If anyone is qualified to compare Game of Thrones characters to real-life politicians, it is Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin. So it is no small thing when Martin says, definitively, that the character who most resembles Donald Trump is Joffrey Baratheon, the megalomaniacal teenage king of Westeros.
Martin argued in a video for T: The New York Times Style Magazine that the US president shares a number of traits with the fictional character, who was also a key component of the HBO series based on Martin’s book series until he was unceremoniously poisoned to death by his new grandmother-in-law.
They have the same level of emotional maturity. And Joffrey likes to remind everyone that he’s king. And he thinks that gives him the ability to do anything. And we’re not an absolute monarchy, like Westeros is. We’re a constitutional republic. And yet, Trump doesn’t seem to know what that means. He thinks the presidency gives him the power to do anything. And so, yeah, Joffrey is Trump.
Joffrey ascends to the Iron Throne when his “father,” King Robert Baratheon, is killed in a hunting accident. (In Westeros’ worst-kept secret, Joffrey’s biological father is actually Jaime Lannister, the twin brother of his mother, Cersei Lannister.) An erratic, entitled, narcissistic misogynist who was born into great wealth and power and refers to himself as “king” in the third person, Joffrey eventually meddles with the wrong family, which leads to his demise.
Martin has compared Trump to Joffrey once before. Last year, he told Esquire that Trump was acting as if he were an adult version of Joffrey. “He’s grown up just as petulant and irrational as he was when he was thirteen in the books,” he said.
Trump, like Joffrey, was born into an inordinately wealthy family. A New York Times investigation found that the president began reaping heaps of cash from his father as a toddler. According to the report, Trump earned $200,000 as a 3-year-old, was a millionaire by age 8, and was “loaned” $60.7 million by his father—most of which was never repaid.
Others have argued that Trump more closely resembles different Thrones characters, such as Walder Frey, the orchestrator of the infamous “Red Wedding” that wiped out almost the entire Stark clan, or perhaps Hodor, a character who is unable to say any words other than his own name due to a childhood accident.