The 1993 film Dave was about a philandering, corrupt president who has a stroke while in flagrante delicto.  A suitable look-alike is found (exact, as both parts are played by Kevin Kline) and is convinced to impersonate the president for what his two handlers think will be a few days.  But Bill Mitchell, the now-comatose president, is done for good, and Dave must stay on in his assumed role – but Dave is a Boy Scout, unlike the man whose shoes he must now fill.

At the time, most people thought the main character was a representation of Bill Clinton; by 1993, Clinton's extramarital exploits and brushes with criminality in Arkansas were already well known.  But seeing the film now, one realizes that the karmically-stricken Bill Mitchell is a proxy for any number of presidents, unethical and above the law.  JFK was a player.  LBJ was a lying, amoral racist.  Clinton...well, we all know what he was.  Bush 43 was a good man who refused to defend himself and his administration to the everlasting detriment of his legacy.  Obama was an intellectual lightweight so out of his league that he still thinks he was a great President when in fact he was the worst of the modern era.  He and his cabal of American saboteurs – Ben Rhodes, Valerie Jarrett, David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel, Jonathan Gruber, et al. – did long-term, incalculable damage to this country.  They ruined what had been the greatest health care system in the world.  They empowered our most dangerous enemies, Iran, China, and Russia, while doing considerable harm to allies like Israel. 

Fast-forward to 2016.  The U.S. had been economically eviscerated by Obama's do-nothing stimulus bill, billions that went into the pockets of now-failed "green" companies like Solyndra and to bail out bankrupt unions.  There are too many failed programs to list here, so suffice it to say that the final blow was that $1.7B in cash that Obama shipped to Iran which preceded the release of $150B's worth of frozen assets.

As it turned out, Obama was an enemy of America, a sort of stealth saboteur.  It seemed that by 2016, it would take decades to recover from his misdeeds.

Then Trump stepped into the fray, not as an impersonator, but as the duly elected president.  The media-pundit class, whose members think it is their job to tell us how to think and vote, assumed he was a joke candidate.  Democrats and Republicans alike did not take his candidacy seriously.  But millions of Americans did take him seriously.  They elected him to drain the swamp – the same swamp that writer Gary Ross drew from for his script for Dave twenty-five years ago.  It has always been with us; it just got worse under the auspices of the Clintons and the Obamas and their respective collection of toadies. 

Seeing Dave today is both a grim reminder of how corrupt so many of those who run our government are and a ray of hope as to how much good an interloper can accomplish.  The left refuses to acknowledge the almost miraculous success of Trump's presidency so far, especially the record-breaking unemployment for blacks, Hispanics, and women.  We are now energy-independent!  This is huge, but the media ignore the fact.  The Norks are not lobbing missiles, and China is beginning to bend with regard to its decades of theft of intellectual property and billions in trade deficits.  ISIS is nearly defeated.  Our military has been, for the first time in years, more adequately funded.  There is more, much more.  Once the southern border is secured, Americans will be safer. 

There is a line in the film when the fake Dave's chief of staff, Bob (played to the nines by Frank Langella), one of the two men who orchestrated the cover-up of Bill Mitchell's incapacitation, is enraged at Dave's growing comfort in the role of president.  Dave calls a press conference on his own.  Bob is furious and tells his partner in crime that he is going to kill him.  Bob says, "I'm going to kill him.  He's not a president.  He's an ordinary person.  I can kill an ordinary person."  Given the familiar analogies in this film, one can only wonder how many inconvenient people have been killed for purely political reasons.  Likely more than a few over the two-hundred and thirty years since the Constitution was written and signed.

Have we become more civilized over all those years?  Hard to say.  In so many ways, we are less civilized.  Advocating for late-term abortion is obviously many steps backward.  Denying the biological fact that there are only two sexes is a huge step backward.  Classifying people by skin color, an idea discredited long ago, is back with a vengeance, thanks to the tenured radicals who took over the universities by the late 1960s and the shot in the arm they got with the Obama administration, the re-racialization of America.  The left cares only about identity groups; the right recognizes individuals as discrete from one another.  Skin color is meaningless.  Liberty is everything.

Dave, the film, reminds that political corruption has always been with us.  At the end, we're told that the circle of criminals that were part of Bill Mitchell's administration are indicted on "34 counts of election law violations and obstruction of justice."  Let us hope the many villains among the Clinton and Obama grouping of crooks and liars will someday be indicted for their many crimes. Writer Gary Ross was prescient, indeed; when Bill Mitchell's vice president is sworn in, he is sworn in as the 45th President of the United States!