The identity of Donald Trump through the lenses of cinema and TV series

Needless to say, the only Donald Trump we would ever have wanted to deal with was the character welcoming a lost boy wandering through the depths of New York City in the Trump Tower in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. A brief 1992 cameo for the real estate mogul who, in the ‘90s, began facing his first financial troubles. It would have been nice to leave him there, remembered as a wealthy old man who amused himself by appearing on TV and in newspapers, even landing in a sequel to one of cinema’s pop culture classics. His presidential race also had a sequel, complete with a coup attempt in his name and another victory that left the world with a bitter taste. Since sequels are notoriously never as good as the originals, there is a risk that Trump’s second term, after being elected in 2017, could be even worse than the first, and there might be little that movies or series could invent to rationalize what the population and the surrounding world will face. The U.S., in particular, had already tried to heal an open wound after the entrepreneur’s four years in the Oval Office, while in the past year, with the 2024 elections approaching, it has tried to depict the darkest scenarios to exorcise what the future might hold. Civil War captures precisely this: the absolutization of red and blue America clashing without even following clear political lines anymore.

In a central scene of Civil War, a group of soldiers fire at a house where someone is holding them at gunpoint in return. Who the enemy is in this case isn’t even clear, just as the reasons behind the contemporary civil war in the film seem increasingly uncertain. The image of the President, played by Nick Offerman, is also the perfect portrayal of a politician with grandiose delusions, reminiscent of Donald Trump’s own behavior. Alex Garland’s work is the starkest yet clearest portrayal of what could happen if one allowed oneself to drift along in the administrative breakdown of a divided and expansive reality like the United States. It’s also a study of the influence of images on the popular mind. So shocking, in fact, that the most powerful image of 2024, the film’s release year, is that of Donald Trump with a bleeding ear and raised arm after surviving an attack—almost in line with Civil War’s main argument. Garland’s work looks forward, studying the U.S. future, while cinema has also looked back to understand the first seeds of a politics that marginalizes minorities and puts individual freedoms at risk. Two vivid examples are BlacKkKlansman (2018), where Spike Lee recreates a plot by an intelligence department in which a white man, assisted by an African American officer, infiltrates a Ku Klux Klan circle in the early ‘70s. Similarly, The Order (2024) by Justin Kurzel tells the story of an FBI agent who, in 1983, sought to uncover criminals behind a series of thefts and robberies linked to far-right extremists whose white supremacist beliefs align with those of the people who stormed the Capitol in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021 (an event referenced openly at the film’s end before the credits).

However, it was in television that anxieties and fears surrounding Trump’s candidacy and victory most visibly surfaced. In the first episode of American Horror Story: Cult, released in 2017, the character played by Sarah Paulson has a full-blown panic attack while watching the tycoon’s victory on TV, terrified of what life would become for her same-sex family—a scene that resurfaced on social media after the candidate’s second victory. Looking back at past television, we might wonder if the actors of The Nanny, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and Sex and the City could have imagined that the man who made cameos on their sets would eventually reside in the White House. Yet, it was television in the ‘90s that welcomed him as he sought ways to resolve his financial woes, eventually agreeing to a reality show that would later inspire a film about his early days.

The Apprentice by Ali Abbasi, released in Italy last October, unpacks the lessons Trump learned from his mentor, attorney Roy Cohn: attack, always deny, and never admit defeat. Sound familiar? A work that deconstructs the icon, revealing the man, taking us back to when he was just a young man and showing how things could have turned out differently. So, what should we expect from the next four years? Meanwhile, the Republican candidate’s campaign has already given us a documentary titled Vindicating Trump, directed by right-wing activist and conspiracy theorist Dinesh D’Souza along with Bruce Schooley. Among various endorsements for Kamala Harris, there was also the appearance of the Democratic representative herself on a historic show like SNL. While uncertainty looms, one hope remains: in these moments, narratives tend to find new, powerful drives that yield creativity born from crises. These dark times may one day offer us cult classics like All the President's Men (1976).