Trump Films (the Best Films)

Thread inspired by J. Hoberman’s excellent The Dream Life. (So-so thread title, I know.)

If you haven’t read it, Hoberman’s book details how Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon all left behind films that appeared during their presidencies and seemed to capture something fundamental about them. Sometimes the connections are obvious, sometimes more elliptical. Examples: The Manchurian Candidate (obvious, at least in retrospect) and the first two Bonds for Kennedy, The Alamo and The Chase (most intriguing pick, as I recall) for Johnson, too many to name for Nixon.

I’ve seen so many films the last couple years, both narrative and documentaries, where Trump is front and center. At least one of them, you’d expect that: The Final Year, covering the end of Obama’s term. Also The Fourth Estate, or at least the part I saw, about the New York Times but more about Trump.

On top of that, though, the less obvious. Jarecki’s The King is about Trump. BlacKkKlansman and Beatriz at Dinner are about Trump. Frederick Wiseman’s Jackson Heights, somewhat (even if it was never conceived as such). Won’t You Be My Neighbor? clearly has Trump on its mind towards the end. The Post mostly sticks to its story, but I remember there was at least one speech in there clearly directed at Trump.

I’m sure there’ll be lots more for the next couple of years. And that’ll be enough.

I honestly feel like Trump has ruined my life.

Idk if he’s ruining my life, but he’s definitely turning my hair gray

The first three films I mention above--The Final Year, The Fourth Estate, and The King--all treat election day 2016 as more or less the end of the world.

The documentaries are easy. I think Hoberman wrote exclusively about Hollywood films, many of them big-budget.

I assumed this thread was going to be more about these: https://www.nathanrabin.com/happy-place/?category=Trumpterpiece+Theater

Of course Get Out - “I would have voted for Obama a third time if I could”

Bar Rescue

I think Get Out is more about Obama years than it is Trump...

Black Panther maybe. People loved seeing the true and wise king return to overthrow the maniac. Killmonger wasn’t really a Trump figure but he was an agent of chaos, upending everything about wakanda that had previously seemed dependable. People like Seth Abramsom—and me in my more wearied moods—like to fantasize about Mueller sweeping in with a bevy of charges even the GOP can’t ignore and restoring some kind of normalcy to the kingdom.

the prospective father-in-law in Get Out says he wd've voted a third time for Obama

i started a thread a while back along similar lines which never really went anywhere: Fascism at 24 frames per second: onscreen representations of the Presidency in Trump's America

the purge: election year is the first one which springs to mind, although it failed to predict the actual outcome of the election

Lol that movie

doesn't have to be a good movie to be a trump movie!

in fact it's probably more appropriately trumpian if it's terrible

It predicted that one could attempt to murder his political opponent on a sacrificial altar and maintain his core supporters. It’s not like the new founding fathers had to find a new candidate.

i wonder if the grandmaster in thor: ragnarok was more trumpish on the page (image-obsessed tyrant/buffoon who wants everyone to love him) but then they cast jeff goldblum and he became, well, jeff goldblum

BG: ah, sorry about that--if I'd know your thread was out there, I wouldn't have started this one. (I searched Trump films and Trump movies, but your title must have been a few screens from the top.)

I'd count Get Out as Obama too--technically released after Trump took office (just barely), but about events that took place under Obama (and about white Obama voters). Horror films are a good place to look for this kind of thing, though: Night of the Living Dead is a great LBJ/Vietnam film, The Exorcist for Nixon, etc.

enh no worries clemenza, this one already seems more active than mine! i think i struggled to actually articulate what i wanted it to be about anyway, yours is a lot clearer

still to come is darren aronofsky's noah sequel with trump as sampson and hillary delilah

We've got Villeneuve's Baron Harkonnen coming up.

Ladybird had a subtext of nostalgia for the Bush era, if not Bush, which I think worked better now that that time seems in some sense a “simpler time,” which it might not have in 2013

It probably is helpful to make note as these things are being released, as the references will likely become more oblique and the connection less obvious as we blessedly (hopefully) move past this era down the line.

(Reminded of the recent moment when I heard Jonathan Edwards's 'Sunshine' while in the midst of reading Nixonland and, once the time period of the song's release occurred to me, wondering for the first time if the unnamed antagonist of the song might not be Nixon, which apparently is the case.)

it's just so weird to me that there's so little direct reflection of trump's presidency in tv / movies / comic books / whatever

previous presidents have been namechecked in fiction constantly (ime) but there's this lacuna where president trump should be - maybe i'm not watching or reading the right stuff, i dunno, but it feels like he's kinda absent from popular media

It takes most commercial films a year to 18 months and a half to go from shooting to general release, so we may start seeing it more.

