What Donald Trump's Pretty Good Review of Citizen Kane Says About His Very Stupid Movie Tariffs

covfefe ≠ rosebud

In 2002, the documentarian Errol Morris was commissioned by the Academy of Arts & Motion Pictures to produce a series of short interviews intended to air sporadically throughout the 75th Academy Awards. The premise for this series was simple: a collection of notable public figures would each talk about their all-time favorite movie, explaining what scenes, imagery, lines of dialogue, characters, and themes made the chosen film exemplary in their eyes. Morris and his crew started production, but were only able to train The Interrotron on a few interviewees before the Academy, for reasons that remain vague to this day, decided to scrap the project. One interview from the aborted series did survive, however, and over the past decade it has cyclically resurfaced online for reasons that obviate explanation. Maybe you’ve stumbled across the video before; it’s the one where Donald Trump waxes poetic about Citizen Kane.

Back when I used to teach my American Studies / Cinema Studies course on post-2008 “business biopics,” I would screen this clip for my students at the end of our first class, once we’d finished reading the syllabus together and learned everybody’s names. Since nearly all of my students were majoring in fields outside of the humanities, and less than half of them had ever watched a movie released before 2010, Donald Trump yapping about Citizen Kane served several constructive table-setting purposes for me.

In addition to introducing the class to what is probably the quintessential template text in the business biopic genre, the clip illustrates how a critical engagement with a work of art can reveal (and conceal) otherwise inarticulable aspects of a person’s character—and in Trump’s case, the material realities and wildest delusions of American politics dating to the nation’s founding. Good luck finding a piece of film criticism that better demonstrates how the media we consume, and the desires and beliefs structured by that media, can have concrete repercussions in the real world. Two decades after the interview didn’t air, Morris’s conversation with Trump radiates the eerie prescience of an artifact uncovered from a lost, best-forgotten civilization, its energies as cursed as they are entrancing. It’s part triviality, part harbinger.

The clip also sees Trump performing some rudimentary—but pretty on target—close readings of Orson Welles’s most well-regarded feature. (Based on the repetitiveness of the language, and the inclusion of Boomerisms like “happy camper,” these interpretations do sound like Trump’s own.) In terms of unpacking symbolism, the guy’s not wrong: Charles Foster Kane’s dining room table does grow longer as he becomes increasingly alienated from his wife, the rest of society, the young man he once was. The word “rosebud” does feel charged with a particular, almost occult semantic power. Remove the context from these quotes, and you might think you were listening to the in-app AI regurgitate one of the more Marxist posts on The Best Movie Substack. “Citizen Kane was really about accumulation,” Trump says, “and at the end of the accumulation, you see what happens. And it’s not necessarily all positive………

………not positive.”

Whether it’s a one-sentence Reddit comment or a 1500-word Buzzfeed article, the analysis of this clip tends to fixate on Trump’s inability to put into practice the emptiness-of-accumulation lesson from Citizen Kane. Everyone is baffled as to how Trump can ascertain that “wealth isolates you from other people,” yet cannot translate that insight to his remarkably Citizen Kane-y personal and professional exploits. Weeks before Trump was elected president in 2016, Errol Morris himself reflected on his chat with “the candidate who idealizes Charles Foster Kane, Cinematic Monster.” As Morris tells the interviewer, “I still can’t wrap my head around if he just chooses to ignore its obvious moral undertone, or if he genuinely doesn’t see it.” Morris remains confounded by how Trump could express the central message of Citizen Kane so cogently, then refute that message in his every choice, word, and action.

Earlier this month, I was reminded of Morris’s interview with Trump, now the President of the United States for a second non-consecutive term, when news broke about Trump’s intentions to impose a “100% tariff” on foreign-produced movies. As with all of President Trump’s policy ideas, the bureaucratic and legal complexities involved in implementing such a tariff aren’t worth writing about here because 1) no consideration went into the ridiculous proposal in the first place, and 2) the President’s high-key dementia, no different than his predecessor’s low-key dementia, already has his attentions moving onto bigger and shinier momentary obsessions. Cost-strangling Emilia Perez to death in its crib would greatly increase the quality of life in this nation, so it stands to reason that Trump will never get it done.

