While it certainly isn’t the “strangest” thing about the U.S. election of 2024, it bears a particularly on-the-nose kind of ominousness that the final date to cast one’s vote this year (a.k.a. Voting Day) takes place on Guy Fawkes Day. Immortalized, for Americans, with 2005’s V for Vendetta (notably, adapted from David Lloyd’s graphic novel by The Wachowskis). Not just because of Natalie Portman getting her head shaved as part of the storyline, but because of popularizing Guy Fawkes masks (in and outside of the UK) and providing a friendly little rhyme (already well-known to Brits) that few who have seen the movie could ever forget: “Remember, remember/The Fifth of November.” The full rhyme, however, goes: “Remember, remember/The Fifth of November/The Gunpowder Treason and plot/I know of no reason/Why the Gunpowder Treason/Should ever be forgot!”
In the Year of Our Dystopia, 2024, remembering the abridged form of the rhyme is especially effortless for Americans who have been bombarded with nonstop grotesquerie in the form of election coverage. And The Orange One, of course, has been given plenty of opportunity to go viral for all the wrong reasons. Not that anything he says or does could ever really change the opinion of his most devout followers: that he is Cheeto Jesus. Come down from the “heavens” of Trump Tower to “save” the Republican party, and ‘Murica along with it.
To drive home that point, there is plenty of wearable merchandise to parade their devotion. Not just red MAGA hats and Trump-Vance (formerly Trump-Pence) shirts, but also the chilling array of Trump masks to choose from—now even ones that come complete with blood dripping down his ear to honor the (first) assassination attempt against him. Of course, that two people have tried to kill Trump during this election cycle has only made him all the more “Christ-like” to those who want to see such events through a martyr sort of lens. Even if the thing about martyrs is: they actually die.
Just as V (played by Hugo Weaving) does in the aforementioned film. As for the tailored timing of when V for Vendetta came out, it was strategically released the same year that was to mark the four hundredth anniversary of Guy Fawkes Day (or Night, if you prefer). A historical event in British political history that related to the infamous Gunpowder Plot. Funnily enough, it wasn’t orchestrated by Fawkes, even though he gets all the glory with a day named after him. Instead, the plot to assassinate the Protestant King James I (of England and VI of Scotland) was led by a Catholic named Robert Catesby. Fawkes only ended up getting all the credit, so to speak, because he was the one discovered holding the gunpowder—thirty-six barrels’ worth of it, to be exact.
When the public was informed that the plot to kill their king had been prevented, the lore goes that there was cheering in the streets, the ringing of church bells and celebratory bonfires (in the present, that includes fireworks). Who knew people could be so enthusiastic about a discriminatory despot? Oh wait, history has seen such a phenomenon many times since, and is seeing it now in real time.
The story of the Gunpowder Plot isn’t just resonant with this election because of an overt confluence of religion and politics that probably hasn’t been this played up since the Reagan years. Indeed, Guy Fawkes Day has a twofold significance, symbolic interpretation-wise, with regard to this year’s U.S. election. On the one hand, should Trump win, there are many who would be of the Catesby camp: believing that tyrannicide is the only way to stop someone who has thus far evaded every other form of legal comeuppance for his “above the law” (as a dictator sees himself) actions. On the other, if Harris should win, there are many (racists and misogynists) who would try to blow up the White House (you know, like Madonna once said she had thought about doing when Trump “won” the first time) as Catesby and co. had planned to blow up the House of Lords. And all because their Cheeto Jesus didn’t manage to lie, cheat and steal his way into the Oval Office again.
What’s more, if the events of January 6, 2021 have taught the masses anything (and, hopefully, they have), it’s that Trump’s supporters, like him, do not take no (a.k.a. reality) for an answer. And that he is “deft” (though that word should never really be used to describe him) at gathering his lap dogs for a cause. For who could forget that ominous tweet presaging what was to come during the Capitol riots: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” And oh, how prepared Trump supporters are to be “wild”—to, like their “master,” do whatever underhanded, thuggish thing it takes to bend reality to their will.
As the movie version of Roy Cohn (played by Jeremy Strong) tells Trump (played by Sebastian Stan) in The Apprentice, “You create your own reality. The truth is malleable.” Malleable enough, perhaps, to incite his supporters, once again, to engage in their own kind of Gunpowder Plot. Which is just one aspect of what makes this year’s election falling on Guy Fawkes Day so unsettling.
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