In December 2016, the gilt lobby of Trump Tower became the visual center of American power. Cameras followed the comings and goings of middle-aged and older white guys amid a large plainclothes security detail. A surprising number of the men in Donald Trump’s orbit—longtime cronies, legal counsel, crony-legal counsel hybrids, along with Secret Service and ancillary bodyguards—wore overcoats . . . long overcoats with the wide, drooping shoulders of the early 1990s. Klatches of these coats seemed to linger in every alcove, creating a mood that even the camera crews in North Face jackets could not dilute.

Though I found that overcoat lobby scene as ominous as the impending presidency, it was also hilarious, like a Sidney Lumet shoot that got lost in time. I remember the mental scrolling through lots of memes—gangsters or Gotham or any Marvel/DC Comics dystopia—that all seemed too self-serious. It’s taken me a while to finally hit upon the right one: the decadent metropolis in The Triplets of Belleville, Sylvain Chomet’s Oscar-nominated animated comedy.

Chomet’s 2003 film is brutally funny, surprisingly moving, and also unnerving. His Weimar-looking, mafia-run city where almost everyone is morbidly obese seems to be an amalgam of New York and Paris—the Paris part because the crime concerns a Tour de France–caliber cyclist who’s been kidnapped by the mafia on another continent, shipped across an ocean, and is now being tortured as part of a gambling scheme. Although the film’s stylization of grotesques is European—a steroid mashup of twenties Berlin and The Untouchables—this capital of consumption where the cyclist and his grandma and dog rescuers wind up is unmistakably American.

The supersize Statue of Liberty in the harbor holds up an ice cream cone in her right hand and displays a hamburger on the book in her left, like someone at the all-you-can-eat buffet balancing multiple plates to avoid having to walk back for refills. The counter woman who offers the granny heroine a HAMBURGER lunges with the smiling teeth of Thomas Nast’s Tammany Tiger. There are plenty of smiling, obese tourists on the streets but no police in sight. If the city is “policed” at all it seems to be by pairs of tall, dark-haired mafia thugs in black suits and boxy overcoats. Their coats are so boxy, in fact, that they look like moving coffins, perhaps to provide you a preview of your fate should you not comply with their wishes. (Rob Porter, who was Trump’s White House Staff Secretary before domestic abuse allegations from both of his ex-wives compelled him to resign on February 7, calls these guys to mind.) The singing sister act of the title lives in near poverty in an urban no-man’s-land reminiscent of South Bronx lots in the 1980s. For food, they dynamite skinny frogs out of a pond.

The animation was inspired by Dada and the surrealists: the denizens of Belleville have the menacing look of the caricatures of Max Beckmann and especially George Grosz. Donald Trump’s bizarre interventions to mask the effects of aging and weight gain have already done the artistic work of transforming him into a Grosz caricature. He is one pound shy of obese (but we know he lies about his weight), eats a lot of red meat and HAMBURGERS, makes his skin orange and his hair yellow, and wears absurdly long ties and tractor caps with suits. Grosz’s savage depictions of Weimar’s greedy, cruel, and hideously lustful ruling classes showed the moral rot in the decade before Hitler came to power. Trump seems a corporeal composite of these leering war profiteers and industrialists, corrupt military officers with empty skulls, and ranting demagogues. But that’s just the packaging. There’s the racism, the degradation of women, the foul mouth, the serial financial crimes, the pride in bullying. And at the core a cutthroat capitalist with no ethics and an insatiable desire for power.

Chomet applies the Grosz palette of grays, browns, and blacks to his metropolis without morals, a place where a tiny, clown-nose crime boss can run a global racket that kidnaps athletes, works them to near-death, and then shoots them when they fall. It might be an oligarchy, but you see people bowing down to only one clown. Tellingly, the retro overlay of the twenties and thirties suggests a place that can’t let go of its past.

Perhaps the most hapless (and most Bellevillean) among the overcoats at Trump Tower in December 2016 was Michael Cohen, Trump’s special counsel. In December 2017, after Buzzfeed News published Christpher Steele’s dossier saying that Cohen met with Kremlin officials in Prague in August 2016, Cohen expressed his denial of the allegation by tweeting a photo of his closed passport with the text “I have never been to Prague in my life.” In a cartoon world, that would probably make everything just fine.

Since moving to Washington and being viewed through the sanitizing lens of the presidential tarmac, the Trump act has been somewhat scrubbed of its skulking gangster origins. Washington does not have the eighties smoke-glass-table sheen of Trump Tower; you’re never going to think Scarface in the Green Room. But with the progress of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections, we’re seeing the overcoats reappear metaphorically with Congressional Republicans now doing the president’s dirty work.

See, or instance, one Devin Nunes, Chaiman of the House Intelligence Committee, whose four-page memorandum released on February 2 was an overt, Trump-backed attempt to discredit the Special Counsel investigation of the Trump presidential campaign and pivot public attention away from it. The FBI issued a rare statement expressing “grave concerns” about the memo’s factual omissions and accuracy.

Belleville is not the Airstrip One of George Orwell, nor the New Babylon of Fritz Lang, nor the Pottersville of Frank Capra. It manages the daytime pretense of normality. Besides the captive cyclists and the frog-dynamiting old ladies, you don’t see any drone citizens enduring public deprivation, just docile consumers captive to capitalistic decadence. In this city of extremes (rich and poor, obese and emaciated), the citizens passively accept the rampant corruption of the gangsters in charge. This is what authoritarian regimes look like: a consumption-anesthetized populace awash in cheap money. Ask yourself why so many photos of Moscow show bourgeois women with shopping bags looking at the windows of luxury storefronts. Soulless figures are recognizable even centuries apart.

There was a period last fall—you knew it was coming—when leftist pundits began chastising the press for catastrophizing Trump’s near daily breaches of protocol and/or the rule of law. They parroted the “Trump Derangement Syndrome” defense that the President fed them in tweets. They thought it was naïve to get worked up over ethics violations and ideas that (probably) would never get through Congress. This is where we are now: the decision whether to let “the little things” slide so as not to rile the MAGA base, or whether letting the little things slide is what makes the big things arrive faster. As the Mueller investigation revealed, thirteen Facebook pages put up by Russian troll farms managed to reach 126 million Americans. How many among of those 126 million eventually became MAGA diehards? The pundits don’t have those numbers. All we Americans can do is take collective responsibility for the outcome of the 2016 election. The first step is accepting that our society has failed while we were reaping its benefits. As Augustine put it: “Never fight evil as if it were something that arose totally outside yourself.” The second step, though, is to fiercely resist normalizing overt corruption. What made The Triplets of Belleville so funny in 2003 was its outlandishness. Fifteen years later, the outlandishness is much harder to laugh at. §