SANTA MONICA — As the year ends, much of the government is AWOL by presidential pique and my search for storied characters as bad as Donald Trump is on. It's not easy to find a match.

Trump is orchestrating a Christmas crisis in the White House over building a border wall that costs $6 billion — which Congress will not fund. Isolated and angry in his bunker, he is that extraordinary creature: A president waging a kind of war on American democracy — on the falling stock market and thousands of government employees, who will work for nothing until the government opens again.

The Pentagon is also in disarray, with the only good man in the Cabinet, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, resigning in protest at Trump's sloppy Syria withdrawal. Our friends and NATO allies are staring aghast across the Atlantic at us.

Listen, you want your children to hear something that explains Trump as the master of schadenfreude, the only president who seems to enjoys inflicting pain on people. You're tempted by Scrooge in "A Christmas Carol," in Charles Dickens' literary lore, but it's not quite right to choose an English classic. Sleepless, evil Macbeth also comes close, with his famous line that life is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.

But by George, I came up with an American archetype — the man who almost breaks the spirit of George Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart in "It's a Wonderful Life." Four hundred people filled the Aero Theatre here, on Montana Avenue, to travel back to 1946. This is my hometown.

Oh, the bright happy Charleston dancing and the light, free spirits on screen made me wish for those days, of depression and wartime under presidents who inspired confidence and comfort — the cheery Franklin Delano Roosevelt, succeeded by Harry S. Truman in 1945.

The black-and-white Americana masterpiece casts a dark shadow of a villain, the richest, meanest man in Bedford Falls. Old Mr. Potter was a robber baron of real estate, owning slum real estate that he did nothing to improve. The Trump family company owned swaths of public housing decades ago, when the president and his father, Fred, ran it together. Their business practices were suspect; the company was accused of racial discrimination and predatory rent raises.

If only it were fiction.

In the classic Christmas movie, the miserly Mr. Potter's prosperity was not enough. He wants to crush his only business rival, young and handsome George. He kept his saving and loan company afloat with generous terms for his customers. When George refuses an offer to work for Mr. Potter, he kept his conscience clear, but the husband and father was in for some serious revenge and Trump-style schadenfreude.

Suddenly, the Frank Capra movie loses its charmed innocence. The famed director shows how close George Bailey comes to suicide, driven to it by Mr. Potter. The point is that Mr. Potter won't rest until he ruins good-natured George and re-names the town after himself. Like Trump, he has no friends. The lust to achieve his aims reveals a ruthless and even unscrupulous streak. A will to win at all costs. Imagine that.

In anxious times that teeter on the edge of economic and foreign policy troubles, it sure helps to have a president with a steady head, heart and hand. That's one moral of the story.

Jimmy Stewart represented the winning side of the American character in George Bailey: open, fair and kind. His bitter nemesis, Mr. Potter, is a dead ringer for the American character that paces the halls of the White House, watching the right's talk shows, raging at his enemies list. The military, the Congress, the press, NATO — he'll show them.

He'll show us — unless we show him. The best vs. the worst in the American character are in a mighty clash right now. As the movie's refreshing wisdom shows, the best can prevail — even after coming close to the edge.

Merry Christmas to all.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit creators.com.