Also given the speed at which the outrages pile up, I'm not sure most filmmakers know what to focus on, unless it's eg Spike Lee on Charlottesville.

yeah, some of the stuff that got tagged as Trump-inspired, like season 1 of the Handmaid's Tale, was produced well before anyone knew he would win

It feels like Trump is the unacknowledged center of a lot of recent entertainment. Like his effect is there and clearly felt but no one wants to acknowledge his actual existence.

(Not a movie, but MODAAK happened in a comic book.)
https://www.geek.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/trump-modok-2.jpg

bizarro gazzara is right that he is more absent than usual from popular media. Even Last Man Standing said recently that they wouldn't talk about Trump on the revive, which is ridiculous. He is too polarizing and everyone saw what happened to Roseanne.

Even though he's not always named specifically, my own sense is that there's been lots of Trump at the movies, what prompted me to start this in the first place. More so than with Obama, where I felt that absence. (I remember one writer--maybe Hoberman himself--calling Rachel Getting Married the first Obama film. I'd have to rewatch it to know what was meant by that. There was Ides of March, then Get Out near the end, and after that I draw a blank.)

That 12-18 month gap from conception to release makes something like Wiseman's In Jackson Heights tricky. I think Trump was barely president when I saw it, and with all the time Wiseman has to spend embedding himself into a situation, it was possibly even started before Trump announced. But it was impossible, for me, not to see it through the filter of Trump's anti-immigration crusade when I finally saw it.

There hasn't been much anti-Trump music reach me. I know it's out there--Christgau has something every other month. My favourite Trump song has nothing to do with Trump and came out in 2013: the Julie Ruin's "Lookout."

there's a purge tv show too

(it premieres next month)

if we're including tv in this, i'd definitely throw in the new season of UNBREAKABLE KIMMY SCHMIDT, particularly the documentary episode

also i feel like your perception, clemenza, that there's been lots of trump at the movies might be rooted in the way culture in general has become more militaristic and dour? (you could write a dissertation on the d/evolution of imagine dragons from mumford hangers-on to official soundtrack for the no doubt imminent gladiator games)

what was the Seagal (or Van Damme?) movie that Trump had cut down to just the carnage for maximum enjoyment?

so, maybe that soporific John Wick garbage?

bloodsport iirc

and it wasn’t that he cut it down, it was that he made don jr fast-forward to the good parts, which makes it funnier/sadder

Two precursors: Pain and Gain and Observe and Report

yeah, i left Pain & Gain unfinished, as i would like to leave this era

beatriz at dinner

Logan seemed to incorporate several references to the effects of the trump regime or at least what they were talking about. Clamping down on certain aspects of society etc.
I noticed at the time it was out but it's pretty early in the incumbency

the florida project wasn't bad in this regard but there aren't many. (shouldn't be a controversial statement with a degenerate product of nepotism who can't even spell simple words correctly on a regular basis in the oval office but it takes a while for people born into privilege and advantage sufficient enough post-reagan that they get to become professional gatekeepers on multi-million $$ "art" projects to catch wind of what's 'really going on' in 90% of american lives for the production of zeigeist-y films to ensue. i'll be surprised if there are many pre-midterms)

i feel like your perception that there's been lots of trump at the movies might be rooted in the way culture in general has become more militaristic and dour?

I also see a lot of documentaries, and that probably causes me to feel like there are more Trump films out there than there actually are--a lot of what I list above are documentaries.

Also given the speed at which the outrages pile up, I'm not sure most filmmakers know what to focus on

True--unless you're Spike Lee, focused on one specific thing, where the fuck do you start? Wherever you start, it'll be old news within a week. If Trump is reelected--sorry to ruin everyone's day--I suspect there'll be such numbing despair that filmmakers will either turn away entirely, or Trump will only be a metaphorical presence, embedded in nihilistic horror films and such.

I forget that J. Hoberman maintains a site. Here's his review of Get Out ("Conceived in the waning days of Barack Obama’s presidency and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, four days after Donald Trump assumed power"), also a more recent piece on "Trump the Entertainer."

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/03/13/a-real-american-horror-story-get-out/
http://j-hoberman.com/2016/11/the-entertainer-trump-loeil/

Logan seemed to incorporate several references to the effects of the trump regime or at least what they were talking about. Clamping down on certain aspects of society etc.

this was written years before and filmed before the election

but there was no predatory capitalism or "Clamping down on certain aspects of society" in the USA til the Grifter came along

also, Hugh Jackman didn't have a beard

Seemed to be all too fitting at the time I saw it anyway.

