Popverse's top stories of the day

• How Disney+'s What If...? is the moonshot for the next 50 years of Marvel Studios & the MCU
• Watch: Dune: Prophecy's Desmond Hart explained: His secret identity, his past, and his possible future [SPOILERS]
• Dune: Prophecy's Desmond Hart explained: His secret identity, his past, and his possible future [SPOILERS]

The President of the United States is often referred to as the most powerful man in the world (mainly because we sadly lack a Superman to help clean things up for us), but what if he had even more power? Like, I don't know, the power to have his enemies killed with the stroke of a pen? That kind of power is reserved for the owner of a Death Note... which nearly made it into the hands of - wait for it - Donald Trump.

If you’re a fan of the original Death Note anime and manga, you might have wondered how you missed seeing Donald Trump with a Shinigami notebook. That's because it comes from the 2020 one-shot, The a-Kira Story. When a Death Note is offered up in an online auction, President Trump successfully bids for it and wins. However, a new rule states that if he accepts the notebook in these circumstances, he will die.

The President in question is never explicitly named, but it came out in 2020 and just look at the way they drew him in the image above. That ridiculous hair. That jowly scowl. That perpetually puckered mouth. That can be no one but Donald Trump. The chapter doesn’t exactly paint the former President in a positive light. He initially bought the Death Note under the guise of keeping the United States safe. Instead, he is confronted by a new rule regarding the notebook; anyone who buys the Death Note will die upon receiving it.

In Tsugumi Ohba’s opinion, that isn’t a sacrifice Donald Trump would be willing to make. Instead, he goes out and tells an easily disproven and very public lie by telling the world that he has the Death Note but refuses to use it in the hopes it will boost his reputation.

So as scary as the upcoming election feels, we can at least rest easy knowing that there is no way a US President actually has a Death Note (even in comics).

Each week, Popverse's resident anime expert Trent Cannon runs down the latest and, dare we say "greatest," in anime and manga in Popverse Jump. Some recent columns have included... 

• Why the finales of My Hero Academia, Jujutsu Kaisen, and One Piece feel like the end of an era in manga
• Why is One Piece more popular now that the anime is 25 years old? We asked around and found out
• Dan Da Dan is weird, profoundly inappropriate, and the perfect anime this season
• Why One Piece's Monkey D. Luffy is the perfect anime hero for the dark times ahead
• 40 years after its debut, Dragon Ball is a pop culture force like few others
• Dan Da Dan's most emotionally devastating sequence proves that sometimes words aren't necessary
• Gnosia, the "Among Us meets Everything Everywhere All at Once" visual novel is getting an anime adaptation that needs to be as weird as possible
• Assassination Classroom is a Shonen anime well worth revisiting, ten years on
• Sony is making big moves to own the anime industry by buying Kadokawa, publisher of Oshi no Ko, Sword Art Online, and Konosuba