WE'RE ALL IN TRUMP'S MOVIE: BUT HE'S THE STAR
Article #15
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“This rage that lasts a thousand years, Will soon be, will soon be, will soon be done. This is a kind of magic. There can be only one.” A Kind of Magic - Queen
Have you ever heard of zip, zap, boing?
I’m standing in a circle of maybe fourteen strangers on a Tuesday evening. And we’re maybe a round or two into this zip, zap, boing craic and I am so confused my head hurts. Not only that, but I’m failing so badly at this thing, I have beads of heavy sweat racing out of every pore.
And to compound matters, I seem to be the only gobshite that’s lost at sea. I’m there thinking “Why didn’t those bloody nuns teach us this in Calasanctius college!” And the more we zip, zap, boing, the more everyone gets into it and everytime I make an absolute balls of it when zip, or zap or fucking boing comes my way, the laughter gets louder.
And because this is an ice breaker, no-one gets kicked out, so no matter how many times I fuck up - yep you guessed it - there is NO ESCAPE! I must remain and my absolute humiliation must continue uninterrupted.
Finally, the torture comes to an end. And I’m thinking “I betcha Paul Newman or Colin Farrell didn’t have to do this shite.”
Apparently, the game had a purpose beyond making you feel like you couldn’t cut mustard at a toddlers camp. Apparently, it was supposed to get us out of our heads and “just be in the moment man”.
I swear to Jaysus, if someone had of walked through the door and offered me my cash back, I would have taken the money and ran. But they didn’t and I stayed.
I remember holding a number of competing thoughts. Thank Christ no-one in the Vincent’s dressing room saw this. Second, it’s hard to be in the moment when you’re you’re making a tit of yourself in front of a room full of strangers and third: what in the name of Jehova was I thinking signing up for this?
Yet, If you walked into an acting class today, I bet within five minutes the teacher, or guru, or whoever is dispensing the wisdom, will drop this nugget of wisdom: acting is about ‘being in the moment’ baby.
The Moment
And what in the name of Jaysus does “being in the moment” actually mean, I hear you ask?
Well, comrade, that’s a great question. And the only way I could try and answer it is this: it’s kind of like trying to describe the kind of person you might have the hots for – very illusive to wrap some exact words around, but you know it when you see it.
Take Tony Kelly’s wonder goal in the All-Ireland hurling final last month. What that boy from Ballyea did with that sliothar in the seconds before he speared it into the net, defies explanation.
Marty Morrisey, the commentator in that clip, did his best to wrap some words around it and in the end resigned himself to this: “sheer, utter magic.”
And how the hell would a hurling coach even begin to try and teach that?
For sure, you could break down the technicality of it in an intellectual kind of way - do this, do that, swing here. But that’s not the essence of what is happening. What is happening is Tony was down the tunnel, in the zone, responding to what was in front of him, moment to moment. He was free as a bird in a corridor between time and space. Then - like Marty said - the magic happened.
Magic, my friend. Sheer, utter magic.
Bob Dylan, speaking to Ed Bradley in 2004, talked about the elusiveness of that magic: “I don’t know how I got to write those songs.” he says about his early 1960’s hot streak. “Those early songs were almost magically written.” Speaking about his 1964 classic It’s Alright Ma (I’m only bleeding), he says: “Well… try to sit down and write something like that… there’s a magic to that… not a Siegfried & Roy kind of magic, it’s a different kind of magic, a kind of penetrating magic, you know, and I did it at one time.”
Senna’s lap in Monaco in ‘88, Robin Williams doing improv, Tony Kelly, Bob Dylan, they are all one and the same: instruments of something. Something that is just passing through them perhaps. Something that lifts the rest of us out of the every day. Making us consider, even for a split second, in a magic that we can’t touch, feel or rationalise. A magic we can only stop and wonder at. And if we don’t keep our eyes open, it will be gone - zip, zap - just like that!
