Hail, hail Freedonia

Hail, hail Freedonia!
by David Benjamin

“The last man nearly ruined this country./ He didn’t know what to do with it./ If you think this country’s bad off now,/ Just wait ’til I get through with it!”
— Rufus T. Firefly

PARIS — The latest burst of palace intrigue in the Trump White House sent me running, panic-stricken, to Duck Soup. Where I asked the question: Who, really is a better president for America today?

Donald Trump or Rufus T. Firefly?

This is no easy choice.

A recent survey of presidential historians moved James Buchanan out of the top spot he had monopolized for 157 years, as the worst U.S. president — ever. After a mere year in office, Trump leapfrogged Buchanan to Number One.

This unique honor moves Trump into Firefly territory.

I’m surprised the nation’s pundits haven’t been drawing more Rufus-Donald parallels. Some of the similarities are eerie. For example, in his first speech onscreen, Firefly launches a stream-of-consciousness riff that could’ve been lifted straight out of a Trump rally. He begins by leering at a woman, Mrs.Teasdale (Margaret Dumont), and continues by disparaging her physical appearance. Shades of Rosie O’Donnell!

“Say, you cover a lot of ground yourself. You’d better beat it. I hear they’re gonna tear you down and put up an office building where you’re standing. You can leave in a taxi. If you can’t get a taxi, you can leave in a huff. If that’s too soon, you can leave in a minute and a huff. You know, you haven’t stopped talking since I came here. You must’ve been vaccinated with a phonograph needle.”

Besides a remarkably prescient reference to real-estate development in this monolog, we see here a technique oft-credited to Trump but deftly demonstrated by Rufus T. Firefly as early as 1933. The Gatling-gun demagogue overwhelms his listener with a barrage of non sequiturs so swift and incoherent that he can be neither queried nor challenged. All his victim can do — as Mrs. Teasdale and a hundred Trump interviewers have illustrated — is stagger on to the next topic. Dazed and confused, she says, “This is a gala day for you!”

Firefly responds with a sexist punchline that Trump, alas, wouldn’t be quick (or modest) enough to deliver: “Well, a gal a day is enough for me. I don’t think I could handle anymore.”

The Trump-Firefly nexus includes some remarkable physical commonalities. Both wear bulgy suits and Bozo ties. Firefly has a fake mustache.Trump has fake complexion. Firefly wears glasses, Trump wears tanning goggles. They both walk funny, talk dirty and make faces. Firefly is called “Your excellency.” Trump, desperately, would love to be.

Each is a master of hypocrisy. Trump styles himself as a “law and order” guy, after settling $25 million on the victims of his fraudulent university and launching an administration in which four of its architects have, so far, pled guilty in criminal indictments. The first law Firefly proposes, while holding his cigar, is a ban on smoking.

He sings, “I will not stand for anything that’s crooked or unfair./ I’m strictly on the up and up, so everyone beware./ If anyone’s caught taking graft and I don’t get my share,/ We’ll stand ‘em up against the wall/ And pop goes the weasel!”

On the matter of business acumen and fiscal probity, the president of Freedonia boasts his special aptitude, as well as Trump’s, when he declares, “Why a four-year-old child could understand this [tax] report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child. I can’t make head or tail of it.”

Speaking of the tax, however, Firefly has the jump on Trump, because he knows you have to take up the tacks before you take up the carpet. This is a manual labor test that would probably stump Trump. Or, as his sainted mother used to say: “Pants first, Donald. Then the shoes.”

As for Trump’s famous difficulty paying attention at meetings, Rufus T. Firefly plays jacks while presiding over his Cabinet. Trump — note the tiny, fidgety, Tweet-callused fingers — only wishes he could.

Of course, both Trump and Firefly are shameless, prolific liars. But it’s Firefly who succinctly states their mutual affinity for truthiness: “Well, who are you gonna believe? Me, or your own eyes?”

Both leaders have a knack for finding talent in queer places. Trump put a brain surgeon and a party planner in charge of his housing office, a tobacco investor in charge of public health and — running his Energy Department — a guy who thought it was the Electric Company. Firefly hires a peanut vendor as his Secretary of War.

Trump’s senior advisor is his son-in-law, Jared. Firefly’s senior adviser is his brother, Zeppo. Difference is, we know Zeppo can sing and dance. Can Jared even carry a tune, do a box-step, or just recite “The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck”?

Speaking of electric companies, Freedonia’s worst enemy is Sylvania, a tiny country run by a paranoid tinpot against whom Rufus T. Firefly triggers a war by shooting off his mouth in an unhinged gush of self-contradiction:

“I’d be only too happy to meet Ambassador Trentino and offer him on behalf of my country the right hand of good fellowship. And I feel sure he will accept this gesture in the spirit in which it is offered. But suppose he doesn’t. A fine thing that’ll be. I hold out my hand and he refuses to accept it. That’ll add a lot to my prestige, won’t it? Me, the head of a country snubbed by a foreign ambassador! Who does he think he is, that he can come here and make a sap out of me in front of my people? Think of it! I hold out my hand and that hyena refuses to accept it. Why, the cheap four-flushing swine! He’ll never get away with it!”

Trentino, of course, doesn’t get away with it, or even get the chance. In a gesture that must fill Donald Trump with jealousy every time he watches Duck Soup, Firefly slaps Trentino across the chops and starts a war whose very theme song would render Trump green with envy:

“To war, to war,
To war we’re gonna go!
Hi-de, hi-de, hi-de, hi-de,
Hi-de, hi-de ho!”

With a toe-tapping refrain that the NRA would love to use, if only they didn’t have to credit the Marx Brothers:

“They got guns, we got guns,
All God’s chil’en got guns!”

Guns, of course, is where Trump has it all over Rufus T. Firefly. Trump has no war of his very own— yet — but he commands so many guns, rockets, bombs and bombers, nukes, missiles, tanks, jets, submarines, soldiers, sailors, Marines, Navy Seals and other forms of cannon fodder that he wants to march ‘em all down Pennsylvania Avenue in a 13 million-dollar Busby Berkeley parade.

True to form, Firefly runs out of bullets before his war is over and he has to start throwing apples and bananas at the Sylvanian chief — who surrenders under the onslaught. This prompts one of the great last lines in the history of film: “I’m sorry. You’ll have to wait ’til the fruit runs out.”

But there you have the clincher — the answer to why Rufus T. Firefly would be, for America today, a far, far better president than Donald J. Trump.

Both are clowns. Only one is funny.