Trump’s Heroes: The Bunker Comedy No One Asked For

Imagine if American politics borrowed plot lines from a 1960s sitcom, and you might get something like the Trump administration—a real-life, unscripted rerun of Hogan’s Heroes. For the uninitiated, Hogan’s Heroes was a show about Allied POWs running circles around their bumbling Nazi captors. The parallels are hard to miss, if you squint a little.

At the helm was Colonel Klink, a clueless, self-important fool, constantly outwitted by the prisoners he was supposed to control. Klink at least had the self-awareness to know he wasn’t the brightest bulb. Trump, on the other hand, thought he was the whole chandelier. He’d deliver statements his aides would frantically backpedal, spinning his rants into something vaguely policy-shaped before the next Twitter detonation.

Then there’s Sergeant Schultz, known for his catchphrase, “I see nothing! I know nothing!”—a fitting motto for an administration that treated inconvenient facts like they were radioactive. Russian interference? “I see nothing.” Pandemic science? “I know nothing.” Entire departments seemed to adopt this tactical ignorance by 2017.

But where Hogan’s Heroes was a harmless, if absurd, farce, the Trump years were a high-stakes, slow-motion crisis. The show’s charm lay in the comforting inevitability of good triumphing over evil. Trump’s era? The prisoners were the American public, and the tunnels led straight into conspiracy rabbit holes.

In the end, calling Trump’s presidency a sitcom is almost too kind. At least in the show, the prisoners had a plan.

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