The Internet Gleefully Mocks Trump’s Coronavirus Council

“Everyone immediately had this visceral reaction about the absurdity of it,” sighs Rob Sheridan, a Tacoma, Washington, illustrator and a DC Comics writer. “The Onion couldn’t assemble a more ridiculous rogues’ gallery of nepotists, slugs and vampire capitalists to take on the job of reopening the economy.”

Much of the internet seems to share Sheridan’s feelings about the council announced yesterday by President Trump that will advise the president about reopening the economy after the coronavirus crisis. Its roster includes the president’s family (daughter Ivanka, son in law Jared), a TV personality turned White House aide (Larry Kudlow) and several cabinet members (Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin). And when Fox News assembled the seven-person council into a series of side-by-side photos, which you can see directly below, the memes began.

Sheridan’s version has probably been the most shared, replacing the Trump council with pictures of the Jaws shark. Of course, the 1975 film itself is a comment about how wrong-headed politics can create a public crisis: Recall that Amity Island’s mayor reopens the beaches amid pressure from the town’s business community eager not to miss out on the dollars spent by Fourth of July vacationers.

“As I as soon as I thought about reopening Amity beach—that persistent theme that ran through Jaws—it felt like the perfect metaphor,” says Sheridan, who figures it took him about 10 minutes to assemble the image that has since been retweeted nearly 28,000 times and liked 118,800 times.

Alison Pitt, the host of the “Daily Trek News” podcast and a business analyst at a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based software company, drew inspiration from a different fictional wellspring—assembling a lineup of creatures not from this planet but from ones across the Trek universe.

The scariest member here, says Pitt, is the Shakespeare-spouting Klingon Gen. Chang played by Christopher Plummer in 1991’s Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. That’s the one-eyed fella with the sash, who is standing in for U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer. “Chang was so sneaky terrible. He was trying to disrupt the whole peace talks between the Federation and the Klingons,” explains Pitt. “Basically trying to blow up the whole thing when they were trying to do good.”

Doesn’t sound too dissimilar to what happens in Washington, D.C. every day.

Here are some other takes on the coronavirus council:

And in this final one, it seems like @KaliMiller partly raided the ranks of our Fictional 15 list to fill out her squares.