Trump 2.0 — A Movie We’ve Seen Before

If you’ve never seen an Asylum production of their “Saving the World from Imminent Destruction” series, you’re excused from this post. The rest of us already know the basics. A once prominent, now disgraced scientist (often Sam Baldwin, but not always) is minding his own business making a living income and trying to mend his struggling family life when he notices that something is seriously amiss in the cosmos. Gravity isn’t working quite right. Or all the birds seem to be migrating at the same time. Or some local pond suddenly ejaculates a pillar of lava. You know. The warning knell of an extinction-level catastrophe. Meanwhile, where are the kids? They were supposed to be home by now. He calls his ex-wife. She doesn’t know where they are. He calls an old colleague at the agency in DC where nobody else will take his calls anymore. In a whisper, the colleague tells him the experts in charge haven’t noticed anything to worry about cosmologically speaking.

This far in, we already know what’s going to happen. The kids aren’t missing. They’re really trapped with their Jeep at the lakeshore while a hail of fireballs (or Jeep-crushing boulders) is cutting off their escape. Fortunately, the son’s CBO patches him through to Dad who rushes to an attempted rescue. Meanwhile his agency colleague is learning that the alarm his friend sounded is rapidly becoming a global nightmare, all precipitated by the weaponized project our hero got fired from for objecting. Emergency commandos are dispatched to recover the only man who knows how to operate the high-tech system now causing havoc. 

You know:

O the Humanity! Trying to heal and protect an endangered family while developing the new technology required to save the human race from extinction is an endless ping-ponging process. Find the kids. Find the missing advanced prototype. Digging the kids and the wife(?) out of the downtown rubble, then racing for the remote base where it might be possible to launch the new satellite before the generals go flat effing crazy and decide to send all their nukes at the comet or the earth’s core or whatever and kill all of humanity to save themselves in their little hideaway under the mountain… then getting the kids into that little hideaway just in case, while fleeing on more cracking roads from the military hit squads sent to take out the one man who knows where the bodies are buried AND how to save the annoying human race…

Any of this sounding familiar yet? Flashback time. The most reliably expository device in the movie universe. Our own Asylum hero was running the show for a while, his breakthrough idea funded and succeeding in producing his predicted results when the fates stopped smiling on him and got him fired from his job. Then the screenplay’s central calamity got underway, a slow motion weaponization of the institution he’d led, now targeted against him, the land of his birth, and the world at large. Friends and people he’d mentored turned their backs and the cracks started opening up everywhere, deep down at first and unreported, unmonitored by the bureaucrats and bookkeepers of  “the project,” until the death tolls became too big to ignore.

Return to the unfolding crisis in present time. The hero is called back to help undo what his misused breakthroughs had wrought. He is needed, still despised and conspired against but returned at last from the wilderness to action. But all the swords of Damocles that have been proliferating during his exile are now beginning to fall at once, widely and bloodily. Huge losses of life in the Ukraine, Israel, Central and South America, Europe, and the United States, as a virus both human and biochemical invades cities, homes, and even the bodies of women and children, bringing death everywhere. Most spectacularly, there is also war, as long neglected rivalries spin out of control and add bullets and bombs to drugs and disease and madness as causes of death.

Now the Asylum chase scenes reach their top speed, in some ways as comical as the old Mad Mad Mad Mad World blockbuster…

Go ahead. Watch the whole thing. We’ve got time…

Right now, we don’t even know if we’re in the second or third act, because after a while the scenes all run together and it’s getting harder for us to keep track (if we ever were keeping track) with the doings of our protagonist. What is he doing? He’s flying hither and yon around the world, trying to put out fires started and ignored by everyone before him, then racing home to deal with a domestic hubbub that has his family (you know, the beleaguered citizens of the USA) grousing that they’re being overlooked in all the pointless world-saving commotion. So from day to day he’s laying down the law with NATO, speeding home to lay the cornerstone of yet another symbolic American memorial, then back again to pour oil on the stormy waters of Russia and China… zipping back to light the welcome torch for an MMA fighting event, World Cup tournament, Grand Prix race, 250th Anniversary fireworks show, etc, etc… before flying to Europe, again, to remind them that suicide by illegal immigration is, um, suicidal… aaand home again to comfort victims of another needless loss of life in the streets or insane federal court decision… and so on.

