Citizen Trump

Trump reportedly claims that Citizen Kane is his favorite movie. It isn't hard to see why.

Image: AP file photos

by Justin Rosario

Over the years I have heard various comparisons of Donald Trump to the titular character of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. It had been years since I had seen the film so the comparison didn’t really resonate. My in-laws were in town for a long weekend, however, and we ended up watching Welles’ scathing indictment of a wealthy, soulless billionaire (in today’s money). 

If you’re not familiar with Citizen Kane, firstly, shame on you! It is excellent for an 81-year-old movie. Secondly, and more importantly, it was loosely based on a real-life rich, William Randolph Hearst, one of the Rupert Murdochs of the time. Hearst was one of the men directly responsible for helping push the United States into the Spanish-American War in order to sell papers (yes, that really happened).

Kane vs Trump

Charles Foster Kane is supposed to be a tragic figure, plucked out of poverty at a young age and placed into obscene wealth. The tragic part is that he was given away by a calculating mother at that young age to be raised by an uncaring guardian who would teach him to be a Leader of Men, befitting the amount of money at his disposal.

There are a lot of holes in the story of Citizen Kane — not plot holes necessarily — just chunks of the story left unsaid. There are about 20 seconds spent on Kane’s childhood after his mother sends him away. Clearly, Kane’s childhood is absolutely miserable and it strips him of his capacity to love anyone but himself. A little more insight would have been useful given its impact on Kane’s character development.

Donald Trump’s family is not entirely dissimilar — Fred Trump, Donald’s father, was not exactly known for his warmth or humanity. By all reports he was an absolute monster who marched with the KKK, drove one of his sons to an alcoholic death, and taught Donald how to be a racist, mobbed-up, sociopath. Fred Trump’s parenting created a miserable childhood for Donald and also stripped him of his capacity to love anyone but himself.

Trump, naturally, passed this legacy onto his children. He paid people to raise his kids and when they were old enough to pay attention to (or lust over in Ivanka’s case), Trump forced them to compete for his affection. Unsurprisingly, they all seem to have turned out as damaged and pathological as he has.

Kane’s abuse of his wives isn’t all that different from Trump’s, either. Kane married women because of what he believed they could do for him. His first wife, Emily, was the niece of the President of the United States. It wasn’t spelled out in the movie but despite his wealth, Kane wasn’t part of the upper crust of society. You had to either be born or marry into America’s aristocracy, and Kane’s ambition meant he did the latter.

Trump has long both envied and despised America’s elite, desperately desiring to be acknowledged by them and utterly lacking the ability to be more than a tacky caricature of a rich man. He never tried to marry into the club but he always surrounded himself with celebrities to elevate his own status. Trump was furious when all of those celebrities lost his number after the 2016 election.

Kane’s second wife, Susan, was, for all intents and purposes, a doll, part of Kane’s collection. An uneducated woman he could feel vastly superior to while controlling her utterly. Susan’s room, seen near the end of the film when Kane smashes it in a rage, is not quite adult-sized. He had placed her in a dollhouse, and when she left him, he broke his toys.

Melania, Trump’s third wife, was a model from Eastern Europe 25 years younger than Trump. She’s had various cosmetic procedures over the years, ostensibly to please her husband who is notorious for dumping women he deems past their prime (according to Trump, when a woman reaches 35, “it’s called checkout time.”). The stories of the total lack of affection, never mind actual love, in their marriage are legion. She doesn’t even sleep in the same room as her husband, just like poor Susan.

That’s just their personal lives. It gets uglier when you get to their public personas.

Vote for me, you peasants!

Both Kane and Trump ran as populists. They spoke for the working man and positioned themselves as truth tellers to the corrupt establishment. Both turn out to be pathological liars. 

Kane, still based on Hearst, takes his newspaper and turns it into a propaganda machine. Even as Kane writes his “Declaration of Principles” in which he claims to be an honest champion of the people, it rings as hollow as Fox News’ old slogan of “Fair and Balanced.”

Kane uses his paper to stir up controversy and outrage. His agitprop helps send America to war for the explicit purpose of selling papers, much like the real-life Hearst. There is a lot of debate about how much influence Hearst and Pultizer’s (yes, that Pulitzer) propaganda competition contributed to the start of the Spanish-American War. It is inarguable, though, that they primed a public just 30 years out from the horror and devastation of the Civil War for more conflict by resorting to nativism and flat-out lying. Those lies led to thousands of dead Americans.

Similarly, Trump spent all of 2020 lying to the public about Covid for the explicit purpose of aiding his reelection bid. While Trump does not own Fox News and the right-wing media, he certainly exerts a massive amount of control over them and, accordingly, they resorted to nativism and flat-out lying that resulted in half a million Americans dying.

Trump’s favorite film?

Trump reportedly claims that Citizen Kane is his favorite movie. I find that unlikely given Trump’s disdain for reading, culture and anything remotely intelligent. Then again, my understanding is that Trump sees Kane as a hero brought down by the disloyal people around him. Specifically, his wives (of course). In other words, he doesn’t actually understand what the movie is about at all. But that’s kind of an ongoing problem with sociopathic billionaires — they see what they want to see and no one dares tell them they are wrong.

Kane does not appear to be smarter than the average person — better educated and quite charming, but that’s about it. With his vast fortune, Kane was able to indulge the very worst of himself. Those around him enabled him either out of fear or greed. He had no real friends, just sycophants. When they no longer stoked his ego or they outlived their usefulness, Kane simply tossed people aside. He held no loyalty to anyone. No love but for himself, a point the movie made over and over.

I could, almost quite literally, rewrite the last two paragraphs with Trump’s name and not change a word. Trump is not even as smart or well-educated as the fictional Kane. One of his professors called him the “dumbest goddamn student I ever had” and Trump’s track record as a businessman is famously, possibly historically, awful.  Without the money he was born into, Trump would have been, at best, a mildly successful used car salesman but more likely a convicted rapist. 

Unfortunately for the country, Trump has been showered with money his entire life. First by his father, then by the mob, then by Russia. Now he’s grabbing millions from his MAGA cult who worship him and get little in return other than a sweet dose of hate on demand. Trump is just as likely to run in 2024 as he is to take the money and run. It’s not like he actually cares about Republican voters beyond the money and adoration.

Rosebud…

In the end, Kane dies alone, surrounded by a lifetime of mindless avarice; completely abandoned, unloved, and almost entirely unmourned (Susan felt bad for him and that was kind of it). His ability to influence the world long faded, Kane spent his last years holed up in his Florida palace bitter and miserable. After all of the evil he had cast into the world, this, to me, was a happy ending. And one I fervently wish on Donald Trump.

While it would be extremely useful if he were to drop dead on live TV before the 2024 election, I wouldn’t mind if Trump spent a few years at Mar-a-Lago in a wheelchair, screaming at a world that has long stopped paying attention to him. Nothing would be worse for a malignant narcissist than to be ignored by a cult that no longer has a use for him. 

Annoyingly, unlike Kane, Trump’s evil will be with us for decades, long after he’s dead. But it would be nice to see him shoved aside and wracked with rage by his own impotence. A lot of people, including me, have had crappy childhoods and we chose not to spend our lives being monsters.

In a rare moment of self reflection Kane laments to his assistant, “You know, Mr. Bernstein, if I hadn't been very rich, I might have been a really great man.”

You know, Mr. Bernstein, if I had been very rich, I might have been a real monster, just like Donald Trump and Charles Foster Kane. Thank God I wasn’t.

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