The Boys Season 5: Six times the Trump satire got a little too real | indy100

Jasper Savage/Prime

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Season 5, Episodes 1-3 of The Boys.

The fifth and final season of The Boys is well underway, and with that, fans of the Amazon Prime Video series will know there’s a solid helping of political satire mixed in with all the blood, guts and extremely NSFW special effects.

After all, the series – based on the comics by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson – has previously poked fun at US president Donald Trump’s golden sneakers, while right-wingers have complained about the show’s ‘politics’ without immediately realising that it’s their politics which is being ridiculed in the show.

And now, with Vought director turned mind-reading supe Ashley Barrett (Colby Minifie) serving as vice president, there’s a whole host of fresh political comparisons to be made between the world of The Boys and the Trump administration.

We’ve rounded them up for you below…

Designating ‘the Starlighters’ a terrorist organisation

In the opening scene of the very first episode, Homelander (Antony Starr) tells a crowd of his supporters that “the Starlighters” have been designated a “terrorist organisation”, and while the name is taken from former member of The Seven turned The Boys ally Starlight (Erin Moriarty), the group has no official leadership or organisation and is more a movement.

The same can be said for Antifa, which is also without a leader, and was designated a “domestic terrorist organization” by Trump in September last year.

Amazon

“Posting [memes] should be a crime”

The overpowered big bad that is Homelander has blessed us with several hilarious memes over the past four seasons, and while the cast and creators love them, the superhero himself – what with his extremely delicate ego – does not, and later in episode one, we see Homelander tell Sister Sage (Susan Hayward) that “posting [memes] should be a crime”, before being seen in his room with a decapitated Vought employee who he says “liked a couple of Starlight posts in the past”.

While not a crime under Trump’s administration, memes and the US government’s apparent dislike of ones critical of it made headlines last year when a Norwegian tourist claimed he was refused entry to the US because he had the ‘bald’ JD Vance meme saved on his phone.

US Customs and Border Protection hit back at the tourist’s claims by alleging he was denied entry for “his admitted drug use”.

And following the signing of an executive order by Trump on his first day in office relating to “protecting the United States from foreign terrorists and other national security and public safety threats”, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services says the EO requires them “to collect social media identifier(s) data on immigration forms and/or within information collection systems”.

Abolishing DEI

Yep, that’s already happened.

Trump signed an executive order “ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs and preferencing” in January last year (also on his first day in office) – one which branded such programs “discriminatory”.

Indeed, another executive order signed last month reads: “My Administration has made significant progress in ending racial discrimination in American society, including so-called “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) activities in which employees, applicants, or contracting parties are treated differently, separated, or singled out based on their race or ethnicity, rather than treated equally and objectively based on their merit and without regard to their immutable characteristics.”

It’s not too dissimilar from comments made by Ashley in the first episode, where she shares her plans to ‘abolish DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion]’ and tells Firecracker (Valorie Curry) in an interview that “it’s racist to give people a leg up based on skin colour. Isn’t white a colour too?”

“It’s just that we’ve already purged the CIA, DOJ, FBI, FTC, FCC, EPHA, DHS, HHS and USPS”

Ashley later explains to Sage that Homelander’s expulsion of ‘Starlighters’ has already extended to multiple government agencies and departments, and we can’t be the only ones that think this mass exodus of government resources sounds incredibly similar to the cutting of government ‘waste’ by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)…

Presenting Soldier Boy with the Democratic Medal of Patriotic Freedom

Skipping ahead to episode three, after Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles) seemingly survives the supe-killing virus at The Kix Crib at the end of episode two, the old-school superhero is reintroduced to America with considerable pomp and ceremony, including being presented with the “Democratic Medal of Patriotic Freedom”.

The closest real-life equivalent is likely the Presidential Medal of Freedom, but the buzzword-laden title may well remind you of all the awards Trump has either received or had named after him as he continues his campaign to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

Amazon

Homelander as God

The release of episode three also happens to be eerily timely, in that just days before we all watched Homelander have a religious experience (namely in the form of Madelyn Stillwell – the Vought boss he lasered the eyeballs off of at the end of season one – appearing to him as an angel), Trump took to Truth Social to share an AI image of him as Jesus.

Homelander viewing himself as God comes after he learns about a type of Compound V known as V1, which prevented Soldier Boy from succumbing to the supe virus in episode two, and could render him immune to the bug and potentially invincible, but who will get their hands on the rare drug first: Vought or The Boys?

The Boys continues on Amazon Prime Video every Wednesday.

Why not read…?

Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter

How to join the indy100's free WhatsApp channel

Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.