Hollywood's first explicitly Trump film will probably star Matt Damon, Jake Gyllenhaal and Jessica Chastain.

Shock and Awe isn't terrible, but boy it feels 10 years out of date (if it had been made in 2008, I think there would have been a dozen related films even then, counting documentaries). Obviously, it's a W. film first and foremost. But--I'm sure why Rob Reiner felt it would be timely now, much as with The Post--it begins with a Bill Moyers quote about a free press. To that end, it becomes partly a Trump film.

Worst line (one of the two main reporters contrasting Woodward and Bernstein with the reporting they're doing on Bush):

"They took down a president whose biggest crime was trying to cover up some dirty political tricks."

Not quite.

not film but barry (will hader) "is" "trump" (hader a wannabe actor not eastern eurotrash thrall assassin reading alec baldwin (trump)'s lines from glengarry glen ross) a la arrested development bluths = bushes sorta

Went to see How to Steal a Million tonight, part of a local rep series called "Designing the Movies." (Too tired, shouldn't have gone.) They've got Whit Stillman's Metropolitan coming up, which the series host described as a snapshot of "Trump's New York." Intriguing, but I've seen Metropolitan two or three times, and I would have said that's as far away from Trump as you can get.

Also: Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 11/9 is a Trump film. A not particularly good one.

Metropolitan is a weird case: It kind of fits in that it was shot in Trump's New York, but it's set much earlier (early '70s).

THEN DON'T...never mind.

I'm sorry clemenza, I'm not against you at all, I like you and I like your posts. I just for some reason can't stand the idea of a thread that even acknowledges him like this

I like you fine, Dan, but there are like 50 threads on ILX with Trump's name, and you seem to fixate on this one.

And then--we go through this every time--you always go on about how the thread celebrates him, like anybody who ever wrote a book about art to come out of Nazi Germany must be a Nazi himself (or some comparable example).

I don't think that! I guess I was just responding to the title 'the best films'. That set me off. I know in my heart it was sardonic, but it made me so angry

To take the heat off this thread, I'll start the Trump is really, unironically great (do not read if you hate Trump) thread

The title has been explained to you. Twice. Scroll back.

I know! It just continues to offend me

I'm sorry clemenza, I just can't stand the idea of a thread that acknowledges him like this, that proposes he is worthy of some kind of place in the history of film, vaunted or not

so I will try to ignore this thread from now on

There are films about him, and therefore he is part of film history--like Katherine Hepburn, like Pauly Shore, like anybody who's ever been in a film or been the subject of a film.

Precedent? And Then You Destroy Yourself: Nixon at the Movies

It’s spelt president but yeah

quiet lol

Lol

Hitler Bad, Films Good

It's worth saying that there was definitely parts of ILX that were fascinated (we do love to be fascinated) by Trump and his WWFisms and a lot of that has aged like milk, and then again, and again. I don't think this thread is doing that, but I can see why Dan S might react to it. Also it's been a rough decade for irony.

He is a monster, and even talking about him possibly having his own era triggers me

I mean I kind of get this, but the "well, that happened" reaction is one of the reasons that it happened again.

I'd forgotten the original framing of this thread, so my previous addition isn't really in line with that - it is kind of fascinating the cultural weight that he's had for so long though - both of the Pulitzer-winning cartoonists (Gary Trudeau and Berke Breathed) were fascinated by him in the 80s.

This came up in the Twin Peaks S3 thread, the question of whether Dr. Jacoby had turned into a MAGA guy...He does strike me as somebody who would vote for Trump, so nihilistic at this point that he doesn't even care that he's voting for somebody who embodies a lot of what he's railing about. I have to believe that survivalists are far and and away predominantly Trump voters, if they do vote.

Rewatched The Best Man, which I PVR'd a few weeks ago. Obviously, not a real Trump film, in that it was made in 1964. Henry Fonda's William Russell is Adlai Stevenson, Cliff Robertson's Joe Cantwell is an amalgam of McCarthy and Nixon, and Lee Tracy's Art Hockstader--the president, and kind of annoying--is, I don't know, part Truman and part Eisenhower.

But the reason I put it here--besides, of course, the overwhelming desire to ruin Dan S.'s day (hi, Dan! just kidding)--is the final showdown between Russell and Cantwell, after Russell withdraws and throws his delegates to the third-wheel nobody.

Cantwell: I don't understand you.
Russell: I know you don't. Because you have no sense of responsibility towards anyone or anything. That is a tragedy in a man, and a disaster in a president.

