Donald Trump as Citizen Kane

Tuesday

Last past May we learned that Donald Trump’s favorite movie is Citizen Kane. After the Republican’s National Convention last week, I’m wondering whether he isn’t actually using the film for campaign ideas.

Consider the following speech that Kane gives when he is on the verge—or so it seems at the moment—of being elected governor of New York over “Boss” Jim Gettys. With a smug little self-satisfied smile and with an enormous picture of himself towering over him, Kane says,

But here’s one promise I’ll make, and Boss Jim Gettys knows I’ll keep it. My first official act as governor of this state will be to appoint a special district attorney to arrange for the indictment, prosecution and conviction of Boss Jim W. Gettys.

In Trump’s case, the target is “crooked Hillary,” and there were references during convention speeches to Hillary in an orange jump suit, to Hillary behind bars, to Hillary “locked up.” We learn from Boss Gettys that Kane has been conducting a similar campaign:

Well, Mr. Kane, if I owned a newspaper and if I didn’t like the way somebody was doing things, some politician, say—I’d fight him with everything I had, only I wouldn’t show him in a convict suit with stripes, so his children could see the picture in the paper, or his mother.

It so turns out that Gettys has leverage over Kane, which is knowledge of his extramarital affair with Susan Alexander. That’s a difference between now and 1941, when Citizen Kane was made. Today, even three marriages aren’t enough to keep the Christian right from supporting Trump.

The movie exposes Kane’s supposed concern for the working man. While he runs as a populist, his friend Jed Leland points out that he’s really all out for himself. Here’s Leland after Kane’s defeat:

You talk about the people as though you owned them. As though they belong to you. As long as I can remember, you’ve talked about giving the people their rights as if you could make them a present of liberty, as a reward for services rendered.

And further on:

[The working man is] turning into something called organized labor. You’re not going to like that one little bit when you find out it means your workingman expects something at his right and not your gift. Charlie, when your precious underprivileged really get together—oh, boy, that’s going to add up to something bigger than your privilege, and then I don’t know what you’ll do. Sail away to a desert island, probably, and lord it over the monkeys.

And finally:

You don’t care about anything except you. You just want to persuade people that you love them so much that they ought to love you back. Only you want love on your own terms.

To which the narcissistic Kane says,

A toast, Jedediah, to love on my terms. Those are the only terms anybody ever knows, his own.

By the end of his life, Kane is hobnobbing with fascists, just as Trump is saying favorable things about autocrats like Putin and Saddam Hussein. He dies in an empty mausoleum that reflects the emptiness of his soul.