The Top 100 Trump Comparisons the Media Made This Election, Some Accurate and Most Off-the-Wall

The bizarre nature of the Donald Trump spectacle in 2016 has left scores of pundits baffled. How did we get to this point? How is it possible that an orange-tinted racist with no apparent grasp on the most basic political facts can get a weighted coin flip away from the White House? To better understand the inexplicable, pundits have routinely reached for comparisons: things we examine as a means of “understanding” Trump and wrapping our heads around his meteoric, unaccountable rise.

Alas, the vast majority of these attempts bore little intellectual fruit. As I’ve noted before, Trump comparisons are simply a lazy, topical way of indulging in unrelated ideological beefs—typically conflating socialism with fascism under the vague, centrist umbrella of “authoritarianism.” Other times, the comparisons were useful (those in the top five or so of this list I think are generally apt) and other times just goofy (Trump is an autoimmune disease or a Galaxy Note 7, because, why not?).

In the aggregate, the trend of comparing Trump to random things or people was a bad one and did far more to sow confusion and smuggle in the writer's own preexisting hangups than pinpoint any helpful historical parallels.

Yet they were exceedingly popular. So here are 100 Trump comparisons in the media, ranked from most useful to dumbest.

1. The United States of America, Al Jazeera / Salon / Jacobin

2. Pat Buchanan, Politico

3. George Wallace, NPR / Daily Beast / National Review / NY Magazine / Rachel Maddow / HuffPo

4. Silvio Berlusconi, CNN / NYTimes / Newsday / The Intercept / Washington Post / Politico

5. Andrew Jackson, NYTimes

6. P.T. Barnum, TruthOut / Daily Kos

7. Benito Mussolini, The Atlantic / John Yoo / Salon / IBT / Washington Post / Larry Flynt

8. Adolf Hitler, NY Magazine / Daily Beast / Ken Burns

9. A tapeworm, Sarah Ruhl

10. Richard Nixon, The Guardian / Daily Beast

11. Biff Tannen, Writer of Back to the Future / The Verge

12. Marine Le Pen, QZ

13. Narendra Modi, CNN

14. A chimpanzee, Jane Goodall

15. Brexit, Mashable / The Economist / WaPo / Samantha Bee

16. Norse God Loki, The Baffler

17. Pinochet, Politico

18. Rodrigo Duterte, Time / CNN / Vox / John Oliver

19. Ross Perot, National Review

20. Napoleon, HuffPo

21. Napoleon from Animal Farm, GQ / IJR

22. Francisco Franco, Paste Magazine

23. Andrew Dice Clay, Bill Maher

24. Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan HuffPo / The Hill / The Guardian

25. Steve Jobs CIO

26. Getúlio Vargas, Político / Washington Times

27. Boris Johnson, Fortune

28. Hillary Clinton, CNN

29. Caligula, The Guardian / Counterpunch

30. Vladimir Putin, Financial Times / Buzzfeed / Daily Beast

31. The Hulk, Trevor Noah

32. Nicolas Sarkozy, National Post / Le Figaro

33. Nero, Daily Beast

34. Lewis C. Levin, Narrative ly

35. Pol Pot, WaPo

36. Barack Obama, National Review

37. Joseph Goebbels, Daily Beast / RedState / Daily Kos

38. Saddam Hussein, Vanity Fair

39. Juan Peron Normon Ornstein

40. Ceausescu Daniel Negreanu / The Diplomat

41. The devil, HuffPo

42. A stock that's bottomed out, CNBC

43. An African dictator, Daily Show

44. Huey Long, George Will

45. Rasputin, David Brooks

46. Jim Jones, GQ

47. Bashar al-Assad, Daily Beast

48. Groucho Marx, Reuters

49. Euron Greyjoy, Vice / Salon

50. Tory leadership hopefuls Tony Clement and Kellie Leitch, The Globe and Mail

51. Joseph Stalin, Daily News / NY Magazine / Daily Beast

52. Shakespeare's Richard III, NYTimes

53. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Daily Beast / Boing Boing / CBS News

54. Slobodan Milosevic, USA Today

55. Kim Jong-Il, NY Magazine / Slate

56. Robert Mugabe, Chris Coons

57. Gene Simmons, Toronto Sun

58. Zachary Taylor, Politico

59. Ramsay Bolton, Inverse

60. Ebola, Bill Maher

61. Bill Cosby, Trevor Noah

62. Neville Chamberlain, HuffPo / WaPo

63. Justin Trudeau, Bloomberg

64. A Chinese communist, Foreign Policy / Time / WSJ

65. Planet Earth, Seth Meyers

66. King George III, Salon

67. The Marlboro Man, Mark Cuban

68. Lord Voldemort, BBC

69. Darth Vader, Daily Show / The Guardian

70. Kim Jong Un, Arianna Huffington

71. Marion Barry, Washington Post

72. Mao Zedong, New Yorker

73. An autoimmune disease, The Guardian

74. A Manchurian candidate, Salon / CNBC

75. Batman vs Superman, Variety

76. Muammar Gaddafi, Middle East Eye

77. A hurricane, WaPo

78. L. Ron Hubbard, Daily Beast

79. Saparmurat Niyazov, The Diplomat

80. Che Guevara, Bill Maher

81. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, WaPo / The Guardian / Cairo Review

82. A Marvel supervillain, Marvel

83. A Latin American strongman, Politico / Slate / McClatchy / Financial Times / Miami Herald

84. Ayatollah Khomeini, Daily Beast

85. John F. Kennedy, Andy Puzder

86. A Navy Seal, Fox News

87. Fidel Castro, Van Jones

88. Nicolas Maduro, Jorge Ramos / Fusion

89. Moqtada al-Sadr, Daily Beast

90. Joe McCarthy, The New Yorker

91. Karl Marx, The Conversation

92. Donald Trump, CNN

93. A Galaxy Note 7, The Times of India

94. The white Cornel West, Joy Ann Reid

95. Zika virus, Ana Navarro

96. Benjamin Disraeli, First Things

97. Hugo Chavez, NYTimes / Politico / Univision / Reuters / The Guardian

98. Jeremy Corbyn, HuffPo / The Telegraph / The Mirror / Daily Beast / Guardian / Etc. etc.

99. German philosopher Martin Heidegger, London Review of Books

100. Bernie Sanders, NPR / Daily Beast / The Guardian / The Atlantic / HuffPo / Bustle