That's the part that shows up on the IMDB quote page--the very noble, high-minded sentiment that would have been embraced by people in 1964. But it's Cantwell's response that, in the Trump era, I found chilling (especially Robertson's dead-eyed delivery of it--he's very good in the film).

Cantwell: You don't understand me. You don't understand politics. You don't understand this country. The way it is and the way we are.

(The same idea shows up in Stone's Nixon, when Hopkins looks up at Kennedy's portrait and says "When they look at you, they see what they want to be. When they look at me, they see what they are.")

Not explicitly a Trump reference, but this bit about Betsy DeVos from the final season of the Adult Swim series Joe Pera Talks With You deserves a mention & due praise as an all too rare example of a character on a show (in this case, Joe's eccentric girlfriend/partner Sarah, a middle school music teacher in Marquette MI*) reacting realistically about trying to merely exist during the first Trump administration.**

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGy7ur-lfMo

*Where the DeVos family holds considerable influence, including (as mentioned in the clip) an art museum at the NMU School of Art & Design.

**Added context: The third & final season of JPTWY was filmed in 2021, but it's very explicitly set in 2019.

This came up in the Twin Peaks S3 thread, the question of whether Dr. Jacoby had turned into a MAGA guy...He does strike me as somebody who would vote for Trump, so nihilistic at this point that he doesn't even care that he's voting for somebody who embodies a lot of what he's railing about. I have to believe that survivalists are far and and away predominantly Trump voters, if they do vote.

― clemenza, Friday, February 7, 2025 1:49 PM (three weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

there's a definite branch of 60/70s science/fact people that have been smoking their own supply for so long that there's no waaaay they could be wrong! i work with one currently and they're genuinely intelligent on work-related matter until anything social/political gets involved. but yeah, Jacoby would've swung Trump.

Also, Jerry Garcia but that's a different thread.

Coupla weeks ago I watched "Maximum Overdrive", Stephen King's 1986 directorial effort, and was surprised to see the name of future Trumpwife Marla Maples at the bottom of the credits.

Geez, she was in Todd Solondz's Happiness.

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0005185/

Ha, wow

Re: Jerry, I don’t think so. He stuck pretty hard to the “don’t be a dick” ideology (setting aside his addictive behavior) and Trump’s prime directive appears to be “be a dick whenever possible.”

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/mar/30/visions-of-america-25-films-to-help-understand-the-us-today

good list. i have more to add to my watchlist.

I've mentioned Us, Joker, The Florida Project, and In Jackson Heights in connection to Trump--either on this thread or on others--and A Face in the Crowd was automatic in 2016 when people wrote pieces trying to figure out "how is this happening?"

Is Korda in Wes Anderson's The Phonecian Scheme supposed to evoke Trump? Who knows. But the possibility will give me an excuse to dodge the dedicated thread for such an irredeemably wretched film.

If anyone can point me in the direction of an irresponibly nasty Kael/Simon-like review, I'd appreciate it.

irresponsibly...

Check out Odie Henderson's review in The Boston Globe

That's pretty good, thanks--was able to read it on a Press Reader link. Only point of disagreement is Cera, who I found as unbearable as everyone else. I realized I have a book by Henderson, Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras.

Thought the first hour or so of Eddington was pretty good. Started to lose its way after that, then there was 15 minutes I'll call the Lingering and Pernicious Influence of Peckinpah and Taxi Driver, and all I could think during that was "Please fucking end." The Ironic Epilogue was okay. Trump scrolls by glancingly--would have posted here anyway, for (a few dozen) obvious reasons.

Second film in a row, though, where I've really liked Pedro Pascal (Materialists the other).

there's some discussion in the Beau Is Afraid thread

I saw that, and also Justin Chang's review. I'll single out what I thought was the best scene, early in the film: the confrontation between the sheriff and the mayor in the grocery store. I expect there'll be a great COVID film someday--don't think Eddington is it--and could see that scene being in that film.

Eddington sure has taken a turn since he had those marmalade sandwiches with the queen.

Do we need a parallel Elon Musk Films thread? I saw Superman (2025) last night, and there are things I want to say.

Feels like every blockbuster has an Elon Musk stand-in villain in recent years, I believe he even whined about this himself at one point.

Interesting idea...Hoberman's book (inspiration for this thread) focussed solely on presidents, but I guess Musk partially was, for a while.

There's no overt Trump figure in the new movie, but Superman's antagonists are steeped in the attitudes and environment (especially in the media) that Trump cultivates. The biggest administrative figure we see is the Secretary of Defense, and I didn't get a reading on him from one viewing.

