“You had Trump, but now you have these Trump spawn that are trying to outdo each other for how outrageous and sexualized and gun-toting and slavishly obedient they can be,” Kripke says. Although he doesn’t name names aside from Greene, other post-Trump politicians in this vein include South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, who recently admitted to killing her own dog, and far-right Colorado Representative Lauren Boebert, who used to own Shooters’ Grill, a restaurant that encouraged its staff to carry guns. It’s easy to see why Greene would inspire Firecracker, though, as the Georgia representative’s horrifying, hateful extremism remains in a league of its own.
Of course, all of these womens’ policies and ideology are far scarier than any bizarre details about their history, but “The Boys” does love to dig into the peculiarities of its villains, as it did in a recent episode that saw Firecracker host a six-hour TV show called TruthBomb that was designed in part to take down her former child pageant rival, Starlight (Erin Moriarty). Over the course of the telethon, Firecracker sings a duet with The Deep (Chace Crawford), admits to sleeping with a teenager (a mistake she says inspired her return to religion), and platforms a pastor who uses numerology to theorize that her enemies are Satanic.