But like his reading of Citizen Kane, Trump is correct-despite-himself with respect to identifying the short- and long-term problems facing Hollywood. The LA-based film industry has shed tens of thousands of jobs in recent years, and an ongoing arms race of tax incentives, waged on fronts domestic and international, has resulted in fewer movies and TV shows getting shot in California and the United States. Unless they somehow involve Nathan Fielder, the shows and movies that do shoot on location are stupid, terrible, or both, and worst of all, M. Night Shyamalan trying to pass off Toronto as Philadelphia contributes to the exact cognitive dissonance, the mental disconnect between what we’re told and what we can plainly see, that leads to a critical mass of voters casting ballots for Donald Trump in two presidential elections.

What may actually be worth thinking about, though, is how Trump’s quick-fix tariff solution to the “Decline of the Hollywood” mirrors the faulty, magic wand rationale of the dozens of critics who have highlighted and bemoaned his review of Citizen Kane over the years. From their perspective, this clip of Trump misunderstanding Orson Welles’s “obvious moral undertone” is a kind of key to understanding Trump’s psyche and, by extension, neutralizing his cultish movement that enervates, perplexes, and infuriates them. The logic: If only Donald Trump could watch Citizen Kane “the right way,” he would be transformed into an empathetic, caring human being. As the old joke goes, A conservative is just a liberal who got mugged. Would watching and responding to Citizen Kane “the right way” initiate the reverse process?

It wouldn’t. There are no quick fixes for these types of deep-seated issues of the economy and the spirit, and suggesting that every Republican is one Criterion Channel subscription away from registering as a Democrat is insane, maybe more insane than Donald Trump trying to solve problems caused by businessmen who think and act exactly like Donald Trump. As much as films can be Roger Ebert’s “machines that generate empathy,” they are just as often tools for circulating deceptive narratives, quashing transgression, isolating the viewer, and further protecting and enriching the already powerful.

To bring it back to business biopics, it isn’t a coincidence that David Fincher, the director of The Social Network, also directed SE7EN and created Mindhunter. While his film successfully argues that billionaires have more in common with serial killers than with normal human beings, it can’t make that statement without inflating the legend of Mark Zuckerberg and his MySpace clone. After I showed my students the Trump clip, the first movie we watched afterward was The Social Network, which demonstrates that sometimes the criticizing and the propagandizing happen simultaneously, within the same film, and that paradox is what pushes the film and our analysis beyond childish notions of “good” and “bad.” The Social Network is a vicious broadside against our corrupt tech elite, but Facebook doesn’t become META without The Social Network.

Nor does Donald Trump become President Trump without Citizen Kane. For his purposes, the movie did teach Trump something important, even if he grossly misread it: If you’re a shameless vain lunatic intent on annoying, frightening, and immiserating a solid half of your countrymen, your life will probably suck if you marry a woman who isn’t completely cynical and dead-inside. And in that regard, Citizen Kane fueling Trump’s rampant materialism and pointless cruelty can teach us something about the enduring myth that Hollywood or “the arts” are bastions of progressive activism, democratic resistance, and ethical integrity.

Consider, for example, the fact that during the same Academy Awards that didn’t televise Errol Morris’s interview with Trump, Michael Moore was roundly booed for critiquing the Bush Administration and the Iraq War during his acceptance speech for Bowling for Columbine. Later that night, the Oscar for Best Director went to Roman Polanski, who for decades couldn’t enter the United States lest he be arrested for statutory rape. Want to claim that Hollywood has progressed since then? Consider that the man who won Best Actor for starring in Polanski’s The Pianist, Adrien Brody, was given the same award last year for The Brutalist. Brody is currently dating the ex-wife of Harvey Weinstein.

Sometimes, it feels like these individuals’ psychotic drive to become and stay famous is a sublimated means to announce, in the words of Donald Trump describing Charles Foster Kane, that they are just “lonely and rather sad.” Perhaps this is why Orson Welles elected to begin and end his magnum opus with a NO TRESPASSING sign—if there’s the tiniest possibility that a film can transform a viewer into Donald Trump, everyone is best-served staying the hell away from it. If movies, the humanities, or “great art” are worth saving, if they have any inarguable value, that value derives from how their persistence across time and space can remind us that the identical fate awaits the evil billionaire and the selfless beggar. When I rewatched Citizen Kane last week, my takeaway was that there is warmth to be found in this unthinkable thought: To the furnace, every sled may as well have the same name.