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J.K. Rowling Says Trump Is Worse Than Voldemort
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@jk_rowling He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named! #Voldetrump
— @decider
J.K. Rowling took to Twitter on December 8 to defend her character, Lord Voldemort, from comparisons to Donald Trump. Rowling was reacting to a tweet by BBC Newsbeat, which read: “This is why people are calling American businessman, Donald Trump, Lord Voldemort.” The tweet features a link to a story about Trump’s call for “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” after the recent terrorist attacks in San Bernardino and Paris. Rowling tweeted: “How Horrible. Voldemort was nowhere near as bad.” She also re-tweeted a map showing mass shootings in the US in 2015, highlighting how many of those were performed by Muslims, which was very few.
As Harry Potter fans know, Voldemort’s motis operandi was hinged on deep-set racism and his desire to purify wizard-kind. Voldemort casually murdered and tortured people, leading a Nazi-like movement against people not born into wizarding families. Though Trump’s record remains clean of murder and torture, Voldemort’s classist and racist agenda bears a remarkable similarity to Trump’s real-life policies.
One of the core messages of the Harry Potter series is to express yourself in the face of such forces, as is particularly embodied in the classic quote, “Fear in a name increases fear of the thing itself.” Indeed, Rowling is not the only author speaking out on her dislike for Trump lately, as Man Booker winner Marlon James recently called Trump a “shit stain on the butt crack of the universe.”
