Donald Trump should be the next Bond villain

The Bond franchise is over half a century old, with the scheduled release of the 25th instalment next year. It has provided audiences with a mix of international thrills, high-flying luxury advertising and, of course, an array of villains who have, in the words of Guardian writer Ryan Gilbey, tended "to personify the perceived threats or preoccupations of the era which spawns them".

Since Dr No, working for SPECTRE ("Special Executive for Counter-Intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion") appeared in the first film in 1962, antagonists like Auric Goldfinger and Oddjob, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Dr Kananga/Mr Big, Hugo Drax, Eliot Carver, Le Chifre and Tiago "Raoul Silva" Rodriguez have been larger-than-life exaggerations and personifications of the West's fears through the decades.

Whether those fears have been the nuclear terror of the Cold War-era epitomised by the villains of the early films or the spectre of international gangster capitalism, fears about the power of influence and money of an international media baron in the vein of Rupert Murdoch, or even the threat to national security posed by a computer hacker like Julian Assange - Bond baddies have been shallow caricatures of whatever keeps us up at night.

As the new Bond villain, what does Rami Malek articulate as the bogeyman of the current era? Islamic extremism may be an obvious choice, but it's said to be on the wane and you get the feeling that Bond is not the kind of franchise to risk its status as the most successful series of films in history by pissing off the Muslim world (Malek refused to play an Islamic terrorist anyway).

What, then, might be left for Bond's creators to explore?

A mad climate denialist intent on proving his point by inflicting ecological chaos on the world? An old-school unapologetic racist hellbent on revitalising the Klan or the Nazis and instituting a modern-day Holocaust? A megalomaniac billionaire using his powers as the leader of the world's biggest economy for personal gain no matter the consequences? A misogynist determined to put an end to feminism and the recognition of LGBTQI gains by ensuring that everyone who's not a straight man be ordered back into the kitchen?

Malek is not the actor to play Donald Trump convincingly (they would have picked Alec Baldwin for that) so for now the question remains - who and what will he play?

But more importantly, why aren't the Bond creators recognising the single greatest threat to the existence of their own franchise, the future of democracy and the entire planet by acknowledging that the greatest threat to the world is fat, orange, in his 70s and in need of an appearance as the ultimate and justly doomed foil for Bond?