Rewatched Iron Man 2 recently and got blindsided by the Musk cameo, totally forgot about it (from a pretty forgettable sequel tho).

Bugonia seems like an obvious fit to me, and someone else wrote on the Yorgos Lanthimos thread yesterday that he thought it was much better than Eddington--not mentioning Trump, but I'll infer the same connection there.

I thought it was interesting most of the way, even compelling during some of the back-and-forth between Plemons and Stone as he detailed his crazed, QAnon-level theories. (Plemon's look makes him the obvious choice for The Clayton Kershaw Story.) Strong evocation of The King of Comedy and Reseroir Dogs (tacky suits and Green Day subbing for Stealer's Wheel--not as good, and the song was almost too literal in context).

It only unravelled a bit right at the end for me. First, the surprise (I've never seen the original South Korean film) isn't much of a surprise, if was even supposed to be. And then there's the final five-minute postscript. I found it so sappy and puerile, I honestly wonder if it isn't meant as a parody of the kind of film that would have tacked on the same postscript in earnest.

Did not recognize Plemons' mom at all till I looked at credits later...not that recognizing her's easy.

I guess it's a "Trump film" insofar as it reflects the psychosis of living in the U.S. during the "Trump era," though the fact that it's a remake of a Korean film from 2003 kind of cuts against the idea that there is something unique in what it is capturing. More generally, I am resistant to the idea that the sociopolitical culture of the past decade can be reduced to Trump (as suffocating as his presence can sometimes feel). I know this thread is inspired by a J. Hoberman book, but it just feels like a narrow way to approach movies that are picking up on a lot of different cultural strands.

Not sure if you've seen the film yet, or how closely the actual script is to the original film. To hear Jesse Plemons explain himself, and then Stone's dismissal of him--and then Plemons' ridicule of her dismissal--was, for me, a perfect encapsulation of the Trump-era feedback loop. Obviously, Hoberman's book (did Arthur Penn set out to make one of the definitive LBJ films when he made The Chase? my guess is he would have been surprised to hear that...), and this thread, involve a lot of speculation. But I think the core of Hoberman's idea is sound, even if the connections are more intuitive than concrete. I love art like that; but I know many people are resistant to that kind of thing (not saying that you are in general).

I am resistant to the idea that the sociopolitical culture of the past decade can be reduced to Trump (as suffocating as his presence can sometimes feel)

Don't disagree with that--he's the end point of a long story. I'm reading Gabriel Gatehouse's The Coming Storm: A Journey Into the Heart of the Conspiracy Machine right now, and while it's a Jan. 6/QAnon/Trump book, it starts with Vince Foster. (Actually, it starts with witches in the 16th century.) So in that sense, any "Trump film" is going to have a trail extending into the past.

The best counter-example I can think of to the idea that fortuitous timing is some kind of mitigating factor: Coppola's The Conversation. Not just in terms of the subject matter--a film about wiretappers landing just as Watergate reaches its culmination (release date of April 7, 1974)--but also in the way Hackman (secretive, socially inept) and Allen Garfield (a wheeler-dealer blowhard) perfectly encapsulate opposite sides of Nixon's personality, there isn't a more definitive Nixon film. It feels that way today, and I'm sure it would have felt even more like that in 1974.

The script was written between 1967 and 1969, inspired by Blow-Up; Harry Caul was supposedly based on the lead character in Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf. Do either of those facts make it any less of a Nixon film? Not to me; for someone else, maybe.

And some stuff just seems fortuitous in retrospect because it's an early sign of something that gets expressed better later - there's a Sean Connery film, The Anderson Tapes, that would feel like a parody of the surveillance paranoia of the 70s, if it was released in 1980 - but it was released a decade earlier, before the ones most people would think of.

would love to know about people that have seen the 90s little rascals remake and their voting habits

An actual 100% Trump film: The Apprentice. Definitely worthwhile for Jeremy Strong's Roy Cohn--that has to be a dream role for an actor. Thought Maria Bakalvoa was very good too as Ivanka Trump. Sebastian Stan was smart to settle for the occasional hand gesture in lieu of slavish imitation. The big leap you have to make in watching the film is that Trump was once, as Cohn latches on to him, a relative innocent who would say things like "Isn't that illegal?" It's a big leap. (Another reason to watch: Trump dancing to Suicide's "Ghost Rider." The soundtrack's actually pretty interesting throughout, although songs will be plunked in willy-nilly--i.e., the Pet Shop Boys' "Always on My Mind" seemingly as Reagan's presidency is beginning rather than ending.)

(Ivana, not Ivanka.)