Watchmen: Are Some Trump Folk Actually #DeletedWatchmenCharacters?

Amazing how much can happen in a week. The last time we checked in on HBO Watchmen series creator Damon Lindelof, he was agreeing with culture critic Soraya Nadia McDonald (The Undefeated) that the attack on our nation’s capital fueled by Trump and his gaggle of goons was looking eerily similar to what a second season of the Emmy Awards-winning series would probably look like (more of our thoughts on that below). Flash ahead a week and the U.S. House of Representatives is currently voting to impeach Trumpy for a second time- no surprise when the mound occupying The White House has spent months egging on his whackjobs to take action. But even with all of those blatant facts in play (and more coming out every day), what good would be having a “gaggle of goons” be if they wouldn’t be mindlessly doing your bidding at the snap of your finger. So as expected, Trump had some of his goose-steppers take the mic to whine about how unfair it was to want to impeach a man who egged on some walking balls of insignificance to hurt, destroy, and kill.

But as aggravating as it was to watch this mess of people shill for a shallow disaster, Lindelof found a silver lining in the middle of it in the form of #DeletedWatchmenCharacters- those who suckle on Trumpy’s teat and look the part to be in Lindelof’s pseudo-sequel “remix” of the classic comic book series. So for a look at two third-rate villains who didn’t come close to making the cut, check out what Lindelof has to say about Florida fraud Matt Gaetz aka Love Trumps Gaetz and New Jersey’s walking landfill Jeff Van Drew aka Red White Van Drew:

Last week, McDonald tweeted what a lot of us were thinking as we watched the coverage of the terrorist attack: we were living through the second season of Watchmen, and it was being covered live on CNN (though we usually go MSNBC and Twitter- you get the point). As you’ll see in the Instagram post below, it’s clear that Lindelof is in total agreement with McDonald’s perspective. But we viewed it more in terms of it all being a series of Watchmen “deleted scenes”- going more like this:

One of our nation’s MVPs Stacey Abrams would be Angela Abar/Sister Night (Regina King), stepping into the pool and realizing she now possesses the power of Dr. Manhattan. But the power comes with a price: the transition can be a slow and painful one. But there’s no time for that, not when Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock have an election to win to take the Senate back from the Seventh Kalvary. One would think that with the power of a god, it would be a no-brainer for the pair to coast to victory. But this is Abrams we’re talking about. Using her still-developing powers, she literally removes the obstacles people have to vote. Voting places well-staffed and running smoothly- with more than enough to choose from. Places to go to get fair and accurate information on the topics up for debate. But that’s it. The vote itself is left to those Abrams has fought so hard to give the vote back to: the people. And as Abrams learns to embrace and balance her power, what results in a modern-day political miracle.

And since we’re talking about the Seventh Kalvary, how could we leave out Sen. Josh Hawley as our real-life counterpart to James Wolk‘s Sen. Joe Keene Jr.? I’ll put aside the obvious “all vanilla white guys look alike” joke because the images above already run with the punchline, but could there be a better match-up? A figurehead for a small group of privileged, hate-filled d-bags? Check. Come up with crazy conspiracy theories about the government? Check. Look to steal power to create their version of what they think would be a “perfect world”? Check. So this week would’ve represented a deleted scene where Hawley has somehow made it to The White House (having survived being turned into goo)- but thanks to a fully-powered “Stacey Manhattan” and some long-lost friends (spoilers!), “President Hawley” is seeing all of his plans going up in flames. His only choice? Unleash some of his Rorschach wannabes to create chaos at the capital while Hawley escapes until he can figure out his next move.