It’s easy enough to locate Reaganism in the cinema of the 1980s. Top Gun, Rambo: First Blood Part II, Wall Street, Red Dawn, Back to the Future: fantasies of moral clarity, economic individualism, technological supremacy and national restoration. These were films that believed in America. Their ideological confidence mirrored the president’s own: a performative optimism, replete with flags, fists and free markets.
Trumpism, by contrast, resists visual distillation. If Reaganism was legible, macho, militarised, made-for-TV, then Trumpism was already television. It didn’t need film to mythologise it. It arrived fully formed, a feedback loop of spectacle and grievance, bloated with signs and symbols yet curiously devoid of meaning. If Reaganism was the fantasy of capitalist ascent, Trumpism was its come-down: paranoid, broken, without plot.
Between Reagan’s dream of ascent and Trump’s comedown, there was Obama: a presidency scored to Hans Zimmer, lit like a Sorkin set, performed with a serenity that masked the drone strikes. Hollywood adored him, but it wasn’t mythic—it was prestige television, glossy liberal realism, America as West Wing box set. If Reagan offered fantasy and Trump offered spectacle, Obama offered a kind of cinematic technocracy: beautifully framed, immaculately hollow.
The Trump presidency (2016–2020) had no Top Gun. What it had instead were memes, timelines, livestreams, Q drops. Politics as aesthetic experience, comic, terrifying, and constant. Cinema struggled to keep pace, unsure whether to parody, confront or retreat. Where Reagan found his heroic double in Stallone or Cruise, Trump’s doubles were already diffused: the Joker, Jordan Belfort, Don Draper, Tony Soprano, Logan Roy. Figures of power and grotesque success. But few emerged during the presidency itself. One of the most striking features of the period was the absence of a cinematic narrative that could express, let alone affirm, the Trumpian worldview. The films of the time reflected disorientation, exhaustion, the failure of plot itself.
The clearest cinematic artefact of Trumpism’s first term was Joker (2019). Todd Phillips claimed it had nothing to do with politics, but the film arrived soaked in political affect—incel martyrdom, class resentment, the ruins of mental health provision, the permanent collapse of empathy. Gotham is a city in decay, its elites remote, its public services slashed. Arthur Fleck doesn’t become a revolutionary. He becomes content. A face. The riot around him is aesthetic, not ideological: the politics of mood, not programme. What Joker understood, more than it meant to, is that in a society already degraded, fascism can arrive without uniforms or speeches. All it needs is a camera and a crowd. Like Trump, Fleck doesn’t offer a future. He offers the satisfaction of watching it burn.
Yet Joker’s politics remain ambivalent. Perhaps it overshoots the moment, absorbing Trumpian affects without quite articulating them. Its rage is palpable, but its object is vague. Like the era itself, it flirts with the idea of collapse while leaving its consequences offscreen.
If Joker is the film most often read politically, Uncut Gems is the one that most feels like Trumpism. It’s a film of pure velocity, hedonic, anxious, amoral. The protagonist, Howard Ratner, is a New York jeweller with a gambling addiction and a pathological need to keep moving. He talks like Trump, deals like Trump, lies like Trump. Or so it seems. But Howard is not triumphant, he is fraying. A man whose compulsive motion masks existential panic. Uncut Gems isn’t a portrait of Trump, it’s what Trumpism feels like from the inside. Not powerful, but bluffing. Not stable, but on the brink. In its frenetic pacing and sensory overload, Uncut Gems mirrors the timeline: capitalism as a panic attack.
Fascism is no longer staged—it’s streamed. A thousand micro-narratives, each more outlandish than the last, scroll past daily, too fast to contextualise and too surreal to resist.
These films didn’t endorse Trump. But they couldn’t look away. Nor could they escape the conditions that produced him. This is what separates the Trumpist cinema, such as it is, from the Reaganite: Reaganism projected the fantasy of capitalist ascent. Trumpism is the hangover. The rage without vision. The spectacle without script.
Whether that will change now, under Trump’s second presidency, is not yet clear. The tone is certainly darker. In 2016, Trump campaigned on restoration: make America great again. In 2024, he campaigned on revenge. His second administration has begun with mass deportations, state-level purges, open talk of re-education. The aesthetic has shifted too: from chaos to order, from carnival to crackdown. If the first term was meme-fascism, the second is beginning to look more like the real thing. Not quite 1933, perhaps—but not 1928 either.
There’s another shift too, less aesthetic than strategic. Reaganism required a far enemy. It was built on the Cold War: the Soviet Union as existential threat, the Evil Empire. Even at home, its targets were cast as proxies—unions, welfare recipients, the anti-war movement—all painted as internal saboteurs in a global struggle. The fantasy of American supremacy demanded an Other: Moscow, Managua, the Sandinistas, the KGB. Reagan’s cinema followed suit. In Red Dawn, the Russians parachute into Colorado. In Rocky IV, the fight against Communism plays out in a boxing ring. America’s story was one of external confrontation and ultimate triumph.
Trumpism, by contrast, has no far enemy. China occasionally features as scapegoat, but it is not the central antagonist. Trump’s focus is almost entirely domestic. Even migrants, once imagined as a teeming horde at the gates, are now cast as an internal infestation, already here, already contaminating. The second term has abandoned any pretence of foreign policy coherence. There are no wars to win abroad. There is only the war at home: against universities, journalists, judges, trans people, trade unionists, sanctuary cities, librarians, civil servants, anyone accused of disloyalty to the nation. This is not imperial projection. It is purification. What unites Trump’s targets is not what they do, but where they are: here.
