The Musical’s George W Bush Era Vibes Hit Hard in the Trump Years

Dave Benett

It’s bizarre to watch Wicked in the political moment we find ourselves in. No, this is not about to be a diatribe about how “eerily relevant” a twenty-one year-old Broadway musical is, or how an escapist fantasy film should keep things apolitical, or — Oz forgive — an indictment of its “wokeness,” in that infuriating use of the term. What makes the viewing experience of director Jon M. Chu’s 2024 film simultaneously nostalgic and contemporary is the cyclical nature of American politics, and the way that the anti-intellectualism, scapegoating, cult of personality, and propaganda that characterized George W. Bush’s presidency has come roaring back into fashion. It’s not just low-rise jeans and baby tees, y’all!

The musical Wicked was certainly purposefully political when it debuted back in 2003. When the New York Times theatre critic Ben Brantley reviewed the show on Broadway, he called it “a Technicolorized sermon,” a “politically indignant deconstruction of L. Frank Baum’s Oz tales” that “wears its political heart as if it were a slogan button.” The themes and direct, sometimes even verbatim references to American politics peppered throughout the toe-tapping musical perhaps went unnoticed by young children in the audience, but not to those attuned to current events.

Interestingly, the film nixes the first political reference made in the musical. When a munchkin asks Glinda if it’s true the Wicked Witch was her friend, the blonde in the bubble quips “well, it depends on what you mean by friend” — referencing an infamously avoidant answer that President Bill Clinton gave about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Yet other references remain. After learning about how animals in the kingdom are being oppressed, Elphaba muses that “it couldn’t happen here, in Oz.” This is a nod to Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 dystopian novel It Can’t Happen Here about the rise of a fictional fascist dictator in America. (Spoiler alert: it can.) Then, in the song “Popular,” one of Wicked’s more enduring and, well, popular songs, Glinda cheekily nickname-checks President Ronald Reagan, the Great Communicator:

“When I see depressing creatures / With unprepossessing features / I remind them on their own behalf to think of / Celebrated heads of state or / ‘Specially great communicators / Did they have brains or knowledge? / Don’t make me laugh / They were popular / Please. It’s all about popular / It’s not about aptitude / it’s the way you’re viewed / So it’s very shrewd to be / Very very popular like me.”

Reagan aside, it was impossible at the time to hear those lyrics and not be reminded of the recent presidential election that chose Bush, the guy voters would rather have a beer with, over then-Vice President Al Gore, who came across like a nerd. It’s a humorous and perky song with a depressing reminder of society’s values boiling underneath the surface. In 2015, Bush addressed students at Southern Methodist University, joking that “To those of you who are graduating this afternoon with high honors, awards and distinctions, I say, ‘Well done.’ And as I like to tell the C students: You too, can be president.” It’s not about aptitude, indeed.

It is in Wicked’s second act where the Bush references become more pointed. (Stay tuned! Wicked: Part 2 releases in theaters on November 21, 2025.) Elphaba’s doomed younger sister Nessarose, who finds herself the new mayor of Munchkinland, refers to herself as an “unelected official.” That choice of words seemingly winked at how Bush’s 2000 election came down to a Supreme Court ruling. Later on, Glinda spins Nessarose’s death as a “regime change,” a phrase synonymous with the Bush Doctrine’s aggressive approach to foreign policy and the President’s fervent plan to overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

According to Wicked original ensemble member Ben Cameron in Staged Right: Exploring the Politics of Wicked, the latter received a hearty, knowing audience reception in 2003 — especially during the San Francisco production. These lines may not have garnered quite the roaring response that Hamilton’s “immigrants, we get the job done” did after Donald Trump was first elected in 2016, but the intended audience is similar.

Over the course of Wicked, Elphaba convinces her love interest, the shallow Fiyero and, eventually, Glinda to question authority and care about social justice in Oz. But not before she becomes a political scapegoat thanks to the Wizard of Oz himself — the most direct analogue to Bush and those in power at the time. He tells Glinda and Elphaba in the first act and the film, “where I come from, everyone knows: The best way to bring folks together is to give them a really good enemy.” That is a great, succinct way to describe America after the events of 9/11. We were told we had a common enemy in Osama Bin Laden. We went to war over lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. We changed French fries to Freedom fries. After a divisive election, tragedy had united us.

“[The Iraq War] was sold completely on misinformation and disinformation, that was propagated not just by our government, but frankly by your government, too,” said Stephen Schwartz, the composer and lyricist behind the musical, in a recent interview with UK publication The Independent. “And also the demonization of Saddam Hussein as a justification for the war. Not that he wasn’t a bad guy, but the total, black-and-white demonization obviously struck us as part of the story. We hope that we threaded that in, in a subtle and entertaining way.”

In Wicked: The Grimmerie, a Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Hit Broadway Musical by David Cote, Winnie Holzman, the musical’s writer, explains that when she and Schwartz started working in 1998, they were initially inspired by Clinton — a likeable leader with a glaring personal weakness — in crafting the Wizard. But as Bush took power and America changed, so did the man behind the curtain. The folksy, self-deprecating “corn-fed hick” in the Emerald City who was proudly unfit to lead, lied to his people and turned them against the Wicked Witch became more dangerous.

In a 2003 piece in The New York Times, when the show was playing an out-of-town tryout in San Francisco, author Daniel Handler drew a brief comparison between Wicked’s page to stage journey in the Bush era to T. H. White’s The Once and Future King’s musical adaptation, Camelot, in the Kennedy era. Handler, better known as Lemony Snicket, concluded that “perhaps, the show suggests, ‘wicked’ is what the W stands for.”

In “Wonderful,” a second-act ditty that will likely hit like a ton of yellow bricks in 2025, the Wizard describes a post-modern take on morality and truth itself. “A man’s called a traitor or liberator / A rich man’s a thief or philanthropist / Is one a crusader or ruthless invader? / It’s all in which label is able to persist / There are precious few at ease / With moral ambiguities / So we act as though they don’t exist.” Again, while the lyrics are applicable to several historical figures, they were written with Bush’s invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan in mind.

It should be noted that all of this is all a walk in the park compared to the source material. In Maguire’s dense and dark novel, Elphaba joins an eco-terrorist organization and the animals experience oppression that’s more complex and akin to Apartheid. “[Maguire’s] Oz is basically a fascist society,” said Schwartz in The Grimmerie. “We didn’t push that far — we made it more about American politics. Depending on what color state you live in, you have a view of how close to fascism we are right now.” That book was published in 2005.

The politics of Wicked are perhaps ultimately more clever than smart. These references were jokes akin to political cartoons, after all, and stories about plucky underdogs speaking truth to power and fighting oppression are not uncommon. However, the fact that all of this was hiding in plain sight within a Broadway show about female friendship in the land of Oz was incredibly appealing to a bookish and disillusioned teenager like myself back in the day. And if it was evident to me at that age, there’s no excuse for anyone else, especially now. Here we are in 2024, where the cult of personality around Donald Trump is that much more dangerous, anti-intellectualism is that much more prevalent, and moral ambiguities are swept under the rug at an alarming rate. It’s unsettling to think of how far backwards we’ve fallen and to be reminded of that by a musical, of all things.

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Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue

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