Supergirl Season 3 Premiere Takes Shot At Donald Trump Over Global Warming
10/09/2017 10:13 pm EDT
In the season 3 premiere of Supergirl, former series regular Calista Flockhart now finds her character Cat Grant acting as the Press Secretary for Lynda Carter's U.S. President Olivia Marsdin. A few comments, though, cross the border between the fictional universe of National City and modern America, and seemed pretty squarely aimed at real-world U.S. President Donald Trump.
During her introduction as Press Secretary, Grant is shown responding to a question from the press corps about global warming. She tells them that President Marsdin believes in global warming in the same way she believes other easily-proven concepts which are accepted as public knowledge, and goes on to intimate that people who lack the intelligence of an 8-year-old.
President Trump has repeatedly called climate change a "hoax," most famously in 2012 when he tweeted, "The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive."
There are other Trump-adjacent elements of the episode, some or all of which may be intentional.
For instance, incoming baddie Morgan Edge is a real estate developer -- Donald Trump's civilian occupation. That will likely feel like a shot across the bow to some, but it may not be that simple.
In the episode, Edge hires Bloodsport to sabotage something in a way that will benefit his company. In Bloodsport's first appearance, it's Lex Luthor who secretly hires him -- and there, as here, a Kryptonian's accusations on the matter are met with, basically, "Well, you can't do anything if you can't prove it." Since one of Luthor's many holdings in that era of the comics was real estate -- and since that was inspired by Superman: The Movie and its sequels, which often depicted Luthor as obsessed with "land," that may be a Luthor thing more than a Trump thing.
While it is clear that Trump has colored some post-Crisis on Infinite Earths interpretations of Lex Luthor, our own research has indicated that John Byrne and Marv Wolfman never meant to reflect Trump in the initial "businessman" reinterpretation of the character. That would come later.
Similarly, some viewers might read Morgan Edge's creepy advances toward Lena Luthor as Trump-like, given the fact that Trump's own behavior toward and around women was an issue during the Presidential campaign, but it is extremely unlikely that was intended to speak to the President. In the comics, Edge's career was ended and he found himself in jail when his womanizing ways caught up with him and The Daily Planet's Cat Grant not only broke up with him, but broke the story of his ties to Intergang in the process.
An additional note: it is clear that the Speaker of the House in Supergirl is meant to be a stand-in for Trump; he is referenced as believing in conspiracy theories, including that there are surveillance bugs in microwaves and toasters.
Trump, who long peddled a discredited conspiracy theory that suggested former President Barack Obama was not born in the United States, never made any such claims, but Presidential advisor Kelly Anne Conway suggested that Obama had spied on Trump using microwaves.
Edge also strongly implies that he has a long history of antagonism back and forth with the press, and CatCo in particular, which plays into one of the most pervasive narratives of the Trump presidency to date.
Supergirl airs on Monday nights at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW.
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