The time Trump reviewed Citizen Kane and revealed too much of himself

The Herald Scotland

11 hours ago

Yet there are rare moments when this side reaches the surface, and it can feel quite startling, as if he has maybe revealed too much of himself.
Times when he has spoken about his brother Fred, for one, whose alcoholism led to an early death that greatly influenced the trajectory of the younger Trump. Glimpses into his personal grief are fleeting, but they expose a man who, beneath his bravado, is deeply shaped by his fear of being rendered powerless.
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But there's an even stranger instance of Trump revealing his vulnerable side, and it's when, in 2002, he reviewed his favourite film – the 1941 Orson Welles-directed Citizen Kane.
It's not hard to see why the film resonates so much with Trump. Its portrayal of Charles Foster Kane – a wealthy, ambitious, and arrogant media mogul whose life is marked by power, betrayal, and isolation – has drawn plenty of comparisons with the President.
Throughout his review, Trump makes it clear that he sees Kane as a stand-in for himself. 'The wealth, the sorrow, the unhappiness, the happiness, just struck lots of different notes,' he muses.
He finds solace in Kane's struggles with the pursuit of success and wealth, rather than the cautionary tale Welles intended, pointing out telling moments like Kane and his wife sitting further apart at the dinner table the more his power mutates and grows. It is transparent that Trump sees parallels to his own personal life in these moments, and he sees Kane as that rare someone who can actually understand him.
'In real life I believe that wealth does in fact isolate you from other people. It's a protective mechanism. You have your guard up much more than you would if you didn't have wealth.'
His reading is rather revealing, even if he misses much of the film's subtext. Citizen Kane is a tragedy about a man who sacrifices love and humanity in pursuit of power, only to die alone, lamenting his lost innocence. Yet Trump doesn't recoil from Kane's fate; he relates to it.
He recognises Kane's isolation not as a direct result of his actions and mindset, but as a protective mechanism. It is as if Trump sees Kane as a muse, a kindred spirit that he in some way must protect lest it reflect badly on himself. It's a telling inversion, where a critique of wealth and power is instead embraced as a necessary defence against a hostile world.
Errol Morris, who directed the segment featuring Trump's review, later remarked on the strange dissonance between the film's intent and Trump's interpretation, the clash between the obvious meaning behind Kane's character and Trump's completely analogous take.
'If I were Donald Trump, I would not want to emphasise that connection with Kane. You know, a megalomaniac in love with power and crushing everything in his path. The inability to have friends, the inability to find love,' the documentarian observed.
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Trump changes the reasons he loves Citizen Kane over time, and it always runs in sync with his own narrative. When speaking on the film during his 2016 presidential campaign, he focused on the sharp turn the media took against Kane, likening it to his own media onslaught at the time. In that reading, Kane becomes a fellow 'fake news' martyr, unjustifiably persecuted.
Like most things with Trump, his reading of Citizen Kane is less about the film and more about himself. He doesn't see a warning; he sees a mirror. And in that reflection, he finds validation – even in the parts that should give him pause. The film explores how fetishising success can become a hollow pitfall in wait, yet to Trump, it just makes Kane a misunderstood man.
It is peculiar that through the endless observations of Trump, the millions of words out of his mouth that have been documented and spread, we begin to get closer to how his internal world works through his grasp of a film's meaning and what becomes accidentally revealed through that. His relationship with Citizen Kane speaks loudly about his own relationship with power, where the spectre of tragedy is just an inevitability of that process.
Of course, by the end of the review, the Trump we all know returns. Trump's reply when asked what advice he would give Kane, a man of a similar disposition? 'Get yourself a different woman'.