The Penguin Returns

One question is how Cobblepot so successfully got minions of henchmen to do his evil work for him. The same could be asked of Donald Trump or Vivek Ramaswamy … and their bankers.

In early 2019 I published a satirical post featuring Donald Trump as The Penguin, the DC Comics Batman villain (true identity: Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot). I probably gave my readers more credit than I should have for knowing either the comic book history or understanding the comparison. Those posts, in April 2019, January 2020, and December 2022, did not generate high numbers of readers, but they were fun to write.

I called Trump “President Cobblepot” because of an uncanny resemblance to Batman’s nemesis who manages to get himself popularly elected Mayor of Gotham and then uses the position to continue building his crime empire and eliminating rivals. That first post opened with a quote from the authors of Limits to Growth, “We often recognize an untruth when we hear one, coming from our own mouths or those of others, and most particularly coming from advertisers and political leaders. Many of these untruths are…