I grew up as a shy, awkward, closeted gay boy who did musical theatre. I had a passion for the arts and performing. I even pursued it professionally at one point before I entered politics as my career. As a kid I always fought for the chance to get my parents to take me to go see musicals. One of them was “Wicked,” which debuted in 2003. I saw it once on Broadway and a second time in San Francisco. It has always been one of my favorites. Just the story itself draws you in. We all know the story of “The Wizard of Oz,” but the musical “Wicked” (based on Gregory Maguire’s book of the same name) really turns the classic tale on its head. It makes you look at the main villain, the Wicked Witch of the West, with a completely different perspective. Forcing us as the audience to ask the question: Who or what decides if someone is wicked?
Fast forward to 2024, the musical has been adapted for the big screen, has broken box office records, and is well on its way on becoming the favorite for the upcoming awards season. Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande gave stellar performances as Elphaba/The Wicked Witch and Glinda, respectively. Watching it on the big screen with my mom, I couldn’t have been more blown away. It was fantastic.
I also couldn’t help but see parallels with the political themes of the movie and the election we just had. President-elect Trump is probably the most vilified person we have ever seen in our country’s history, much like Elphaba.
But according to the leftist keyboard warriors on social media, that is not the case. To their logic, it was Vice President Kamala Harris who was the vilified one. A strong woman who everyone was afraid of. And that the Wizard was comparable to Trump because he too was a fascist. A meme circulated on social media after the “Wicked” movie premiere, pontificating that it was a “good time to remind everyone that Wicked is a story about a weak man gaslighting an entire land into believing a woman was their enemy, all because she had the guts to try and stop him from silencing and stripping the rights of a significant part of the population. Inherently political, and unfortunately relevant.”
However, they would be quite surprised to hear why Gregory Maguire chose to title his book “Wicked” when it was published in 1995.
Maguire has stated in interviews that his creation of the novel all stemmed from an article in 1991 that had the headline “Saddam Hussein: The Next Hitler?” a clearly strong response to the Gulf War that erupted that same year.
According to The Denver Post, Maguire said that it was “no accident” that the word “Wicked” has a similar ring to the word “Hitler.” Both are two syllables and have six letters.
Maguire said
I was surprised to find my pulse quickening for military action, even though I had been a card-carrying protester of the Vietnam War. Something about how the story was being framed in the British press made me stop and think that maybe there is such a thing as a just war. After all, Thomas Aquinas said there was. And if there ever was an argument for going to war, even for pacifists and Quakers, it certainly could be made for World War II.
But I came to understand that just this word ‘Hitler’ is not in itself a moral argument for military action. It’s just a word. It’s an incendiary word, and it’s a word you can’t even talk about, in a sense, because it’s so powerful and so real. But you can’t know that Saddam Hussein is the next Hitler. I thought, ‘How can I be so persuaded to justify military action by this one little word?’ So I became very interested in our human response to jingoism.
Does this sound familiar? Who has been called “Hitler” more times than we could count? Sorry, Democrats, but that wasn’t Kamala Harris. If there’s an Elphaba in the 2024 presidential election, it’s clearly Donald Trump.
Perhaps the most impactful statement Maguire made in that article was his take on when Dorothy is told by the Wizard to kill the Wicked Witch. He said:
Think about what happens in the book when Dorothy goes to the Wizard. He says, ‘In this country, everyone must pay for everything he gets … You must kill the witch because she’s wicked.’ And right then and there, this good and wholesome girl chooses to become a murderer on the basis of hearing that one word – wicked. That chilled me … and it got me thinking about what we do with moral ambiguities – we act as though they don’t exist.
He couldn’t be more correct. Trump survived two assassination attempts. One of the assassins had long manifestos written about how he believed Trump was a fascist, a word used repeatedly to describe him, and that he needed to be stopped, even if it meant killing him. And had one of those two assassins succeeded, there is no doubt that many would celebrate Trump’s death. No one mourns the wicked, as is sung in one of the musical’s numbers.
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For Democrats, the story of “Wicked” is not one that reinforces their ideas about President Trump. Rather it is a story that gives them the opportunity to have self-reflection about how they have spent the last eight years uniting behind one powerful belief: Trump is evil. It echoes the statement made by the Wizard in the film: “The best way to bring people together is to find a really good enemy.”
As we saw onscreen, or onstage, the ones crying out “wicked” are, in fact, the wicked ones. They thrust upon an incendiary label on Elphaba and used it as justification to make her the mortal enemy of Oz and therefore, she must be stopped at all costs. All because she refused to bend to the will of establishment and the status quo. That’s got MAGA written all over it.
Viewers saw the emptiness of the Wizard behind the curtain, just as American voters saw through the emptiness of career politicians like Kamala Harris and Joe Biden. The truth ultimately prevails and the ones that are falsely labeled as wicked will eventually fly high despite all that’s been thrown at them. Trump is undoubtedly the one who’s been “defying gravity.”
Jake Iorio is the Director of Chapter Development for the Log Cabin Republicans. You can learn more about the organization by visiting here (logcabin.org).
