“Here’s a man who could’ve been president. Who was as loved and hated and talked about as much as any man in our time.”—Citizen Kane
No single movie can explain a man’s life. Nevertheless, it’s extremely telling that Donald Trump’s favorite movie is Citizen Kane, Orson Welles’ masterpiece about “America’s Kubla Khan.” If there’s anyone in the country who could find real, personal resonance in the film—as opposed to viewing it as a cautionary parable; its original title was the more overt American—it’s Trump.
The parallels between Trump and Charles Foster Kane are significant—more significant than the ones between him and the film character he’s usually compared to, A Face In The Crowd’s Lonesome Rhodes (which is more of a Glenn Beck story). Most obviously, there’s the incredible wealth, a fortune half-earned, half-given. (Kane’s family lucked into the deed of a huge gold mine, though his real empire stemmed from his management of a newspaper he happened to own; Trump was born rich, but made his mark in real estate after a “small” million-dollar loan from his father.) Both suffered devastating familial losses—Trump’s brother died from alcoholism; Kane’s son and first wife died in a car crash, and he was also ripped from his parents at a young age. There are the gaudy tributes to themselves, Kane with his Xanadu (“since the pyramids, the costliest monument a man has built to himself”), Trump with his towers. Both put their names on everything, a byproduct of their shared egoism and megalomania. “Few private lives were more public,” Citizen Kane says of its subject, and Trump follows in the tradition of highly publicized divorces and outsize reactions to petty personal spats. Both form and break alliances out of convenience, as in the way Trump has waved off his one-time support of the Clintons, or how Kane would “often support, then denounce” figures like Hitler. (Perhaps we can expect a similar about-face with Trump’s praising of Vladimir Putin.)
They are endless self-promoters and expert manipulators of the media of their age—Trump with Twitter and “winning” media cycles, and Kane, the ultimate yellow journalist. (He was based on William Randolph Hearst, though modern-day tycoons like Rupert Murdoch give off less of a Kane vibe than Trump.) When a majority of Trump supporters agree with his demonstrably false statements—that President Obama was not born in the U.S., that thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheered on 9/11—it is hard to not hear Kane’s voice: “People will think what I tell them to think.”
And of course, both ran political campaigns that were highly populist and hugely divisive. This is where the parallels between the two diverge, but also where they’re the most revealing. (The fictional campaign even took place in 1916, giving this a nice bit of historical symmetry.)
The film’s opening newsreel reports that Kane “spoke for millions of Americans, [and] was hated by as many more.” That description applies just as readily to Trump, whose candidacy resonates strongest with those alienated by the political process—those who felt no one was speaking for them. Early in the film, we see Kane derided as both a communist and a fascist; while the former charge hasn’t been levied against Trump (though it wouldn’t be surprising for one of his GOP rivals to do so, given his old statements in favor of universal healthcare), the latter has—repeatedly and not hyperbolically.
Both men essentially tout themselves as the solution to society’s problems, by dint of their wealth, power, and intelligence, as opposed to whatever policies they’d enact. The campaigns are ego trips, the crowds they draw viewed as personal validation; both trumpet their domination of polls in stump speeches. Given the endless controversies and ugliness that surround him, it’s difficult to imagine Trump’s campaign being derailed by something as pedestrian as an infidelity (as Kane’s is), but his sky-high disapproval ratings suggest that if he is defeated, the voters’ view of his character will be a major factor. (If Trump was accused of having an affair with a terrible singer, it’s easy to imagine his response as, “No, she’s a great singer,” as opposed to, “No, I’m a faithful husband.”)
The differences between Trump and Kane arise in what the two men would do if elected, and whether that would be any good for the country (or New York State, in Kane’s case). Viewers of the movie don’t get a lot of specifics about Kane’s platform, but given his independent campaign occurred in the Progressive Era, it seems safe to assume that his candidacy was centered around worker-friendly reforms and a pledge to ferret out government corruption. He’s described as a “fighting liberal, the friend of the workingman,” a label that would be hard to affix to Trump, even though he draws most of his support from a lower-income and less-educated constituency. Kane’s “shameful, ignominious” defeat—he evidently feels the same way about losers that Trump does—is said to “set back for 20 years the cause of reform in the U.S.” That line suggests Kane would have been a strong public servant. Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign is seen as frankly dangerous; his losing would obviously not be seen as a regressive disaster.
Candidate Kane suggests a Trump with Bernie Sanders’ philosophy. At a campaign rally, he boasts that “the workingman and the slum child know they can expect my best efforts in their interests,” and says he’ll do everything in his power “to protect the underprivileged, the underpaid, and the underfed.” Even Kane’s theme song, the melody of which we hear in the rally scene, touts this issue in its opening lines: