Citizen Trump didn't come out of nowhere. He's a character type with a long history in America—the narcissistic, acquisitive magnate who, in the words of Orson Welles, is "interested in imposing his will" on the country in what is, in the end, just another act of self-aggrandizement. That was Welles' description of Charles Foster Kane, the protagonist in his classic Citizen Kane,[1] which Trump identified back in 1992 as his "all-time favorite movie," an endorsement he repeated in his interview[2] with Megyn Kelly in May. Early in the movie, the character Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotten), who was once Kane's best friend, sums him up as follows: "I don't suppose anybody ever had so many opinions. But he never believed in anything except Charlie Kane. He never had a conviction except Charlie Kane in his life."
I wonder if anyone has ever delivered a better description of Donald Trump himself. As New York Times columnist David Brooks writes, Trump's "vast narcissism[3] makes him a closed fortress." Or, as Trump[4] has said, speaking of himself in the third person, "Love him or hate him, Trump is a man who is certain about what he wants and sets out to get it, no holds barred."
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Trump may not be introspective enough to recognize himself in the character of Kane, but the movie itself was Welles' attempt to explain something real and somewhat worrisome in America—what Alexis de Tocqueville once described as a fundamental American shallowness: "As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?" Tocqueville wrote in a letter to a friend in 1831.
The film was based on the life of another strident and megalomaniacal magnate, William Randolph Hearst, and it told the sad story of the corrupting influence of vast wealth. Welles later said he meant it as a cautionary tale about this American type. "I must admit that it was intended consciously as a sort of social document, as an attack on the acquisitive society—and indeed on acquisition in general," Welles told the BBC in 1960. Instead, today, Citizen Kane seemingly has become a model for the presumptive Republican nominee for president. And Trump today stands much closer to the presidency than Kane ever did in fiction—or Hearst in real life.
Like Trump, Hearst, who ran the nation's biggest newspaper chain during the first decades of the 20th century, inherited some of his fortune from his father. Hearst's papers promoted war[5] with Spain after an explosion destroyed the U.S. Navy ship Maine in 1898 in Havana Harbor. The rallying cry went forth: "Remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain!" An investigation[6] later revealed that the Maine probably blew up because of a fi re that ignited its ammunition, rather than because of a Spanish mine. Hearst's sometimes shoddy journalistic practices inspired political cartoonist William Rogers to depict him as "The Wizard of Ooze[7]."
Hearst actually began as a progressive and ran for governor of New York, with the White House as seemingly the next step. But his political career failed, and he became a reactionary and even flirted with fascism, while increasingly retreating into his vast castle, like his cinematic counterpart, Charlie Kane.
Everything just said about Hearst can also be said about the fictional Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane—although many other things in the film are fictional.
As James Naremore writes in the introduction to his edited collection of articles on the movie, Orson Welles's Citizen Kane[8]: "Kane tells us something about American politics, and its central images keep returning in the national life: Richard Nixon secluding himself at San Clemente[9], or Howard Hughes, just before his death, living in a Bahamas retreat he called the 'Hotel Xanadu.' But even though
Indeed, there are actually at least two basic types of the ultrarich—those who eventually use their wealth and power to advance philanthropic causes, and those who accumulate wealth for its own sake. Andrew Carnegie helped build free Carnegie libraries[10] throughout the country, and through the charitable Carnegie Corporation[11], to which he gave most of his wealth, shared what he called his "gospel[12]" that "the best means of benefiting the community is to place within its reach the ladders upon which the aspiring can rise." Andrew Mellon[13] gave the nation the National Gallery of Art[14] in Washington, D.C.—the grand building itself, his massive art collection and a generous supporting endowment. And Mellon insisted that his name not be used for the National Gallery. It's impossible to imagine Trump doing something like that. Bill and Melinda Gates, through the Gates Foundation[15], represent contemporary ultrarich philanthropists.
In contrast, William Randolph Hearst accumulated for himself, was stridently anti-labor[16] and had few redeeming qualities, as detailed in David Nasaw's acclaimed biography, The Chief.[17] Hearst, Kane and Trump are in this category of the ultra-rich—the Gordon Gekko "greed is good" variety.
As Robert Carringer writes in The Making of Citizen Kane[18], Welles ruthlessly parodied Hearst's materialistic life at his Castle, which in its time was the Mar-a-Lago[19] of the West Coast. Kane was an innovative film, noted for its expressionistic deep-focus cinematography by Gregg Toland, its moody musical score by Bernard Herrmann, its Oscar-winning screenplay[20] that Welles co-authored with Herman Mankiewicz and detailed production designs by Perry Ferguson—all of which are combined into a cinematic vision that communicates a political viewpoint.
"Legendary was the Xanadu where Kublai Khan decreed his stately pleasure dome," the bombastic parody newsreel in Citizen Kane begins. "Today, almost as legendary, is Florida's Xanadu, world's largest private pleasure playground. Here on the deserts of the Gulf Coast a private mountain was commissioned and successfully built. One hundred thousand trees, 20,000 tons of marble are the ingredients of Xanadu's mountain. … The loot of the world."
