It’s a Beast of a time in Washington. Donald Trump’s D.C. reality show is full of new characters, plot twists, and cliffhangers, and the Daily Beast will navigate you through it. The 47th president won’t need to drain The Swamp. It’s all leaking here… Read this exclusive extract from our brilliant newsletter and click here to sign up for more secrets—including a dramatic twist in the are-they-or-aren’t-they relationship between two of MAGA’s biggest names.
Barack Obama read for two hours every night in the White House Treaty Room and George W. Bush learned the art of statesmanship at his father’s knee. Bill Clinton read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations between late-night fast food runs. Carter had Brzezinski. Nixon had Kissinger. Jefferson dined alone.
But what of Donald John Trump? The 47th president sees politics through the lens of a television producer, so it is not surprising that he should look to a fictional president for inspiration. Not to Martin Sheen’s bleeding heart President Josiah Bartlet on The West Wing, but to the infinitely more ruthless Frank Underwood portrayed by Kevin Spacey in Netflix’s House of Cards.
Some policy wonks close to the White House even go so far as to suggest Trump modeled his presidency on Underwood’s hard-ball negotiating tactics.
“I can assure you, the parallels are not total coincidence,” said a MAGA-leaning insider. House of Cards was first broadcast in 2013 and the fifth season—the last featuring Spacey—went on air in May 2017, soon after Trump first moved into the Oval Office. It wasn’t until his return this January, armed with a public mandate and a compliant Congress, that Trump revealed his inner Underwood.
Disregarding the TV character’s penchant for murder, his Democratic affiliations, and his rivalry with his wife—nobody (yet!) is suggesting a Melania run in 2028—Trump could have copied some of his biggest and most controversial policy moves from Beau Willimon’s Netflix script.
As soon as he gets into office, President Francis Joseph Underwood seeks retribution against all those he thinks undermined him. He has one-to-one meetings with the Russian president (Petrov rather than Putin) to forge a peace deal in the Middle East between Israel and Hamas, he slashes the foreign aid budget, sparks a fake national security scare so he can steal the election from his Republican opponent, starts a trade war with China, destroys all his enemies in Congress, plays on his populist roots to energize a voter fan base and sets out to Make America Great Again by launching a domestic work program.
Sound familiar?
Interestingly, Spacey, a longtime Democrat who was friends with Clinton and worked on Carter’s campaign, endorsed “loyal friend” RFK Jr. during his short-lived 2024 presidential campaign.
The irony of his fall from grace won’t be lost on Spacey. His TV presidency was abruptly terminated amid sexual assault charges made against him at the height of the #MeToo movement, of which he was later acquitted.
Trump was found guilty of 34 charges relating to a hush money payment to a porn star. And he’s the one in the White House.
The real one.
Daily Beast’s The Swamp is written by David Gardner, Mary Ann Akers and Juliegrace Brufke.
