Trump's First Term in Film

The 2024 Election Cycle has come and gone, and we’re staring down the barrel of another Trump presidency. I’m privileged to be in a position that’s only disappointed by this result; I know many people are more distressed. The stakes of this stuff are legit, so if even a mild engagement with Trump-adjacent subject matter is too much, I understand. That said, I think it’s worthwhile to remember his first term on the verge of a second. Not the near-constant embarrassing headlines, nor the unstable revolving door of high-visibility positions (remember Jeff Sessions?), nor even the long regressive tail of three Trump-appointed conservative Supreme Justices. I’m also not talking about 2020, one of the worst years of my lifetime, with the appalling death tolls, pushback against medicine, Black Lives Matter protests, economic recession, all of which culminated in a coup attempt on January 6th on the back of still-unfounded, Trump-sponsored conspiracy theories.

No, I’m talking about trying to remember what those 4-ish years felt like culturally. When the only president to be impeached twice and who has since racked up 34 felony convictions for stealing money from his business to pay a porn star was in power, culture was fraught. Movies have a way of capturing the moment in which they were made and, in some cases, grow more resonant with time. The best movies do this while telling uniquely engaging stories that are capable of existing without their subtext, but they always have it. And in our age of cultural ephemerality, where things go viral and then disappear – even “going viral” already feels out of date – movies have a way of living on. In building this list, I’m not looking for the movie that felt “the most 2018” in its depictions of, say, smartphones or use of special effects, I’m looking for movies that capture, reflect and possibly explain what was in the air during those turbulent four years.

The Best Picture Winners (2017 – 2021). The Oscars, who I often disagree with, are worth looking at in this examination. Best Picture winners are nominally a result of a large body voting for something meaningful. With that in mind, it’s possible to view Moonlight’s win as a direct response to Trump’s election, since it features a poor, black, gay protagonist trying to reckon with his identity. The following year, The Shape of Water also featured a romance that functions as a metaphor for interracial, gay, or any other form of love that conservatives might seek to ban. In 2018, the Academy embraced a very simple (read: dull and uncomplicated) story of interracial friendship in Green Book. In 2019, they made quite a pivot by embracing the very bracing and thrilling Korean thriller about social class, Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite. Then, in 2020, COVID-19 ravaged the world forcing protracted periods of quarantine; the meditative and reflective Nomadland captured a spirit of isolation a lot of people were feeling, and Oscar glory as well.

“Nasty Women.” In his campaign, Donald Trump drew a lot of ire for the way he talked about women. Though he’s recently promised to “protect them even if they don’t want him to”, he appointed 3 Supreme Court Justices during his term who overturned Roe V. Wade in 2022, a moment that felt like the bitter climax of an era with misogyny trickling down from on high. The movies kept pace with this attitude every step of the way.

Films like Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Little Women, The Handmaiden, and The Last Duel are all set in periods and places where society was rigged against women economically through limited career opportunities and arranged marriages, but the non-Little Women films also explore how men directly controlled women’s bodies through sexual means, suppressing rape victims, and forcing a heterosexual identity. Portrait of a Lady on Fire and The Handmaiden feature their female characters rebelling against their male controllers indirectly through expressing their true sexual selves and sometimes directly through violence (Handmaiden is QUITE the watch). Naturally, these films used the times and places of their settings to say something about the here and now – is there that much difference between the sham trial in The Last Duel, where a government official claims that pregnancy could never result from rape, and the way that some of our officials speak about bodily autonomy today? If you’re looking for a story truly set here and now, I’d recommend Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always which centers on a teenaged girl traveling from her home in Trump country to get an abortion. It remains a striking movie made in a moment, about a moment, that communicates its perspective gracefully by just following two characters on a journey.

A key blockbuster from this era is Star Wars VIII: The Last Jedi, which is the best of Disney’s entries in the galaxy far, far away in how it confronts, explores, and upends the tropes of the franchise. This film was subject to a very toxic discourse aimed largely at its female lead Rey (Daisy Ridley), a supporting character named Rose (Kelly Marie Tran), and the suggestion that Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), was less than infallible. It was frustrating to see the toxicity of the public discourse infect a film series I care so much about, and the backlash was so strong that Lucasfilm still hasn’t recovered.

The Watchlist: Portrait of a Lady on Fire | Little Women (2019) | The Handmaiden | The Last Duel | Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always | Star Wars VIII: The Last Jedi

“The American Dream is Dead.” This declaration by Trump represented a key aspect of both his campaigns, which was appealing directly to a mostly-white-lower-to-working-class voting bloc who felt they weren’t seen by Obama’s administration. Trump, twice now, was able to convert their genuine economic concerns into a cultural rage wrapped around the idea of being passed over for consideration. While the reality of that is debatable, the decrease of social mobility isn’t.

