Right-wing YouTube personality Damani Felder took to Twitter last night, cracked his fingers, and said with his whole ass that Donald Trump is real-life Captain America.
President Trump is the real Captain America.
— Damani Felder (@TheDamaniFelder) August 28, 2020
What on god’s green earth possessed this man to make this false statement? First, I want to point out how that is factually INCORRECT. Steven Grant Rogers willingly enlisted in the military multiple times for World War II because he wanted to fight the injustices happening at the hands of Hitler and the Nazis. He hates bullies and is from Brooklyn. How does Trump compare? Well, Trump is a draft dodger and gives Nazis a platform in 2020. The only thing they have in common is that they are both from New York, and Steve Rogers didn’t want to fight in Vietnam either, but that’s because he thought it was an unjust war. So … not the same thing.
This awful comparison brings up a really important issue to me: reading comprehension. For whatever reason, many in Trump’s bubble cannot understand things being presented to them. They’ll watch Star Wars and think the Empire is a good thing, or they look at Captain America punching literal Nazis and think, “Huh, that’s just like Donald Trump and his praise of neo-Nazi ideals.”
It doesn’t make any sense, and it truly is frightening—not just because characters I know and love are being dragged into this, but because it shows that they don’t have the capacity to understand why so many of us fear Trump and the ideas he’s pushing into the radical minds of his base.
The tweet seems to be a response to Captain America trending after a video was tweeted of someone throwing a trashcan lid at a cop, which legitimately looked like a Cap shield throw. Of course, that ushered in people like Ben Shapiro tweeting about it …
“Captain America” is now trending because someone put a police officer in Minneapolis in the hospital — and the virtually all of the tweets are celebrating this act of evil. https://t.co/PohuOzQA0c
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) August 28, 2020
So many of these kinds of replies miss the entire point of what is happening in the world and are upset a cop got hurt as if people are not constantly being murdered in the streets and hurt by cops. In fact, the point has been missed to the degree that, in the replies to the video, many people jokingly responded with the same victim-blaming arguments we often hear when the cops are the perpetrators, and those who would usually be making those arguments took them seriously and tried to refute them, seemingly unaware of the irony.
And while all these references and jokes to Captain America are fun and/or frustrating, I want to talk for a second about why Captain America is a figure we should actually be looking to right now. Steven Grant Rogers, who was born on the Fourth of July, was the kind of man who never wanted the bad guys to win. During World War II, that bad guy was Hitler, and Steve would willingly punch Nazis.
So … what do you think he’d do if he were real and saw Nazis running around and praising Donald Trump?
The idea that Trump is … in any way comparable to Captain America actually terrifies me, because people don’t see the real Trump if they think that he is anything like Steve Rogers. Every version of Captain America represents a good man. He is a symbol for hope, for righteousness, and not letting bullies have the power.
Whatever reason people have for supporting Trump, that is just … not him. Steven Grant Rogers (and for that matter, Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes and Isaiah Bradley and … you get the point) would hate Donald Trump. I’d even go as far as to say they’d punch him in the face, because Donald Trump is breathing hatred into this country. He’s standing up and letting the bad guys win and bullying those who do not agree with him, and if Steve Rogers hates anything, it’s a bully.
(image: Marvel Entertainment)
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