Meanwhile the real comedy relief is provided by the Milton Berles and Buddy Hacketts and Jim Backuses and Jimmy Durantes and Three Stooges of the Left, who are openly complaining that the man in charge isn’t doing anything at all, is betraying the people by not doing more to destroy the economy, is losing his marbles, and is proving  — all in all and all the time— that the only answer is for them, the hack jokers on their last legs, to finally succeed at their so-far-failed prime directive of getting Donald Trump assassinated by anyone who sees an opportunity… Which would fix everything and win all that money everybody’s been chasing after.

I’ve always regarded the Asylum movies as being primarily a comedic form rather than the near-tragedy they purport to be. The ancient dramatic distinction between tragedy and comedy was simple. Comedies had happy endings, tragedies the reverse. Humor can be present or absent in both. So can tears. The Merchant of Venice is a comedy, but it is the director who gets to decide whether the iconic Shylock speech is played for laughs or as a drab reminder that bigotry exists (yawn). Am I the only one who reads Hamlet’s “O what a rogue and peasant slave am I…” speech as a soliloquy too far, the one that exposes the real long-sought mysterious meaning of the play? Which is, drum roll please, that Hamlet fails to act as he knows he must for five long Acts because he is just an actor, and his preferred course is not action but emoting deliciously to himself.  Shakespeare’s goof on his own profession if you will, his own slyest, greatest, secret comedy.

Kind of where we are in my Asylum movie of the world according to Trump at the moment. There is pathos in the circumstance that at the age of 80 he is certainly the most jet-lagged President of the United States in history, even as the clownish haters are seeing human stamina in a scale they can’t imagine and somehow read it as the dementia they couldn’t see in four years of a corpse-like beach exhibit named Biden. Pathos, yes, but also a tour de force performance by Trump reminiscent of the revolving comedy faces of Jonathan Winters. He is capable of being anyone he needs to be at the moment. God knows, he has a global audience consisting of more varieties of attention whore than any President has ever had to deal with, from the vacuous tarts emceeing the news interview shows to the worn out streetwalker politicians of every nation who are locked into ideological playbooks they no longer understand, to the MAGA faithful now grousing about gas prices a dollar lower than they were under Biden, to the arrogant celebrity H.S. dropouts who insist with straight faces that the most uniquely active and charismatic President of all time is a moron, an idiot, a mediocrity, a lowlife who doesn’t even deserve to live. 

There are more categories of attention whores, but I’m running low on stamina myself here. The short answer about what kind of Asylum movie we’re all acting in right now is that it is both a comedy and a possible tragedy in the making, Trump is betting that he can, almost single-handedly, save and reshape the world to last for a lengthy interval of peace, prosperity, and faith in the future. That’s a gigantic bet, which all by itself constitutes proof that he is no mediocrity but a visionary arrived unexpectedly at a position of great power. Enough power to make the bet a cautiously optimistic one. Those who can’t see this really are the morons, idiots, mediocrities, and lowlifes they presume to look down on.

I like doing things in threes. Two movie clips so far. Here’s a third in closing, offered without explanation. It’s from a movie I finally saw in college when I got hooked by a small newspaper ad that ran every day in the school’s daily newspaper. “King of Hearts, running for its 330th straight week at the Orson Welles Cinema.” All that changed in the ad copy was the number of weeks. I guess we all of us went eventually to see it. One of those checkbox items. It’s about an insane asylum whose inmates are suddenly freed by a wartime siege that results in a surreal parade and the coronation of a foot soldier as you guessed it, The King of Hearts.

Who is the King? We don’t really know who his subjects think he is. He just is, a lot like life itself. And fun to watch. Just like that elephant with the handkerchief.

CREDITS ROLL.