A columnist who sounds like he's comparing Donald Trump to Disney's Scrooge McDuck in a bad way

A writer at TomDispatch seems to be comparing Donald Trump to his old Disney comics about Uncle Scrooge (or vice versa), and suggests he doesn't love America:

After reading today’s piece by TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy, I searched the bookshelf in my hallway where I knew I had some old cartoon and comic books from my distant past and found Ariel Dorfman’s classic How to Read Donald Duck (published in 1971), which was aptly comic-book-sized with cartoon illustrations. Its first chapter started with this line: “It would be wrong to assume that Walt Disney is merely a businessman.” And that was true. He was so much more. He was distinctly an imperial cartoonist or, as a question on the back cover of Dorfman’s book asks, “How come the natives and the savages always give up their riches to the Duck invaders?” And at a time when the Vietnam War was still raging, “What are Huey, Dewey, and Louie doing in Vietnam?”

What indeed! Of course, the duck comics (and cartoons) of my younger years were definitely influential and distinctly money-making in their moment. As Dorfman put it then, “The names of presidents change; that of Disney remains.” And even today, as McCoy makes clear, in the age of Uncle Trump (the true Donald of our moment), what, you might ask, is his family doing making money (as Disney once did) across the planet while he’s still president? And what a president he is! As he told New York Times reporters recently, when asked about what limits there might be on his global power, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

What a relief, right? And with all of that in mind, more than half a century after How to Read Donald Duck first came out, let McCoy consider the Donald of our moment, someone it’s all too hard to duck, and his comic book version of foreign policy. Tom

Now that's a politcized statement if there ever was one. And then, he goes and compares Scrooge and his nephews to Trump's family, and the aforementioned natives/savages are presumably meant to be stand-ins for Latin Americans from a modern standing, with the implication Trump is ripping them off of valuables like fuel (similar claims were made about how the USA dealt with Iraq in the early 2000s). Also notice the putdown of Walt Disney himself as "imperial". No doubt, they're aware he was a conservative in some ways, even if his heirs are anything but, and opportunistically sought to tear down on Disney just for that. Here's more:

Writers often try to gild their tawdry times or dignify their flawed leaders with lofty literary analogies — notably, America as the New Jerusalem; Lincoln as Moses leading his people through the wilderness of the Civil War; the Kennedy White House as an incarnation of King Arthur’s “Camelot“; or Lyndon Johnson living his last years as a latter-day King Lear, cast off by his ungrateful children into the moors of south Texas.

But what are we going to do with Donald Trump? Wouldn’t his vanity, his vulgarity, and his relentless pursuit of money and minerals in every corner of the globe turn any literary analogies into soggy clichés? Like the showman P.T. Barnum, Trump is an American original, whose true metaphors can be found only in comic books (America’s one true art form), not literature. As Ariel Dorfman reminded us once upon a time in How to Read Donald Duck, that classic guide to U.S. cultural imperialism in Latin America, there was always more to a Disney comic book than gags.

To understand Trump’s America, we need our own comic guidebook to his global misadventures, which might be titled something like “How to Read Scrooge McDuck.” After all, in case you never had the pleasure of his acquaintance, Scrooge McDuck was the predatory billionaire in Disney comics, who was amazingly popular among teenagers in Cold War America. In that era when American corporations scampered around the global economy extracting profits wherever they saw fit, Scrooge McDuck put a friendly face on U.S. imperialism, making covert intervention and commercial exploitation look benign, even comic.

Well I think that says plenty that's needed to know about where this propagandist is coming from, or going. And while the USA isn't perfect, it sounds like he's implying it's little more than "imperialist". Does that mean American car manufacturers are wrong to sell their products overseas? And that teens were wrong to read about the slapstick adventures of Scrooge McDuck? That's what it sounds like.

It also sounds as though the writer's implying it's wrong for natives to give the adventurers an award, monetary or otherwise, for helping them with their local problems. And that's insulting. But, this does make clear there's some propagandists out there who aren't the fans of pop culture they claim to be, and if this is what they think, then what was their whole point reading even Disney comics decades ago? It's a shame, but there does seem to be a certain segment of society that, if they loved various USA-based comics back in the day, they've since abandoned all that. So why keep on talking about Disney cartoons at all? There's just no point.