It’s a conservative trope that Hollywood hates Trump, Republicans, and all they hold dear. But we still get movies with fundamentally Trump-y themes animating them. Consider what we might call the ‘bad hombres’ genre:
- Silent Night, in which a (white) man seeks vengeance against (Latino) gangsters in southern California after they kill his son
- Peppermint, which has the same plot except it stars Jennifer Garner
- Brawl in Cell Block 99, in which some bad, multicultural gangsters try to ruin Vince Vaughn’s life because he’s prudent and ethically grounded (apparently its studio has a populist bent)
- …probably others I haven’t seen (ChatGPT suggests The Marksman, Rambo: Last Blood, and Sicario).
On the one hand, there’s something unseemly about both sneering at these concerns and then seeking to profit from them. On the other, these stories were in our mythos when Trump descended the escalator.
(Personally I prefer movies like The Forever Purge and The Hunt, which approach the same material with a more sociological eye. The Purge movies in particular, I think, are likely to be remembered as more effectively zeitgeist-y than either the bad hombres movies or the Civil War.)