IS THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY THE NEW TWILIGHT ZONE?
On January 20, 2025 Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th President of the United States of America. It’s peculiar to think of the inauguration of a convicted felon who has made a career of disparaging people of color on a holiday that honors Martin Luther King Jr. But it happened. This strangeness brings to mind the Rod Serling television series, The Twilight Zone.
The success of the now-classic television series, which ran from 1959-1964 (currently on Amazon Prime) is due, in no small part, to the quirky and often unexpected twist at the end of an episode. Just when you thought the story was over and had been told, there will be a twist taking the story in another direction.
In Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up episode, a customer enters a remote diner where the patrons are preoccupied by rumors of a Martian invasion. We find out the stranger who walked in from the woods after his spaceship crashed has been sent as an advance team for a Martian invasion of earth. Then we discover that the short order chef behind the restaurant counter is himself part of an advance alien invasion—not from Mars—he’s from Venus–they got to earth first. A twist.
In The Midnight Sun the earth has been knocked off its orbit and will soon speed into the sun itself, extinguishing life on our planet. At the end of the episode, we discover that, indeed the earth has been knocked off orbit but won’t crash into the sun , but rather, has it has veered away into space, signaling a frozen death for all. The twist.
But a more compelling facet of the series, and perhaps the most notable thing about the genius of Rod Serling, whose 100th birthday was this past December 25th, was his unwavering moral vision.
Throughout the Twilight Zone episodes, there is a moral compass at work, a gyroscope that distinguishes the difference between right and wrong, “between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his dreams.” Serling not only shows us what is decent in humanity, the inspirational goals to which we should aspire, but also he points out where we go wrong. Due to greed, ignorance and other human follies, we fall short. One need only think of some of the classic episodes to see this.
One that resonates today is the episode titled The Monsters are Due on Maple Street. Ordinary neighbors living on a typical suburban street turn on one another at the suggestion that the street is being invaded by aliens from outer space. Serling reminds us that we don’t need alien monsters to invade us. No, human beings can be the worse monsters of all.
This same theme is taken up in The Shelter, where neighbor is pitted against neighbor trying to access the only bomb shelter in the neighborhood when they think an atomic attack is eminent. The alert gets called off and then the neighbors must face one another in shame for their cruel and vicious attacks on one another.
Serling’s sense that justice eventually prevails permeates Death’s Head Revisited, when a Nazi overseer of a concentration camp in World War Two returns after the war to visit the place where he wielded so much power. He finds the spirits of the people he had tortured and killed are still very much alive and they’re waiting to administer retribution for his role in suffering and death. The ghostly assembly uses graphic testimony of his cruelty to convict and sentence him to insanity in a mental institution.
In the Serling universe if you commit a crime, you pay for it.
So what would Rod Serling make of our current political situation after inauguration day? We have a convicted felon not going to prison but rather being elevated to President of the United States. This same criminal President has pardoned hundreds of criminals who stormed the Capital building, assaulting police officers and going after members of Congress who were certifying the results of the 2020 Presidential elections.
In Serling’s universe the criminal would be punished for his crime, not allowed to escape retribution.
The He’s Alive episode has a particularly eerie resonance these days—accentuated by Trump ally and enabler Elon Musk’s gesture that looked a lot like a Nazi salute. He’s Alive centers on a uniformed neo-Nazi zealot on a street corner, flanked by minions also in uniform, hawking racist and anti-Semitic diatribes. “There is a conspiracy,” he lectures. “A conspiracy personified by the yellow man, by the black man, and by foreigners who come in and infiltrate into our economic structure….” In his painful comeuppance, the soap-box zealot gets shot dead by the neighbor that took him in as an abandoned child, who is appalled by the hate-mongering.
The words of the street-corner hate spreader are not verbatim the words that Donald Trump used on the campaign trail. But the differences are minor. His actions since taking office, from empowering a non-elected Elon Musk to make drastic budget cuts to our national infrastructure, to leveling draconian tariffs on friendly neighbor nations, to deporting and incarcerating undocumented Latinos to a Guantanamo gulag, to dropping all pretense that America is on the side of Ukraine and instead backing a murderous Vladimir Putin–all of these actions bring Rod Serling’s sense of justice to mind.
We can only hope that, in some strange way, Trump will stumble off the beaten path into “the middle ground between light and shadow.”
Perhaps the new President will find himself in a Twilight Zone where an abiding morality does exist and justice does prevail. Perhaps he’ll be surprised by a final unexpected cosmic “twist.” Perhaps, like the Neo-Nazi zealot who gets his comeuppance at the end of the He’s Alive episode, Trump will discover that there is a cosmic justice in the universe meting punishment to those who deserve it.
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Copyright by Jesús Treviño and Bobbi Murray. Treviño is a retired television director and author, Murray is a freelance journalist.