Their plight wasn’t completely invisible to Hollywood, however, though the movies named a few different culprits “woke liberals.” Hell or High Water is an excellent and lean heist film about two West Texan brothers looking to steal enough money to buy their mother’s farm out of bank ownership; multiple characters in the movie even lay the blame of their surrounding’s destitution directly at the feet of big banks, elevating the brothers’ cause into the realm of folk heroism. For a true story, I’d recommend the underseen Dark Waters, a retelling of a legal case against DuPont for dumping chemicals into the water of a small rural town. Part of the reason I named First Cow among the best movies of the 2020s so far was its evergreen yet timely exploration of how preexisting wealth snuffs out the American Dream routinely. Those who insist anyone can and should be pulling themselves up by their bootstraps ought to give this a watch (everyone should).

And then there were a couple of movies that captured the extreme emotions in the air. Joker really wants to be about something, and while it’s ultimately an empty exercise, is a fascinating relic of the era of superhero blockbusters begging to be taken seriously by the critical establishment, as well as vocal reception by a key demographic to Trump: the incel. Uncut Gems is as anxious a movie watching experience as you’ll find, but also reflects Trump’s own attitude of trying to manifest success in the face of certain doom – sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. The Irishman was noted for being an elegiac evocation of bitterness and regret (or its absence), but the movie’s portrayal of Jimmy Hoffa as both a vocal figurehead of America’s unions while secretly gambling with their collective pensions is quite the reflection of what Trump delivers to those who support him most. For my money, there’s little that could top the bleak incisiveness of both First Reformed and You Were Never Really Here. The first powerfully captures a preacher struggling with a crisis of faith amidst increased concerns of global warming and what appears to be decay of life in his small town in the heartland. The latter is the REAL Joaquin ode to Taxi Driver, a deeply cynical look at a troubled veteran attempting to find meaning in his empty life through violence, which the film refuses to show us; all we’re treated to is bloody aftermath.

The Watchlist: Hell or High Water | You Were Never Really Here | The Irishman | Uncut Gems | First Cow | Joker | First Reformed | Dark Waters

“Why Don’t They Go Back?” After making political headlines with his fruitless attempts to prove that President Obama wasn’t born an American, Trump brought the same kind of white-forward nativism to his campaign in 2016, and then again in 2024 (don’t forget the baseless claims of what immigrants in Springfield, OH were eating). In 2016, he was more vocally embraced by white supremacists, and their emboldened attitude came to quite the boiling point in places like Charlottesville; in 2024, they thankfully feel less emboldened, but they haven’t gone anywhere. Movies about race relations in America have been a staple of Hollywood for ages, but under Trump they took on a new valence.

In terms of capturing the racial tension in the air around black Americans, the cozy and blinded Green Book feels quite out of touch. Spike Lee naturally rose directly to the occasion. He directly confronts Trump (and a few other things) in both of his excellent films from this era, BlacKkKlansman and Da 5 Bloods. Jordan Peele preempted a lot of the visible racial tensions by examining people who “would have voted for Obama three times” in his highly influential Get Out. Steve McQueen also smartly wove racial tension into the fabric of his underseen and underrated 2018 crime film Widows, which I highly recommend. That same year, the historically high-grossing Black Panther waded into thematic depths of racial diaspora, colonialism, globalism, and retribution, though with ultimately far less edge than the other films on this list.

Naturally, the odor of intolerance that Trump carries around him and has been proudly pumped into the atmosphere since his first election extends its targets beyond black people. In one of the great turns of Knives Out (two films on this list by Rian Johnson) Ana de Armas’ Marta finds herself the beneficiary of her patient’s massive estate after he’s mysteriously killed. The family, though explicitly divided on their political views, unites against this daughter of an illegal immigrant when her kindness and genuine hard work threatens the fortune they were hoping to inherit. Steven Spielberg’s excellent remake/update of West Side Story taps into the original film and musical’s racially charged themes with a fresh sense of danger. The all-white Jets, poor as they are and just a few generations removed from immigration themselves, viciously clash with the Puerto Rican immigrants who comprise the Sharks. The film focuses most of its time on the Romeo and Juliet story at the heart of the conflict, but Spielberg effectively captures the fact that the neighborhood they fight for supremacy over is doomed to demolition at the hands of big business regardless of which gang claims dominion. And for a lovely film that reframes the classically conservative American Dream of owning your own farmland and building your wealth through hard work, look no further than Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari. A family drama set in Arkansas featuring a tough-loving grandmother, a farming father sporting a red hat, and a constant struggle to make ends meet is an American tale as old as time; this time, the husband and wife at the center of the story are immigrants from Korea – “classically American” doesn’t have to mean white.

The Watchlist: BlacKkKlansman, Da 5 Bloods, Get Out, Widows, Black Panther, Knives Out, West Side Story, Minari

What’s Next? I’d expect Hollywood to continue to push back against what Trump carries with him, particularly as it applies to women and minorities; in the history of Hollywood, those issues are evergreen. I am curious to see how much big-studio Hollywood is willing to throw itself into the fray when the industry feels like it’s under such financial strain, but if independent film continues to elevate previously unheard voices, we’ll continue to get perspectives that stray from the norm. No movie is a true stand-in for lived experience or can fully explain why people choose what they do at the ballot box, but the time-capsule nature of film is one of its best qualities.