Badthe movie musical based on the beloved Broadway show of the same name is one of the year’s biggest hits, opening at No. 1 in North America this weekend and already generating some early Oscar buzz. The audience came in ready to love Bad‘s famous power ballads and girl power core, but one aspect of the story seems to have taken people by surprise: its slightly clumsy but remarkably enduring political allegory.

“I noticed Elphaba looks like Kamala Harris and the wizard looks like Donald Trump,” one fan wrote on Reddit. “A charismatic leader pointing out to a community that this woman is evil just because she stands up for a marginalized group of people in society, how can that be (political)?” director John M. Chu joked.

For a crazy, spectacular show about friendship and talking animals, Bad actually invites political interpretations. The allegory can both provoke eye rolls and still feel eerily prescient more than twenty years after its stage debut.

Bad the musical is based on the 1995 novel of the same name by Gregory Maguire, an anti-fascist treatise in which the magician becomes a Hitler-like despot. The musical wouldn’t go that far when it debuted on Broadway in 2003, but it was a hit with the administration of George W. Bush, which had only months earlier ordered the invasion of Iraq.

In Badturns out the Wizard disenfranchises the talking animals of Oz because in order to unite the rest of the land, he must give them a common enemy. Yet the Wizard’s – and later Elphaba’s – persecution of animals is rooted in a lie, just as Bush falsely claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the invasion.

Some references are blatantly obvious: when Dorothy’s house falls to the Wicked Witch of the East, Glinda repeats the Bush administration’s favorite euphemism in the Iraq War by describing it as a “regime change.” “Is someone a crusader or a ruthless invader?” sings The Wizard, referencing Bush’s infamous description of the invasion of Iraq as a crusade. “It’s all in which the label can continue to exist!”

The critics’ reactions were mixed. “As a parable of fascism and freedom, Bad it overplays its hand so much that it severely dilutes its ability to disrupt,” Ben Brantley declared in the New York Times in 2003, adding that the show “carries its political heart as if it were a slogan button.”

Meanwhile, author Daniel Handler, although surprised by such a dark interpretation of sunny and magical Oz, found himself drawn to the idea. “It’s hard not to wonder if the witch, a difficult figure transformed by hard times, isn’t exactly what our stage needs,” Handler also wrote in the New York Times that same year. “And perhaps, the show suggests, ‘wicked’ is what the W stands for” in George W. Bush.”

While singing the same lyrics today, the Wizard suggests not Bush but Trump: a leader who consolidates his power by scapegoating marginalized groups and slowly but surely denying them their rights. Meanwhile, the difference in strategy between the incendiary progressive Elphaba and the conciliatory liberal Glinda could hit Democrats particularly hard amid their post-election recriminations.

Both Elphaba and Glinda worship the Wizard and dream of working at his right hand. When Elphaba learns of the plight of the animals of Oz, she heads straight to the Emerald City to enlist his help, certain that if he hears that the animals are being targeted, he will come to their aid. The wizard suggests that he could do this if Elphaba uses her magic as part of his government, but when she discovers that it is the wizard behind the attacks, she disowns him, much to the dismay of the practical Glinda.

“I hope you’re happy with the way you hurt your cause forever,” Glinda sings. After all, Elphaba alienates a potentially powerful ally. “I hope you are proud, how you would submit to submission to fuel your own ambition,” replies Elphaba, who has decided she will not work with someone who uses his power to hurt Oz’s talking animal citizens. Could you read this moment as an allegory about how Democrats should handle trans issues in the future? Sure it sounds like a stretch, but it’s not as far-fetched as you might imagine.

In a way it’s strange to think that Bad‘s political message feels so prescient, as most Bad fans agree that the political subplot is the weakest part of the musical. Bad lives and breathes through the fraught friendship between its two protagonists, not through its dueling visions of activism.

Yet it is also in another sense Bad was born as an allegory of American politics. It can’t really be anything else. That’s what the Oz stories are for.

Most children’s fantasy classics from the English-speaking world are in English: think of Peter Pan, Narnia, The sword in the stoneand Harry Potter. They tend to think about what it means to be a good king, about wild magical beasts lurking in the forest, about being an island nation.

The Wizard of Ozhowever, is an American fantasy. A map of Oz, which is shaped like a rectangle with the long side horizontal, is a simplified map of America, as if drawn by a child: unimaginably vast, covering the habitable entirety of a continent from east to west. (Oz is bordered by toxic deserts rather than oceans.) It is a land where farmers grow fields of corn and wheat and orchards of apples; where industrialists build huge, beautiful cities; where the west is full of rough and unsettled country. And it’s a country ruled by a crook who lies to the people he rules.

When L. Frank Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900, he imagined the Wizard of Oz as someone who was well-intentioned, but also ineffective and a bit dishonest. “I’m a very good man – just a bad wizard,” the Wizard explains to Dorothy in the 1939 film. Yet the Wizard can work as a remarkably cynical metaphor for all the broken promises of the American dream. The Wizard is a man who promises you everything, but gives you nothing, and then he will tell you that the answer was within you all along.

It is this metaphor that gives The Wizthe all-black reinterpretation of The Wizard of Oz from the 1970s, its surprisingly sharp bite. In The WizDorothy and her friends are black people who have been promised certain basic rights by a government that never intends to pay. (Bad gestures to a similar critique by casting black actress Cynthia Erivo as the racially different, green-skinned Elphaba.)

“Public office is the last refuge of the incompetent,” the Scarecrow mocks The Wizafter learning that the Wizard is a washed-up politician from Atlantic City. “Incompetent!” the Wiz crows. “That’s me!”

Badis not a reinvention of it The Wizard of Oz even if it is revisionist history. As such, one is fundamentally skeptical of authority figures – much more so than Baum, who eventually replaced the wizard with the virtuous and near-infallible fairy queen Ozma.

The premise of any story that tells you that the villains of your youth are misunderstood is that the storytellers lied to you. In Badthe sorcerer is not only a very bad sorcerer, but also a very bad man. He lies maliciously and with a strategic purpose.

Elphaba and Glinda become just two dreamers who, like Dorothy and her friends, travel to the Emerald City because they want the Wizard to grant them their heart’s desire: protection for the talking animals of Oz as they face increasing persecution.

Yet the Wizard they encounter is not only unable to grant them such a request, but even plans to pervert it, using their innocent wishes to commit more violence. He plans to take Elphaba under his wing and have her do magic on his behalf so that he can more thoroughly prosecute the sentient animals he wants to round up and spy on the rest of his citizens more efficiently.

Ultimately, the Wizard names Elphaba the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good Witch of the North, because he can trust Glinda to maintain friendly relations with his government, while Elphaba refuses. He is America ruled not by a crook, but by a strongman – an authoritarian dictator.

This is the kind of metaphor that a revisionist history can offer you, and part of why Bad feels so weirdly urgent right now. In a subversion of a childhood classic, no authority figure can be trusted – and that’s what makes these stories so appealing when people you don’t trust have found their way into positions of power.