Donald Trump, the Cannibal: Twenty-Seven Years of Grand Theft Auto Parodies

Rockstar Games is encouraging its fanbase to touch grass again, having delayed Grand Theft Auto VI’s release by another six months. This decision has caused outrage across the world from the cesspools of Reddit to the halls of Poland’s parliament, for some reason. However, the GTA series is no stranger to controversy, from its portrayal of drunk driving, to its potential for drug trading, to its parodies and satires of real-world celebrities. Politicians, lawyers and magnates are among those who have been skewered since the franchise launched, some still with us, others who have since fallen by the wayside.

Donald Love 

There are hundreds of repulsive caricatures of Donald Trump that have appeared in media over the past few decades, showing up in works as varied as Back to the Future to Sin City to Netflix’s Green Eggs and Ham. However, among the most repugnant portrayals is Donald Love, real estate magnate, media entertainment mogul, and cannibal.

Love is introduced in Grand Theft Auto III as one of mute protagonist Claude’s numerous bosses, hiring Claude first to stage a jailbreak to get his tai chi teacher out of prison. (His teacher, the Old Oriental Gentleman, had been arrested by immigration authorities.) Love then orders Claude to incite a gang war between Liberty City’s Yakuza and the Columbian Cartel, with the intent of driving down real estate prices, before disappearing from the story.

Love recurs in the prequels Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories. In the latter, he runs for mayor in the aftermath of Liberty City’s mayor’s assassination at the hands of protagonist Tony Cipriani. (Chipriani? Sipriani? Kipriani? The pronunciation is always unclear.) Love pays Cipriani lavish sums of cash to campaign for him, crush the opposition, and rig the election, before being publicly outed and forced to declare bankruptcy after losing the race. Love later pays Cipriani to destroy an entire city block for him to redevelop, before picking up a deal putting him back in the black. Along the way, Cipriani procures numerous corpses for Love to eat, among them a John Doe, a reporter for the Liberty Tree, and Love’s former mentor, Avery Carrington.

Love’s failed campaign and bankruptcy are allusions to Trump’s various failed political campaigns and financial endeavors that plagued him throughout the '90s and '00s. His cannibalism is a reference to Trump’s many accusers saying he lacks respect for the dignity of the human body, though Trump has mainly been accused of sexual assault and harassment as opposed to eating human flesh. However, all three games depicting him came out before Trump’s 2016 campaign, making his portrayal hilarious (or harsh) in hindsight.

The Statue of Happiness

The Statue of Happiness from Grand Theft Auto IV is the beaming green statue greeting immigrants as they arrive to Liberty City’s shores—before inevitably being funneled into the city’s prostitution rings, drug-smuggling operations, and Alderney State Penitentiary. Although the statue’s obvious parallel is the Statue of Liberty in New York City, the Statue of Happiness’s face bears a striking resemblance to a former first lady of the United States. Furthermore, a proto-influencer who appears in The Ballad of Gay Tony critically pans the statue, saying, “I could swear that disgusting strange smile on her face reminds me of someone, too. That's the face of a woman who needs some work done, or some action, or both! I mean, she is seriously living a lie, that one, and for what? If I was married to that cold slab of stone I'd be off with any fat bird who'd take me.”

The statue’s face is an obvious reference to Hillary Clinton, whose husband did indeed go off with any lady who’d take him, among them Monica Lewinsky. Hillary Clinton, in the aftermath of the infamous San Andreas “Hot coffee” controversy (including a cut sex mini-game still present in the game’s files), threatened numerous legal actions against Rockstar Games. Among them she drafted legislation prohibiting the sale of M or AO-rated games to minors, with randomized audits of stores by the Federal Trades Commission an accompanying fine of $5,000 for selling such games to minors. The bill died in committee; nevertheless, Rockstar was not one to forgive and forget, and so used her as inspiration for an uncanny, clownish statue with a face leering at Liberty City and a backside pointed towards the Old World.

While the Statue of Liberty carries a glowing torch in real life, the Statue of Happiness carries a coffee cup, a likely reference to the San Andreas “Hot coffee” scandal. Both statues have the date of American independence inscribed on their tablet, while the Statue of Happiness’s tablet additionally includes a poem reading:

“Send us your brightest, your smartest, your most intelligent,
“Yearning to breathe free and submit to our authority,
“Watch us trick them into wiping rich people's asses,
“While we convince them it's a land of opportunity."

Jock Cranley

Jock Cranley is a never-seen-in-gameplay former actor who had a prosperous acting career years before the events of Grand Theft Auto V; protagonist Trevor Philips is mistaken for Jock by sightseeing eccentrics Nigel and Mrs. Thornhill, likely due to them both having crazed attitudes. Cranley is also a wife-killer, having murdered his wife Jolene Cranley-Evans by throwing her off a cliff to make it look like an accident after she opposed his acting dreams. Jolene's ghost appears at midnight near where, if approached, she disappears, leaving a single bloody message: “JOCK.” Unlike fellow woman-killer Peter Dreyfuss, there is no way to bring Cranley to justice.

