One of President Donald Trump’s biographers, Tim O’Brien, recalled a strange old story about a movie he watched with Trump decades ago and said it clearly inspired Trump’s thinking about revenge today.
MS NOW’s Stephanie Ruhle read a recent op-ed that conservative Peggy Noonan penned for the Wall Street Journal that was an obituary of sorts for MAGAism. Among her comments was the allegation that Trump ran the GOP’s brand into the ground.
O’Brien agreed with the assessment, but he had a word of caution about where people think Trump will simply move to a farm upstate.
In his speech Tuesday night, Senator-elect James Talarico (D-Texas) said that he looks forward to bipartisan cooperation and “the politics of love.”
“Donald Trump is not going to be embracing the politics of love anytime soon. But there’s certainly, I think, is a desire in the electorate to talk about our problems in a more civilized way. And there’s still a lot of work to be done, because Trump’s not going away. A cornered Donald Trump lashes out. He’s going to exercise his veto power. He’s going to stroll into more bunkers, foreign wars, because he can. Possibly,” O’Brien continued.
He said that the positive in his mind is that the voters saved America from a “dangerous president in a dangerous moment when other institutions didn’t.”
That’s when Ruhle asked what’s next for Trump.
“More retribution,” O’Brien promised. “He’s been in this moment in lesser ways throughout his life. You know, he almost went personally bankrupt in the early 90s. He went through six corporate bankruptcies. His answer to that was to say, it’s not my fault. It’s the bank’s fault. I won’t do interviews. I’ll yell at people, I’ll pout, but I won’t go away. And he didn’t, you know?”
That’s when O’Brien recalled flying with Trump in his private jet and watching a movie on VHS. In between the Jean-Claude Van Damme tough-guy movies was “Sunset Boulevard.” The two men began watching it, which was startling enough for the MS NOW panel to contemplate.
“There’s this epic scene in that where William Holden and Gloria Swanson are on a couch and they’re screening one of her silent era films, and she gets outraged, and she stands up into the light of the camera and she says, ‘Have they forgotten what a star is? I’ll show all of them!’ Or something to that effect. And Trump just goes, ‘That’s such a good scene.’ And that’s who he is. He doesn’t want people to forget he’s a star. He won’t go away,” said O’Brien.
The line in the film has character Norma Desmond announce, “Those idiot producers. Those imbeciles. Haven’t they got any eyes? Have they forgotten what a star looks like? I’ll show them! I’ll be up there again, so help me!”