The Superhero Fantasies of Trump’s Mob

In the rioters’ world, of course, right and wrong have custom definitions. Their insurrection was against reality itself. Every day, the “stop the steal” cause became more far-fetched: State and national legislators, courts at every level, foreign observers, media watchdogs, and Donald Trump’s own Justice Department all determined that Joe Biden won the presidency by millions of votes. Many of those who lost coped via costumes, for banal reasons. Sometimes, the truth hurts so much that it can disorient and unmoor a person. Denial is part of grief; fiction, fantasy, and what-ifs are part of coping; escapism is seductive even in the best of times. Trump’s bellowing about a rigged election provided comforting make-believe in the manner of any hack evangelist or entertainer.

Trump also has been peddling an attractive idea at the heart of American myths. “You’re very special,” he said in a video addressing the rioters while they rioted. Very special: What a funny, kidult sort of phrase. But insisting on one’s specialness—the sense of standing apart and above—is exactly what underlies vigilantism. It’s what powers superhero stories. It also runs through nationalism and white supremacy, ideologies based on a hope that all humans are not in fact equal. The special we’re talking about here is not achieved but conferred, whether through a radioactive spider bite or divine anointing or circumstances of birth. “This is our country; this is our house,” one invader, his face covered in a Watchmen-evoking gaiter, told a journalist in the Capitol. He didn’t need to explain why he thought his “our” trumped the constituencies whose congressional representatives were about to certify Biden’s election.

Photo essay: Scenes from an American insurrection

Some people, seeing the Comic-Con aesthetics of Wednesday’s mess, might be tempted to blame superhero culture for inspiring seditionists. But don’t we live in an era of self-aware, morally sophisticated fantasy? The Trump mob’s most obvious touchstones—Christopher Nolan’s flinty Batman films, the loyalty-switching drama of Marvel’s Civil War, and the dense plotting of Game of Thrones—are acclaimed for interrogating the vigilante impulse. Inevitably, though, they end up making the things they critique also look quite cool. The director François Truffaut once argued that there’s no such thing as a true anti-war film: No matter how ethically complex a script, no matter how well a director emphasizes the hell of violence, bloody conflict is so theatrical that it glorifies itself in every case. When would-be fascists worship the Death Star and take cues from The Matrix, they show action cinema’s disturbing capaciousness.