Trump Vs. Joker: Who Killed More?

Welcome to another installment of the limited series in which I compare comicdom’s greatest villains to America’s worst politician.

You probably all saw this one coming. Joker is, after all, one of the most overexposed popular villains out there. No less a figure than Mark Hamill has noted similarities between the Clown Prince of Crime and the Clown Prick of Politics.

Around the time of Trump’s first underwhelming inauguration, I remember seeing this panel floating around as an example of how the Joker at least had a single moral fiber as compared with the new president’s zero:

This scene is from Batman and Captain America, in which the Joker unwittingly ends up working for Red Skull. Upon learning of the Red Skull’s political affiliation and being told he would make a “superb Nazi,” Joker reacts as you see above. He then (apparently) is killed while trying to sabotage Skull’s plan to nuke D.C.

You wouldn’t catch this dude claiming that Nazis can be “very fine people,” I tell you what. Meanwhile, Trump’s vice presidents—both the official and unofficial ones—merrily defended Alternative für Deutschland, Germany’s neo-Nazi party, in the run-up to that country’s February election. Elon Musk went full-frontal fascist without a whisper of condemnation from Trump or any of his cronies.

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As compelling as this image is, though, it has one big weakness: Batman and Captain America is an Elseworlds story, so it never actually happened. In its defense, everyone’s characterizations remain very recognizable, so it’s not out of the question that “our” Joker would react the same way in similar circumstances.

On the whole, no matter what universe he’s in, the Joker isn’t a political guy. But on the rare occasions he does take an interest, the white-faced man shows more integrity than the orange-faced one.

In the infamous A Death in the Family, a cash-strapped Joker decides to sell the nuclear missile he has lying around to Islamic terrorists in Lebanon. Unlike Trump, who provided supplies and succor to the likes of Vladimir Putin with no strings attached, Joker boobytrapped the missile to blow up on the landing pad, thus double-crossing the terrorists rather than helping them.

Clearly, Trump should not have bombed Russia, but it would have been nice if he showed the same contempt for murderous dictators as he shows for butterfly sanctuaries.

Even when Joker was appointed Iran’s U.N. ambassador for reasons that absolutely make sense, he stayed true to himself rather than flip-flopping all over the place and set out to kill the entire General Assembly, not just Iran’s enemies. That makes him an equal-opportunity mass murderer rather than a vengeful bully who exclusively targets already vulnerable groups.

But let’s get to the punchline. Like I said, the Joker is not a politician by nature. He is a murderer. That’s his “job,” and he’s good at it: online estimates of his total canonical body count (i.e., not counting deaths that occur outside of mainstream continuity) range from over 670 and counting to over 10,000.

And yet, Trump is still worse.

According to one estimate, over 300,000 people had needlessly died of COVID-19 as of May 2022 due to dropping vaccination rates. The majority of unvaccinated Americans are in red states and bought into the lies that Trump and his ilk have been spreading since the pandemic began. (Dewormer still doesn’t cure COVID.) That’s just the COVID-related deaths. Add the people who died because of Trump’s other inhumane policies—including but not limited to immigration and the death penalty—and the Joker really starts looking like a slacker.

As much as I’d like to say that Trump is an anomaly, committing mass murder is a presidential pastime. He’s not the only one who deliberately made the U.S.-Mexico border more dangerous. By the time Reagan bothered to publicly mention AIDS for the first time, 12,000 Americans were dead. The Vietnam War, which every president from Eisenhower to Nixon had a hand in escalating, killed millions.

You like stories about mass murderers? Forget amateurs like the Joker. Pick up a book by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

But hey, I don’t want to send you away on such a downer. This is a post about the Joker, after all. So I’ll just point out that the Joker is better at applying natural-looking make-up than Trump, too.

Previous Installments in the “Versus” Series:

Trump vs. Luthor