Like Mar-a-Lago—the vast estate built by Hearst contemporary Marjorie Merriweather Post in the 1920s and later bought by Trump—Xanadu's massive scale gives it a surreal quality. In one scene, Kane stands before an oversize fireplace[21] that recalls a medieval hellmouth[22]. As Carringer writes, "The dramatic result is to create one of the most startling and psychologic ally upsetting effects in the entire film." Near the end of his life, Kane is in a self-made hell of excessive ego, ambition and acquisition that Welles later described this way: "I wished to make a picture which might be called a 'failure story.' … My story was not, therefore, about how a man gets money, but what he does with his money—not when he gets old—but throughout his entire career." Today, taking a tour of Hearst Castle is like looking inside of part of the mind of Hearst—or that of a Kane or a Trump.
Trump's palatial homes are also famously jaw-dropping. Most have gold plating that tries to evoke the divine right of kings embodied in palaces such as Versailles[23]. One Trump penthouse[24] is decorated in a Greco-Baroque style, complete with golden capitals on the columns and elaborately painted ceilings. T rump's 757[25] has 24-karat gold plating on the safety belts, call buttons, as well as in the bathroom sink and faucets in his airborne suite.
In the movie, what Leland describes as Kane's lack of belief in anything but himself was based in part on what Welles and Mankiewicz, who had been a guest at Hearst Castle, observed about the newspaper tycoon. As David Nasaw writes of Hearst, "While the ideological positions—and concrete policies—he proposed shifted dramatically in the course of the century, the fervor and frequency with which he espoused his positions did not."
Donald Trump has had a similar shifting of positions[26]. As Kathleen Parker[27] has written, the frequency with which Trump offers promises that are impossible to achieve makes it clear that there's one central belief that overrides all others, just as it did for the fictional-but-somehow-real Cha rles Foster Kane. "By unanimous assent," she writes, "he believes in The Donald." In playing out his narcissism on the national stage, Trump is making Citizen Kane, an old, black-and-white movie seen mainly by movie buffs, almost into a prophesy.
In the film's newsreel, Kane meets Adolf Hitler, which is something that Hearst actually did. Hearst's papers even paid Hitler's close ally, Hermann Göring, to write articles during the 1930s. In another parallel, Trump has infamously praised[28] Russian leader Vladimir Putin, saying, "I've always felt fine about Putin. I think that he's a strong leader."
In Kane's campaign he calls his opponent dishonest and villainizes him, which is also similar to Trump's technique. As Kane says at his campaign rally, he's going "to point out and make public the dishonesty, the downright villainy of Boss Jim W. Gettys' political machine, now in complete control of the government. ... Every independent poll shows that I'll be elected." Trump has called Hillary Clinton "Crooked Hillary," and had boasted at times, such as in a rally in St. Louis in March, that: "We're leading in every single poll."
Finally, Kane eventually says to Leland something that has become a tagline for Donald Trump: "You're fired!"
But Trump's self-identification with Kane goes further than that. When interviewed for a program about famous people on their favorite movies, Trump[29] said, "I think you learn in Citizen Kane that maybe wealth isn't everything. Because he had the wealth, but he didn't have the happiness. The table getting larger, and larger, and larger, with he and his wife getting further and further apart as he got wealthier and wealthier—perhaps I can understand that. ... In real life, I do believe that wealth does in fact isolate you from other people." Trump concluded that "It was a great rise in Citizen Kane. And there was a modest fall."
That last line, however, suggests that Trump didn't really understand the point of Citizen Kane, which was that Kane's rise, too, was somewhat delusional and, in the end, a failure. And Trump clearly believes that, unlike Kane, he will have a great rise without any corresponding fall at all—not even a modest one.
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References
- ^ Citizen Kane, (www.youtube.com)
- ^ repeated in his interview (www.politico.com)
- ^ vast narcissism (www.nytimes.com)
- ^ Trump (boingboing.net)
- ^ promoted war (www.pbs.org)
- ^ investigation (historymatters.gmu.edu)
- ^ The Wizard of Ooze (en.wikipedia.org)
- ^ Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (amzn.com)
- ^ San Clemente (si.wsj.net)
- ^ Carnegie libraries (www.npr.org)
- ^ Carnegie Corporation (www.carnegie.org)
- ^ gospel (www.swarthmore.edu)
- ^ Andrew Mellon (www.nga.gov)
- ^ National Gallery of Art (www.nga.gov)
- ^ Gates Foundation (www.gatesfoundation.org)
- ^ anti-labor (library.csun.edu)
- ^ The Chief. (amzn.com)
- ^ The Making of Citizen Kane (amzn.com)
- ^ Mar-a-Lago (www.maralagoclub.com)
- ^ screenplay (www.aellea.com)
- ^ oversize fireplace (flickminute.com)
- ^ medieval hellmouth (www.medievalist s.net)
- ^ Versailles (en.wikipedia.org)
- ^ penthouse (media.gettyimages.com)
- ^ 757 (www.youtube.com)
- ^ shifting of positions (www.politico.com)
- ^ Kathleen Parker (www.washingtonpost.com)
- ^ praised (www.politico.com)
- ^ Trump (www.youtube.com)
- ^ Presidential Temples (amzn.com)
- ^ Show Comments (www.politico.com)
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