But is the magician channelling the magic, or is the magic channelling the magician?
Man Down
When former President Donald Trump stood up to an open-air podium on a balmy July evening in Butler, Pennsylvania, it seemed like just another day on the campaign trail. Things were going well. He had just come off the back of a live Presidential debate where President Joe Biden looked and sounded worse for wear.
During that debate Trump steered clear of any quicksand and allowed the main headline to unfold – President Biden’s questionable faculties. With the Biden camp and the Democrats in subsequent disarray, the 2024 election runway seemed to be opening up for a Trump takeoff.
And then eight shots rang out in the Pennsylvania sky.
If you and I were standing in a field and we heard gunfire, we would do one thing and one thing only: get the hell out of the way as fast as we could. Survival instinct and adrenalin would kick in and we’d do whatever it took to preserve ourselves.
And that’s what seemed to be happening with Trump. Engulfed by Secret Service, the next bit seemed obvious – they would shepherd him to safety and then the online conspiracy theories could begin in earnest.
There was some audio of him talking about grabbing his shoes. And then it happened. Dazed and ruffled, with blood streaked across his face, he turned to the gasping crowd, punched the air with a clenched fist and uttered the words “fight” three times.
I don’t know about you, but when I saw that I literally could not believe my eyes and here’s why.
Political violence is nothing new in America, especially against occupants of the White House. Four sitting Presidents died as a result of an assassin’s bullet, namely Presidents Lincoln (1865), Garfield (1881), McKinley (1901) and Kennedy (1963). And there were individual attempts on President’s Franklin Roosevelt (1933), Ronald Reagan (1981) and George W. Bush (2005). Gerald Ford is out on his own here. He had two assassination attempts on him within seventeen days of each other in 1975, both by women. He reportedly wore a bulletproof trench coat thereafter, so that may or may not explain why there was no third time lucky.
Donald Trump is the fourth Presidential candidate to be the target of an assassination attempt.
The 1960’s were a famously violent decade with President John F. Kennedy, Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King and Presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) all falling to lone gunmen, apparently, within a tumultuos five-year period. RFK and Luther King were killed within twelve short weeks of each other.
So, in America, bullets flying in the direction of a President or Presidential wannabe is not the exeption - it’s closer to the norm.
What is new is how Trump reacted.
Freeze Frame: In a world of moving picture, the still image is still king.
Trump did something no-one saw coming, not even himself. He responded to the moment, in the moment. Like Tony and Bob, he was alive to it. The result? Arguably, one of the most iconic images in American history. A moment captured that is so, in a strange way, magical, even generative AI would not have dared conjure it up.
But how did Trump manage to be alive to the moment when he was inches from being dead in the moment?
Donald Trump understands the power of image. In a world of giddy imagery, that image Trump conjured out of thin air demonstrates he understands something few of his predecessors did.
Before he disrupted politics forever, Donal Trump was a TV star. He hosted The Apprentice for fourteen straight seasons. He hosted one hundred and eighty-six episodes and was Executive Producer on one hundred and ninety-four episodes. His bombastic style endeared him to millions. And like everything he does, it wasn’t without controversy. Before that, he made cameo’s in movies such as Two Weeks Notice (2002), Zoolander (2001) and Home Alone 2 (1996). He was no stranger to the small screen either, popping up in Sex and the City (1999), Spin City (1998) and even The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (1994).
I’m going a long way around the barn to say the Donald has an IMDB listing as long as queue for a Taylor Swift merch stand. A long list of credits most actors would kill for.
When asked if being an actor helped him during his Presidency, Ronald Regan once famously quipped: “There have been times in this office, when I wondered how you could do the job if you hadn’t been an actor.”
In that case, Trump was more than qualified.
And on the 13th of July, Trump found himself in a Dealey Plazaesque “where were you when?” moment. Those moments don’t come around that often, but when this one did Trump’s sixth sense for great TV kicked in.
