Yahoo Lifestyle 'Wicked' Feels Disturbingly Relevant During Trump's First 100 Days
On Sunday, the Trump administration loaded roughly 250 immigrants onto planes and shipped them off to a mega-prison in El Salvador where they will remain for at least a year. There were no trials, no due justice and no criminal records for many of the deportees who have been sent to a country they don’t even know.
As this story has unfolded over the last few days, revealing disturbing new details on a sometimes hourly basis, I’ve found myself thinking of “Wicked.” Before you close this tab in disgust, hear me out.
“Wicked,” the book-turned-musical-turned-movie based on “The Wizard of Oz,” may just be the best modern allegory for Trump’s second administration, which is currently orchestrating mass deportations against anyone with brown skin and a tattoo.
“Wicked,” which just made its streaming debut on Peacock Friday, offers a surprisingly nuanced take on how fascism can take root in a democratic society. When the film first premiered in November, mere weeks after the presidential election, the parallels between its depiction of the Wizard of Oz as a populist leader who uses a scapegoat to seize power and President Donald Trump’s return to the White House wrote themselves. Now, five months later, as we hurtle through Trump’s first 100 days in office, the similarities have only become more pronounced — and more disturbing.
“Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West” was written by Gregory Maguire and published in 1995. It retells “The Wizard of Oz” from the perspective of its so-called Wicked Witch, who Maguire named Elphaba (a riff on the name of the story’s original author, L. Frank Baum). After arriving at college as a young woman with nascent magic powers, Elphaba soon uncovers the Wizard’s evil plan to seize control of Oz by scapegoating a community of talking animals. She then launches an underground resistance to fight back as the Wizard continues to accumulate power. The story, which starts before Dorothy ever arrives in Munchkinland and eventually overlaps with the version fans already know and love, reveals how Elphaba was framed as an evil terrorist by a fascist government and its complicit subjects, including her one-time friend, Glinda the Good Witch.
Maguire’s original inspiration wasn’t purely political. Instead, it was the real-life murder of a 2-year-old boy named James Bulger by a pair of 10-year-olds, and the way the press framed their behavior as “evil,” that led him to “Wicked.” However, the first Gulf War and the propaganda wielded against Saddam Hussein also factored into Maguire’s exploration into how words like “evil” and “wicked” are used to dehumanize. The result is a book that is extremely unsubtle in its anti-authoritarian stance, and features obvious parallels between the Wizard of Oz and Adolf Hitler (another of Maguire’s inspirations).
Less than a decade later, “Wicked” the book became “Wicked” the musical, which sanded off much of the original story’s rough, political edges, and added some extremely catchy songs. However, the musical still had some bite ― and arrived just in time to take aim at President George W. Bush and the Iraq War. (When Dorothy’s house lands in Oz and crushes the Wicked Witch of the East, Glinda calls it a “regime change.”)
“This war was sold completely on misinformation and disinformation,” the musical’s co-creator Stephen Schwartz later told The Independent. “And also the demonization of Saddam Hussein as a justification for the war. Not that he wasn’t a bad guy, but the total, black-and-white demonization obviously struck us as part of the story.”
In an interview with Broadway World in 2020, four years into the first Trump presidency, Maguire remarked that his story had only become more relevant.
“The world has become more dangerous and despotism has become more apparent, not just in the Middle East but in Europe, and our own Western Hemisphere as well,” he said. “It shocks me and saddens me that I think the story is more urgent now than it was 25 years ago.”
Perhaps the curse of “Wicked” is that its fascist allegory only becomes more potent as time goes on, and the movie is no exception. The blockbuster film from director Jon M. Chu — which is split into two parts (“Wicked: For Good” arrives in November) — falls somewhere between the book and the musical when it comes to delivering a political message.
One of Chu’s smartest decisions was to cast Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba (a role originally played by Idina Menzel on Broadway). Casting a Black woman as the Wicked Witch of the West brings the themes of racism in “Wicked” to the forefront of the story at a time when Trump and his cronies wield terms like “DEI” as an excuse to fire devoted civil servants and strip references to Black legends from government websites.
The movie also takes care to emphasize the book’s political scapegoating plotline.
“When I first got here, there was discord. There was discontent,” the Wizard says. “And back where I come from, everybody knows that the best way to bring folks together is to give them a real good enemy.”
In this case, that enemy is the talking animals of Oz, including a literal goat named Dr. Dillamond who teaches at Elphaba’s university until the Wizard sends government enforcers to arrest him in front of his class. Dillamond’s replacement is a human who proudly shows off his new invention, a cage designed to hold animals and stop them from ever learning to talk in the first place.
Again, the modern parallels seem obvious. When the film hit theaters, critics were quick to point out the similarity between the Wizard’s plan and the way Trump scapegoated the trans community to win the election. Today, his promise of mass deportations — despite the flagrant human rights violations they entail, or perhaps because of them — feels like an equally obvious parallel, cages and all.
Finally, there’s Glinda, whose character’s subtle portrayal in the movie hides the sharpest political message in “Wicked.” Glinda has a chance to side with Elphaba against the Wizard, but she chooses not to, instead opting for comfort and power over what she knows is morally right. As we all consider what to do and what risks are worth taking in the face of mounting fascism, it’s worth considering who the true villain of “Wicked” really is and how history may judge our actions in this pivotal moment.
While “Wicked” already feels painfully relevant in 2025, Chu may have saved the best (or worst) for last. The musical’s second act is where things get truly dark: Elphaba is forced to go into hiding as she faces off against the tyrannical Wizard of Oz and his complicit collaborators.
Whether the upcoming movie sequel feels more like an epic fantasy or a dark reflection of our reality depends on both Chu’s choices as a director and our own choices as a society over the next eight months.
But hopefully, when “Wicked: For Good” shows us Elphaba as an underground resistance leader fighting a fascist dictator, it won’t hit too close to home.
“Wicked” is available to stream on Peacock.