Aside from being a wife murderer, Cranley is something much worse: A political candidate. As one of the main candidates in the San Andreas gubernatorial race, he has all the charm of Arnold Schwarzenegger (his primary inspiration) and the moral bankruptcy of Ronald Reagan. Cranley pledges to slash the state's education budget if elected and sell off all state parkland, and publicly admits to hating immigrants, gay people, law enforcement, old women, labor union members, and people with disabilities. He additionally smears his opponent, Sue Murry, to no end, portraying her as an eye-bleeding demon in his attack ads. Unlike the Governator, Cranley appears not to have won the election, as five years later he is a sports commentator for the Maze Bank Arena.

Tom Goldberg

Tom Goldberg in Grand Theft Auto IV is a partner at the law firm of Goldberg, Ligner & Shyster, a hard-hitting pitbull bulldog of a social crusader, and probably a pedophile. Having uncovered dirt about corrupt police officer Francis McReary, McReary sends Niko Bellic to assassinate Goldberg during a job interview. At the interview, Goldberg is friendly with Niko even as Niko pulls out a firearm. From there, Goldberg says, “I’m all about the Second Amendment. Guns don’t kill people, video games do.” (Niko quickly gives him the third eye.)

Goldberg is an obvious reference to Jack Thompson, a notoriously litigious lawyer whose targets over the years have included rap music, gay people, and video games. The quote, “Guns don’t kill people, video games do,” has variously been attributed to him among with many variants, though there is no evidence he ever said those exact words. Thompson took on Rockstar in numerous lawsuits throughout the 1990s and 2000s and was ultimately disbarred for his antics in 2008. Thompson furiously threatened Rockstar with further litigation when he learned a parody of himself was going to included in their next game; however he never filed a suit.

Niko doesn’t need to kill Goldberg with just a handgun; Rockstar anticipated a wide variety of ways to kill him, such as with a baseball bat, a grenade, a Molotov cocktail, or a rocket launcher. If Niko uses a knife to slit Goldberg’s throat, he can even leave the building quietly without having to flee from the police.

Lester’s Targets

One of Grand Theft Auto V’s most startling mission sequences, in retrospect, is a series of tasks given by hacktivist Lester Crest. Lester tasks protagonist Franklin Clinton with assassinating various corrupt CEOs, among them Brett Lowry, whose pharmaceutical company peddles harmful erectile dysfunction meds; tech mogul Jackson Skinner, who collects and sells his users’ data illegally; and tightfisted cheapskate Isaac Penny, an investor who plans to buy an automotive company and fire a quarter of the workforce to fatten the bottom line.

It was jarring on a recent replay to find myself being paid to assassinate morally bankrupt CEOs, after a CEO himself was gunned down in my hometown in real life, allegedly due to his insurance corporation’s morally bankrupt practices. A Steam account purportedly belonging to Luigi Mangione, the accused shooter, does not list any Grand Theft Auto games in the library. He has, however, played some Undertale, so he is at least likely familiar with the concept of pacifism.

Jay Norris

If you’ve ever found yourself fuming over an unnecessary change to Instagram or Facebook’s user interface, or Meta’s support of hate speech, then the mission “Friend Request,” from Grand Theft Auto V is the mission for you. In it, Lester Crest tasks protagonist Michael de Santa with sabotaging the launch of LifeInvader’s new mobile phone. LifeInvader is Grand Theft Auto’s equivalent of Facebook, debuting in V. It bills itself as “The reason the world never gets anything done any more.” Throughout the game, various characters post their responses to the protagonists’ antics as they shoot their way across San Andreas. (Bleeter, the equivalent of Twitter, debuted in 2009’s The Ballad of Gay Tony. As Instagram was not as prevalent in 2013 as it is today, it has no in-universe equivalent.)

LifeInvader’s CEO is Jay Norris, having founded Lifeinvader in his parents’ poolhouse in the Carraways (GTA’s equivalent of the Hamptons). Norris boasts about his company’s practices to thunderous applause: “We have put a billion people's private data in the public domain, and we have milked every penny we could in the process. And we have one of the youngest work forces in the world! An average age of only fourteen point four years. That's not just impressive. It's revolutionary!” Aside from selling its user data to corporations, LifeInvader and Norris are implied to be working with the IAA (the in-universe equivalent of the NSA and CIA) to spy on America’s public. With the eyes of a dead fish and the humanity of a slug, Norris is an obvious parody of Mark Zuckerberg, with some elements of Steve Jobs mixed in.

The most disturbing part of the mission is the mission’s finale, where it is revealed how Michael sabotaged LifeInvader’s new phone prototype while infiltrating its offices. During Norris’s demonstration of the new phone, Michael calls the prototype, triggering the explosive he planted in the device for Lester and blowing Norris’s head off. Even Michael, the cold-hearted bank robber, is momentarily shocked. LifeInvader’s stock crashes after the assassination, and does not recover for the rest of the game.

The Grand Theft Auto games are more than violence simulators; they also include biting satire of contemporary trends and public figures. Any number of fictionalized celebrities may appear in Grand Theft Auto VI, such as an HD variant of Donald Love as President of the United States; an electric car-touting mogul named Esau Stank with sixty-nine children; a podcaster named Andrew Lyle being brought up on Transylvanian-related underage sex charges who’s fled to the state of Leonida; or any number of celebrities. We’ll find out when Grand Theft Auto VI releases—if that ever happens.