Donald Trump is deeply unpopular. Recent polling has shown that he is actually viewed less favorably by people in the United States than lice, traffic jams, and root canals. His misogyny, xenophobia, racism, and hatred are repugnant to most of the country and most of the entire world, which has watched in horror as Trump went from being just a loud rich celebrity and reality show star to the presumptive nominee of a political Party that has existed for over 150-years. All of this got me thinking about how awful Trump truly is as a candidate, which is something I have written of before I even started considering whether or not he would make a better president than some of the most popular antagonists in film history. For instance, I got to wondering how would Trump fare as president compared to Scar, the villainous lion in the Disney classic The Lion King. My decision? Scar would make a better candidate and a better president than Donald Trump.

Let’s take a look at some of the policies of the two ‘candidates,’ here by examining the pros and cons of both of them.
Trump :

Pro*:
Has opposed the free trade agreements such as NAFTA that have decimated American manufacturing.

Has shown a willingness to re-examine the interventionist policies that have created and maintained an ‘American Empire.’

* Trump disclaimer – Donald Trump changes his positions so often that there is no certainty that he truly supports or will do any of the things he has said he will.

Con:
I won’t go too into this category because I did cover a lot of this before, so just a few:

Has obsessively pushed for a border wall between the United States and Mexico in spite of the fact that immigration from Mexico has been falling the last few years, and while he likes to say that ‘Mexico will pay,’ for the wall, he has absolutely no leverage to use to get them to do that, so the wall would cost billions of dollars of tax payer money to build, staff, and maintain.l

Has proposed banning all Muslims (a population comprised of 1.6 billion human beings in a world with around 7.4 billion people total) from entering the United States.

Has encouraged violence at his rallies and been so overtly racist that he has received unqualified support of white supremacist groups.

He is actually running on a pro-torture/war crimes platform, promising to increase the use of waterboarding and other methods of torture, including threatening harm to the civilian families of terrorists and to use them as hostages.

He is a misogynistic, racist, xenophobic, thin-skinned, short tempered, naïve, incompetent, bully.

If he became president, he would be the one with the nuclear codes and the power to pretty much launch a war anywhere in the world (officially Congress must declare war, but we went to war in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan without any declaration of war in any of those cases).

Scar:

Con:
The whole brother-murdering thing.

The attempted murder of his nephew to cement his coup.

He seems to be a weak ruler as King.

Leaves the attempted murder of Simba to the same 3 hyenas who had failed to kill him once in the movie already, and then never looked into the matter.

Pro:
He is anti-entrenched monarchy and in favor of a more meritocratic system. He uses his intelligence and ruthlessness to grab the crown from his unsuspecting brother. He also neither sires an heir or appoints a successor, which proves that once he died, he hoped that a more democratic system would follow.

He opened society to include the downtrodden and excluded hyenas, who were hated and judged by all the other animals: Zazu called them ‘slobbering, mangy, stupid, poachers.’ So Scar was in favor of greater equality and diversity, and he even provided them with jobs and food BEFORE he took power.

It was absolutely not Scar’s fault that there was a massive drought that hit during his reign and caused the herds to move on. How is that Scar’s fault? He can’t make the weather!

And let’s remember that Simba was an ultra-entitled, greedy brat who, when his father showed him all the land that he would rule (due to no skill of his own, just to being born), his first thought was that he wanted the land that lay OUTSIDE the pride lands too.

The entitled Simba may have grown up to be a bad king (Zazu even tells him so) before he goes through the horror of losing his father and being exiled. So, if Simba was a great king, Scar deserves some of the credit there.

Voiced as a badass in a great performance by Jeremy Irons.

Scar intended to make sure all his subjects and supporters had more than enough food to eat, but again the drought came and changed that, and the drought was not his fault. Plus, as anthropomorphic as the animals are in The Lion King, we don’t see any of them farming or harvesting, meaning that even if he DID know that a drought was coming, there was no way to prepare for the coming food shortage except to try and expand the territory that the Lionesses would need to hunt in, which led to Nala finding Simba in the first place.

Admitted to Simba that it was he, Scar, who killed Mufasa, and not Simba.  If Simba died there – and he was in bad shape at that moment – he would at least have gone out without carrying the guilt that had gnawed at his heart for most of his life. Scar made sure that, if he DID kill his nephew, that he would at least go out with a clear conscience.

Based on all of that, I think Scar would make a far better president/ruler than Donald Trump. He was against the kind of exclusion that has been Trump’s bread and butter, and was in favor for a more equal society. Instead of scapegoating someone else or some other animal for the drought that accompanied his reign, he tried to handle it by giving more license to his surrogates. Scar was a believer in meritocracy, while we know that Trump, and his children and grandchildren, were born into wealth. Trump carries himself as someone who does not believe in the Separation of Powers or that the president must be limited by the Constitution, and he is so thin-skinned that it is not hard to imagine that he would use his power to vilify and attack the press for printing bad things about him. Meanwhile, Scar did not hold grudges and after he secured the throne for himself he didn’t even kill Zazu, in spite of the contempt that Zazu had shown for him from the beginning.

Scar 2016!