Donald Trump has a promise for Christian voters: if they vote for him, just this once, they’ll never have to vote again.
“Just this time!” Trump squawked last month, as the crowd cheered. “You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians. I love you Christians. I’m a Christian. I love you.”
Here, his voice grew wheezy; he had started to run out of air. “In four years you won’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”
As Trump speeches go, this one was par for the course: meandering, nonsensical, grandiose. But it caught the attention of critics on the left, who interpreted it as a dog whistle betraying Trump’s true plan: to become a dictator.
“Trump is telegraphing his authoritarian intentions in plain sight,” political scientist Brian Klaas wrote in The Atlantic. A senior editor at Bloomberg argued that Trump has “praised too many dictators to dismiss his conjecture as hyperbole.”
“Fascist GOP nominee says the quiet part out loud: Vote for him now and you won’t have to vote again in four years,” read one viral tweet, while another warned, “He’s literally saying that he’s going to end democracy.”
Literally, of course, he did not say this—but the idea that Trump’s more indecipherable comments contain a sophisticated, sinister, and secret message has long been an article of faith among Resistance liberals. During the last campaign cycle, Nancy Pelosi declared that Trump’s criticisms of the Squad belied a darker intention to ethnically cleanse the U.S. of non-white citizens; a year later, various media figures announced that his garbled denunciation of the Proud Boys (“Stand back and stand by”) was actually “a coded message” meant to convey his support for the white supremacist cause; and Trump’s latest presser was met with a breathless “fact check” that read like a circa 2010s BuzzFeed listicle: “162 lies and distortions in a news conference”! These suspicions have also lately extended to Trump’s VP pick J.D. Vance, who was subject to allegations that his speech at the RNC contained “Easter eggs of white nationalism” after he said that he’d like to eventually be laid to rest in the Vance family burial plot in Kentucky.
What this most reminds me of, strangely, is the Marvel Cinematic Universe—and more specifically the way fans of the MCU will scrutinize every frame of each new movie for hidden clues, obscure references, and inside jokes that go over the heads of the casual viewer. With so much of our entertainment now part of some media multiverse, new content is increasingly designed to reward these hardcore nerds (I can say this because I am one). Take Deadpool & Wolverine, the MCU’s latest theatrical release, which has been breaking box office records since its opening on July 26: it’s so packed with winks and nods and fan service meta-jokes that geek culture sites have taken to cataloging them in several thousand–word explainers.
If the nation’s newfound passion for geeking out was born amid the 2010s mainstreaming of comic book culture, the advent of social media swiftly taught us that anything can be a fandom if you try hard and make enough memes about it—which is how we began engaging with politics as if it were just another superhero multiverse. This is something beyond donning a lapel pin for your preferred candidate, or phone banking for a get-out-the-vote effort; it’s participation-driven, obsessive, and fueled by the ecstatic joy of rooting for the team you love. . . or against the one you hate. I call this phenomenon “fandom politics,” and through its lens, the election becomes not a boring civic exercise, but a thrilling battle in which the fate of the world hangs in the balance. The candidates are not public officials, but avatars of good and evil.
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