In early 1930s Germany, before the Nazi seizure of power, politics was still unstable, culture still in play. The collapse hadn’t yet congealed into the state. Trumpism followed a similar pattern: Pepe, QAnon, Bannonite mysticism, tradwives, MAGA rap, Roganite bro-masculinity. But that phase may be over. The spectacle is hardening into statecraft. If the first Trump presidency was too unstable to be filmed, the second may suit the older genres: the authoritarian thriller, the state procedural, the cold bureaucratic horror of repression.
If Trumpism’s cinema emerged obliquely, liberal responses arrived drenched in sentiment and moral vanity. The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020) tried to turn the New Left into a courtroom drama for the MSNBC set. Sorkin’s radicals didn’t demand an end to imperialism or capitalism, they pleaded for order with better manners. Don’t Look Up (2021), a fable in which nobody listens to scientists about a planet-killing comet, mistook smugness for satire. These were not films of resistance. They were comfort food for a professional class that had already lost the plot.
If Bannon dreamt of blood and soil, Musk offers pixels and payloads. He doesn’t direct the spectacle. He is the interface.
So the question returns. If Reagan had Bruckheimer and Stallone, will Trump find his Riefenstahl? Bannon once seemed the likely contender—gothic, esoteric, soaked in Schmitt and Evola. But he’s out now: sidelined, too unstable even for Trump’s second act. He still haunts the periphery, muttering about the coming storm. But the future doesn’t belong to Bannon. It belongs to Musk.
Musk is not a filmmaker. But then, neither was Riefenstahl, until she was. What matters is not the auteur but the apparatus. Musk doesn’t just bankroll Trump; he builds the platforms, owns the satellites, writes the code. His new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is tasked with automating bureaucracy, dismantling the civil service, outsourcing the state to algorithmic command. The aesthetic is corporate, slick, evangelical. Government by dashboard. Power as a tech demo.
Of course, the comparison falters too. Riefenstahl crafted totalising myths; Musk produces glitchy prototypes and unfinished promises. But perhaps that’s the point. Today’s propaganda doesn’t need to be finished. It just needs to run.
This is Blade Runner territory, not the noir, but the sublime. “More human than human,” says the Tyrell Corporation. Trump rants and rallies. Musk writes the substrate. The fusion of political will and technological capital—sovereign and server—is where the new propaganda will come from. Not from films, but from platforms. Not from slogans, but from code.
The liberal mistake is to think fascism looks like the past. That it wears boots, gives speeches, marches in rows. But fascism adapts. It modernises. It learns how to render. Trump may not be a reader, but he is an editor. His second term may be the reshoot. The tighter cut. The final render.
And yet, if there is no resistance to Trumpism within the United States, it may be because there is no longer a language for one. The Democrats, the centrists, the late-night satirists, the blue-chip donors, the foundations, the New York Times, they don’t oppose Trumpism. They mirror it in reverse. They believe, like he does, that politics is optics. That the state is a performance. That if only the right people were in charge of the algorithm, things would return to normal. But Trumpism has already destroyed the concept of normal. It isn’t a deviation. It’s the system, laid bare.
Trumpism cannot be resisted from within the spectacle. It must be remembered from outside it.
This is why resistance, if it exists at all, cannot be American. Not in origin. Not in imagination. It has to come from elsewhere, from the long memory of Europe. Not from the EU, or NATO, or the technocratic liberalism that abandoned its citizens to austerity and xenophobia. But from something older. Something the Trumpists want but can never possess.
Because what Trumpism ultimately craves is not democracy but myth. Not the Constitution but the Crown. Not the vote, but the bloodline. Trump doesn’t want to be president. He wants to be patriarch. Emperor. Caesar. His followers do not cheer for policy. They cheer for presence. For gold and eagles and salutes. They want majesty without meaning.
And this is where Europe becomes dangerous, not as a model, but as a memory. Because we killed our kings. We decapitated them, shot them in basements, stripped them of their divinity. Not always at once. Not always well. But we ended the lineage. The pageantry still exists, but the magic has gone. We know what monarchy looks like after the myth has collapsed. Trump doesn’t.
But Europe’s memory is no simple antidote. It remembers resistance—but also collaboration, fascist revival, the bureaucratised violence of Frontex and fortress borders. History is a warning, not a guarantee.
What Europe offers, then, is not resistance in the American sense—a counter-narrative, a better policy platform—but a cultural sabotage. A memory of what happens when power is unmasked. The guillotine still haunts the modern. Not as instrument, but as idea. Trumpism wants to restore the sacred. But Europe remembers what sacred power smells like when it rots.
The danger to Trumpism is not liberalism. It is history.
And that history cannot be streamed. It cannot be merchandised. It cannot be resolved by branding. Which is perhaps why the American spectacle, for all its noise, feels so brittle. It dreams of a grandeur it never had, while the memory of those who did still lingers, on the streets of Paris, in the broken palaces of Berlin, in the bones of Petrograd. Trump wants a dynasty. Europe remembers what it means to end one.
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