Esquire magazine writer Matt Miller doesn't like President Donald Trump. I get that. However, does he have to bring his Trump derangement into articles unrelated to him? An example is his February 21 story about one of The Black Panther actors, Winston Duke, who played the character of M'Baku. It took Miller just three paragraphs before his Trump obsession kicked in with gratuitous cheap shots:
In late 2016, shortly after finding out he'd been cast as M'Baku in Black Panther—and the news of his casting had quickly made its way online—Winston Duke went to Blastoff Comics in North Hollywood to begin research for his first-ever movie role.
“I went in there, and the guy recognized me,” Duke says, “and he just pulled out all the comics that my character had ever appeared in.”
He started reading like crazy, immersing himself in the fictional African nation of Wakanda, an Afrofuturist utopia “that exists outside of the -isms—racism, colonialism,” as Duke explains. “It’s a world that doesn’t define itself in proximity to whiteness.” A few weeks later, the film began shooting during a time when the real world faced its own uncertainty: President Donald Trump had taken the Oath of Office amid a resurgence of white nationalism in America.
The article continued with its Trump obsession:
“After that election it was like, What’s next? We went into this movie wondering, Oh my God, is the world ready for this film? Like so many people in the country, I was wondering where I stood—wondering where my narratives stood,” Duke says. “Going into that, and making this film, I just hoped and prayed that this film could be received for all that it can be.”
But as Trump tried and failed with his immigration ban and kept shouting about building walls, Duke went to work every day with a group of black creatives—director Ryan Coogler and co-stars Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong’o, Danai Gurira, Daniel Kaluuya, and Letita Wright—working to do the opposite.
Well, at least we know that Trump completely owns Matt Miller's mind. Oh, and perhaps he should wait until the Supreme Court rules on the travel ban case in April before claiming he failed.
