Is the Wizard Trump? The politics of the new Wicked movie, explained.

Evilthe movie musical based on the beloved Broadway show of the same name, is one of the biggest hits of the year, opening at no. 1 in North America this weekend and is already generating some the early Oscars. The audience came in prepared to love Evil‘s famous power ballads and girl power core, but one aspect of the story seems to have taken people by surprise: its somewhat clumsy but remarkably durable political allegory.

“I noticed that Elphaba is like Kamala Harris and the Wizard is like Donald Trump,” a fan posted on Reddit. “A charismatic leader who turns on a society that this woman is evil just because she stands up for a marginalized group of people in society, how could that be (political)?” director John M. Chu joked.

What a silly, spectacular show about friendship and talking animals, Evil actually invites political interpretations. Its allegory can both induce eye rolls and still feel eerily prescient more than 20 years after its stage debut.

Evil the musical is based on a 1995 novel of the same title by Gregory Maguire, an anti-fascist treatise in which the wizard becomes a Hitler-like despot. The musical wouldn’t go quite as far when it debuted on Broadway in 2003, but it came in a series of hits on the George W. Bush administrationwho had ordered the invasion of Iraq only months earlier.

IN Evilthe Wizard is revealed to disenfranchise the talking animals of Oz on the grounds that in order to unite the rest of the land he needs to give them a common enemy. Yet the wizard’s pursuit of animals—and later of Elphaba—is rooted in a lie, the same way Bush falsely claimed Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction before he invaded.

Some of the references are blatantly obvious: When Dorothy’s house falls to the Wicked Witch of the East, Glinda echoes the Bush administration’s favorite euphemism for the Iraq war by describing it as a “regime change.” “Are you a crusader or ruthless raider?” the sorcerer sings, referencing Bush’s infamous description of the invasion of Iraq as a crusade. “It is all in which the label is able to pass!”

Critics’ responses were mixed. “As a parable of fascism and freedom, Evil so overplays its hand that it seriously dilutes its power to disturb.” Ben Brantley declared in 2003 in the New York Timesadding that the show “wears its political heart like it was a slogan button.”

Meanwhile, author Daniel Handler found himself drawn to the idea, although he was surprised by such a dark interpretation of sunny and magical Oz. “It’s hard not to wonder if the witch, a difficult figure transformed by difficult times, isn’t exactly what our stage needs,” Handler also wrote in the New York Times same year. “And maybe, the show suggests, ‘evil’ is what the W stands for” in George W. Bush.”

The wizard sings the same lyrics today, suggesting not Bush but Trump: a leader who consolidates his power by scapegoating marginalized groups and slowly but surely denying them their rights. Meanwhile, the difference in strategy between rabble-rousing progressive Elphaba and conciliatory liberal Glinda could hit Democrats especially hard amid their post-election recriminations.

Both Elphaba and Glinda idolize the wizard and dream of working at his right hand. When Elphaba hears about the plight of Oz’s animals, she goes straight to the Emerald City to seek his help, certain that if he learns that the animals are being targeted, he will rush to help them. The wizard suggests that he might if Elphaba uses her magic as part of her administration, but when she learns that it is the wizard behind the attacks, she disowns him, much to the dismay of the practical Glinda.

“I hope you’re happy with how you’ve hurt your cause forever,” Glinda sings. After all, Elphaba alienates a potential powerful ally. “I hope you are proud, how you would brood in submission to feed your own ambition,” replies Elphaba, who has decided that she will not work with anyone who uses his power to hurt Oz’s talking animal citizens. Could you read this moment as an allegory of how Democrats should handle trans issues going forward? Sure, it sounds like a stretch, but it’s not as far-fetched as you might imagine.

In a way, it’s strange to think about it Evil‘s political messages feel so prescient that most Evil fans agree that the political subplot is the weakest part of the musical. Evil lives and breathes the fraught friendship between its two leaders, not its dueling visions of activism.

Yet in another sense, Evil was born to be an allegory of American politics. It can’t be anything else. That’s what Oz stories are for.

Most of the most fantasy classics for children in the English-speaking world are English: think Peter Pan, Narnia, The Sword in the Stoneand Harry Potter. They tend to think about what it means to be a good king, about wild magical beasts lurking in the forest, about being an island nation.

The Wizard of Ozis, however, an American fantasy. A map of Ozshaped like a rectangle with its long side horizontal, is a simplified map of America as if drawn by a child: unimaginably vast, spanning the entire habitable continent from east to west. (Oz is bordered by toxic deserts rather than oceans.) It is a land where farmers cultivate fields of corn and wheat and orchards of apples; where industrialists build great, glittering cities; where the west is full of rough and undeveloped land. And it is a country ruled by a fraud who lies to the people he rules.

When L. Frank Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900 he imagined the Wizard of Oz as well-intentioned, if inefficient and a little dishonest. “I’m a very good man—just a bad wizard,” the wizard explains to Dorothy in the 1939 film. Yet the wizard can serve as a remarkably cynical metaphor for all the broken promises of the American Dream. The sorcerer is a man who will promise you everything but give you nothing, and then he will tell you that the answer was inside yourself all along.

It is this metaphor that gives The Wizthe all-black recreation of The Wizard of Oz from the 1970s, its surprisingly sharp bite. IN The WizDorothy and her friends are black people who are promised certain basic rights by a government that never plans to pay. (Evil gesturing against a similar criticism by casting the black actress Cynthia Erivo as the racially different green-skinned Elphaba.)

“Public office is the last refuge of the incompetent,” scoffs the scarecrow. The Wizafter finding out that the Wizard is a washed-up politician from Atlantic City. “Incompetent!” Wiz crows. “It’s me!”

Evilmeanwhile, is not a re-imagining of The Wizard of Oz as much as it is a revisionist history. As such, it is fundamentally skeptical of authority figures—much more so than Baum, who eventually replaced the wizard with the virtuous and almost infallible fairy queen Ozma.

The premise of any story that tells you the villains of your childhood are misunderstood is that the storytellers lied to you. IN EvilThe wizard is not just a very bad wizard, but also a very bad man. He lies maliciously and for strategic purposes.

Elphaba and Glinda, here, become just two more dreamers who travel to the Emerald City like Dorothy and her friends because they want the Wizard to grant them their heart’s desire: protection of the talking animals of Oz as they become increasingly persecuted .

Yet the sorcerer they meet is not only unable to grant them such a request, but actually plans to pervert it, using their innocent desires to inflict more violence. He plans to take Elphaba under his wing and have her do magic on his behalf so that he can more thoroughly pursue the sentient animals he plans to collect and more effectively spy on the rest of his citizens.

In the end, the Wizard names Elphaba the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good Witch of the North because he can trust Glinda to maintain friendly relations with his administration, while Elphaba refuses. He is America ruled not by an impostor, but by a strong man – an authoritarian dictator.

This is the kind of metaphor a revisionist history can offer you, and part of why Evil feels so bizarrely urgent at this moment. In a subversion of a childhood classic, there is no authority figure to be trusted – which is what makes these stories so appealing, when people you don’t trust have found their way into positions of power.