The following is chock-a-block with spoilers for “Succession” Season 2, including the finale, so proceed with caution.

ADVERTISEMENT

But, to really get what makes “Succession” such an important show for this time, it’s better to look at some of the other moments earlier in the season: Kendall soiling himself after getting wasted with another child of privilege, the infamous “boar on the floor” scene where a couple of Waystar executives scramble on the floor for a sausage, Roman being made to wear a mascot costume during a humiliating bout of management training, and the entire Roy family exposing how gauche and poorly educated they are — despite all their money — at a dinner party with the more old school wealthy family, the Pierces.

“Succession” is the perfect show for the era of Donald Trump, because it’s a show exposing the lie that is the myth of the American meritocracy. In its highly stylized and darkly hilarious way, “Succession” plugs right into the current American moment, where we’re coming to the collective realization that the wealthy class that controls so much of our politics and our society is a bee’s hive of morons who are simply coasting on luck, privilege, and a system that favors the wealthy at the expense of everyone else. And, if anything, the worst among us are actually best positioned to succeed in our deeply broken social systems.

This collective realization is most obviously being brought to us courtesy of Trump and his three children by his first wife, a group of people who, if they had finances commensurate with their merits, would be required to trade places with the homeless people Trump is fond of demonizing. Trump himself can barely read — it’s obvious he’s never read a single book in his entire life — and his three oldest children, while more adept with the written language, are so painfully dumb as a group that it stopped being funny about a year ago. Even Ivanka, supposedly the “smart” one, is such an airhead that it’s become a national embarrassment.

It’s not just the Trumps, however, that are proving on a daily basis that actual merit counts for little, especially compared to wealth and privilege, in American society. The entire Ukraine scandal provides regular reminders that the power class Trump has installed in D.C. is dumber than a cat who can’t find his way out of a paper bag. Rudy Giuliani, who was once the mayor of the largest city in the country, keeps melting down and confessing to likely criminal behavior on TV. Gordon Sondland, a hotel magnate who bought himself an ambassadorship from Trump, managed to hand a career diplomat textual evidence of his involvement in a likely criminal conspiracy. In general, Trump’s associates are (thankfully) really bad at concealing criminal evidence. Even their motives for illegal behavior are stupid — most of Trump’s trouble comes from persuing conspiracy theories that have already been debunked. Meanwhile, Trump’s powerful supporters make obnoxious fools out of themselves every time they stick their heads out in public.