up as an underworld adviser, planning fool-proof crimes for other criminals. The Penguin would then murder the crooks and take their stolen loot. In another scheme, he would freeze wealthy individuals and then demand large sums of money to thaw them out alive.
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The Penguin was a psychopathic narcissist. That is how Batman kept catching and jailing him. At one point the Penguin intended to go straight, but he was infuriated by a cartoon that mocked penguins so he launched a new crime spree. He couldn’t help himself. When the Joker and Catwoman began dominating the headlines, the Penguin committed another series of spectacular crimes in order to overshadow them.
Taking the son of one of his fellow crooks under his wing, the Penguin attempted to teach the boy all about crime. The boy instead wrote a book detailing the Penguin’s crimes. The Penguin liked the idea so much that he stole the book to get it published.
In another scheme, Cobblepot set up his own bird shop, selling birds to prominent people around Gotham City. The cages had bombs that allowed the Penguin to blast his way into the houses and rob them. Another time he pretended to become a legitimate business by using clever mechanical frauds of mythical birds and passing them off as the real deal and charging people admission. In another scheme, the Penguin extorts singers by using gas ejected from microphones to ruin their singing voices if they refuse to pay.
This is a recurrent theme with Penguin. He ingratiates himself to wealthy donors then exploits them mercilessly, giving them zero to negative value back for their investment in him. In real life, being a bait-and-switch fraudster was not only how Trump rose to power in the Manhattan Real Estate market, but also how Vivek Ramaswamy made his millions.
It never ceases to amaze me at how easily USAnians—some of whom I consider quite smart, like James Howard Kunstler, author of A Geography of Nowhere and the World Made by Hand series—can be so easily taken in by a snake oil salesman.
You are probably desperate to understand why this is happening — how, for instance, a blatantly corrupt and ignorant attorney general in New York State can get away with bringing a politically motivated nonsense case against the leading presidential candidate in a courtroom ruled by a judge who acts like a jester in a Shakespeare play. New York AG Letitia James gets away with it because the flagship organ of the thinking class, The New York Times, is in on the gambit. But why? We struggle to sort this out. One explanation is that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has infiltrated the management of our country at every level so as to eventually conquer our territory for its resources while eliminating or enslaving the population. Surely, the CCP has made significant inroads, starting with the successful bribery and compromise of “Joe Biden,” and probably other elected officials, too, in placing many CCP agents in the vast array of university research departments, NGOs, PACs, and lobbying gangs, and extending to the purchase of vital businesses and farmland to prepare the gameboard for eventual takeover.
— James Howard Kunstler, Clusterfuck Nation
Opening his own umbrella company called Penguin Umbrellas Inc, he even fooled Batman into thinking he’s reformed to the point where Batman endorsed his product. It was all a complex scheme to rob the people of Gotham City after which he fled to the Oasis Beach Island, where he attempted another umbrella-related scheme.
And then 1.4 million of them died (disproportionately Republicans) from the bungled Covid response during Trump’s fourth year in office. His support, according to most polls, has not waned.
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Perhaps he figures that despite 91 counts of criminal conduct and a succession of civil cases that will take away his fortune and possibly kick him out of both the Mar A Lago and Bedminster clubs, he will eventually escape and start anew.
After all, the Penguin always did.
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