And with that, he conjured a magic. Some might say a black kind of magic, but magic nonetheless.
Heroes and Villains
Nineteen and a half minutes into Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, there is a scene around a restaurant table featuring billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne, his date Natasha, Gotham’s dashing District Attorney (DA) Harvey Dent and his date and Assistant DA, Rachel Dawes.
The conversation goes like this:
Natasha: How could you want to raise children in a city like this [Gotham]?
Bruce: I was raised here, I turned out ok.
Natasha: I’m talking about the kind of city that idolises a masked vigilante [Batman].
Dent: Gotham City is proud of an ordinary citizen standing up for what’s right.
Natasha: Gotham needs heroes like you, elected officials, not a man who thinks he’s above the law.
Bruce: Exactly. Who appointed the Batman?
Dent: We did. All of us who stood by and let scum take control of our city.
Natasha: This is a democracy, Harvey.
Dent: When their enemies were at the gates, the Romans would suspend democracy and elect one man to protect the city. And it wasn’t considered an honour, it was considered a public service.
Rachel: Harvey, the last man they appointed to protect the republic was Ceasar and he never gave up his power!
Dent: Ok, fine. You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
Underneath its surface, The Dark Knight is a love letter to the idea of hero narrative and mythology. Nolan spends roughly the next two hours of that movie exploring Dent’s hero-villain proposition.
In The Dark Knight, Batman must journey from unelected hero to villain before he can fulfil his true destiny as Gotham’s dark knight. While Dent goes from being Gotham’s elected hero to a cold-blooded villain before he can fulfil his true destiny as Harvey Two-Face. It is a change that mythology demands. In story, character change is not just a choice, it is a necessity. In the words of Marcus Aurelius: “the universe is transformation.” And in story, as in life, change is constant.
Seconds before the assassin’s bullet whizzed passed his ear, for many Donald Trump was the ultimate villain. While for many others, he was the hero, wanting nothing more than to return his beloved republic to its former glory and protect it from the enemies at the gate.
Had the assassin’s bullet taken his life, for many, Trump would have become the martyered hero, proving Dent’s theory. While many others would have seen his time out of office as undeniable proof of his villainary, with an impeachment and 34 counts of felony, not to mention his own attempt at suspending democracy in January 2021.
But the assassin’s bullet didn’t take his life. The movie didn’t end there. Trump pivoted the narrative like no-one else before him.
During the closing frames of The Dark Knight, Batman is being hounded and chased by his friend, Commissioner Gordon, and the Gotham Police. They’ve set the dogs on him - the hero turned villain. In the closing frame of The Dark Knight Rises, the third and final movie of the trilogy, those very same people that hounded Batman are unveiling a statue to him - the villain returned to hero.
Dave Chapelle once said: “You have to be wise enough to know when you are living in your dream and you have to be humble enough to accept when you in someone else’s.”
When he was in the White House, it was hard not to feel that this was Donald Trump’s movie and the rest of us just happened to be in it.
Should he be sworn as the 47th President of the United States in January of 2025, it may be just the beginning of the third and final act of the Trump trilogy. The first act was when the idea of his candidacy was literally a joke, the second was when it clearly wasn’t and the third?
Well, since the that Covid craic, I’ve given up on predicting who’ll be the next Galway Senior hurling manager never mind how the Trump trilogy will land.
But there are certain to be couple of plot twists and turns that no-one sees coming.
I wouldn’t rule out the unveiling of a statue to Trump somewhere in the not too distant future. Maybe not a clenched skyward fist on Mount Rushmore, but somewhere.
If it was up to me, I’d say Trump has enough concrete to his name. If it was up to me, I’d ship the cement mixer over to Ballyea in County Clare.
When all is said and done, whether Tony Kelly is ever etched in concrete is neither here nor there. His magic is chiselled into the mind’s eye, for anyone privileged enough to have witnessed his wizardry.
Heroes and villains come and go.
But sheer, utter magic lives forever.