A working hypothesis, an open letter, and a request for reader submissions
There is a mistake we keep making when we talk about Donald Trump.
We insist on treating him as a political anomaly, a freak accident, an alien presence dropped into the machinery of state. We analyze him with the tools of constitutional law, economics, and political science, and then act surprised when those tools fail to explain either his behavior or his appeal.
But Trump is not an anomaly. He is a genre character.
And like all genre characters, he did not emerge from nowhere. He was written—slowly, unconsciously, across decades—by movies, television, late-night cable, hotel-room dinners eaten in silence, and the glow of a very large screen viewed from a very comfortable reclining chair.
This is not metaphor. This is method.
I want to propose something both simpler and stranger:
The Trump presidency is best understood as the output of fifty years of cinematic intake, metabolized into executive instinct.
Not ideology. Not theory. Narrative reflex.
And I want you, the reader, to help map it.
This article is an open forensic file. A first pass. A call for annotations. Because once you start looking at Trump not as a politician but as a viewer who finally got to step into the screen, things snap into a disturbing kind of focus.
1. Preparation Montage: “Daymn, I Need to Prep for This Job”
At some point—maybe consciously, maybe not—Trump appears to have decided that the presidency was not something you studied.
It was something you absorbed.
Not from briefing books. From vibes. From tone. From characters who act while institutions dither. From men who bypass process because process is weak, corrupt, or boring.
In cinema, the hero never waits for committee approval.
In cinema, legitimacy comes after decisive action.
In cinema, the world is saved by someone who ignores the rules everyone else is too timid to break.
That is not a political philosophy. That is a screenwriting rule.
And once you see it, you start noticing the fingerprints everywhere.
2. Recent Watches: Disaster, Cartel, and the Blofeld Phase
Let’s start with the most recent layer—the films whose DNA seems freshest.
Greenland (2020)
The disaster movie as worldview.
Greenland is not about saving everyone. It is about saving the right people. Systems fail. Governments triage. Bunkers matter. Access is everything. Morality becomes logistical.
This maps uncomfortably well onto Trump-era instincts:
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Catastrophe is inevitable.
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Institutions will collapse.
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Survival belongs to those who plan, pay, or push.
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Empathy is a luxury item.
This is not cruelty for its own sake. It’s disaster realism, filtered through a cinematic lens where the hero’s family survives because he moves faster and harder than everyone else.
Sicario (2015)
The border as moral fog.
Sicario teaches a very specific lesson: legality is decorative. Power is exercised in the dark. Borders are not lines; they are pressure zones. Violence is not a failure of policy—it is the policy.
The film’s worldview is bleak, procedural, and authoritarian in affect:
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The system is already dirty.
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Innocence is a liability.
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Winning requires becoming worse than your enemy, quietly.
Trump doesn’t quote Sicario. He acts like someone who internalized it.
The Daniel Craig Bond Era
This is important.
Classic Bond was camp. Craig’s Bond is grievance, trauma, and brutal necessity. Institutions are compromised. MI6 is outdated. Committees get in the way. Villains speak in the language of order and inevitability.
And somewhere along the way, Trump’s policies start to smell less like conservatism and more like Blofeld with a press office:
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Shadowy globalists
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Personal vendettas
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Loyalty over competence
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The sense that the world is run by hidden boards, councils, and elites
Which makes the idea of a literal “Peace Board” less absurd than it should be.
3. Mid-Career Influences: Competence Porn and Vengeance Fantasies
Taken (2008)
The dad who cuts through bureaucracy.
Taken is pure fantasy for people who believe the system has failed them:
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Police are useless.
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Diplomacy is slow.
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The only thing that works is personal threat escalation.
This is governance as a phone call that ends with “good luck.”
The Accountant (2016)
Order through controlled violence.
This one’s quieter but telling. It fetishizes competence, secrecy, and moral arithmetic. You do bad things so the books balance. You remove problems surgically. You don’t explain.
That maps neatly onto Trump’s fixation with “strong people,” “killers,” and “very tough guys”—not as criminals, but as effective operators.
Early Steven Seagal
Let’s be honest.
The fantasy of a man who:
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Knows things you don’t
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Has a code
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Acts alone
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Is underestimated but lethal
That’s been in the Trump mythos since the ’90s.
Tarantino
Not the dialogue—the revenge structure.
Enemies must be humiliated. Scores must be settled publicly. Mercy is weakness. Justice is theatrical.
4. Deep Canon: Bourne, Clancy, and the Fall of Process
The Bourne Trilogy
Institutions lie. Paper trails kill. The protagonist survives by burning the system down.
Bourne is especially important because it frames bureaucracy itself as the villain. Files, analysts, oversight—these are tools of oppression, not safeguards.
Sound familiar?
Tom Clancy (Harrison Ford Era)
The decent man trapped in a corrupt machine.
Clancy’s presidents are reluctant heroes. The CIA is shady. The military is noble. Politicians are weak. Action restores legitimacy.
Trump skips the reluctance phase but keeps the fantasy.
White House Has Fallen
This one matters more than critics admit.
It’s about the symbolic violation of power—and its restoration by force. The White House as a fortress under siege. The state saved by one man willing to do what others can’t.
This is not subtle influence. This is aspirational imagery.
5. Television as Moral Formation: Breaking Bad and The Godfather
Breaking Bad
“I did it for the family.”
This is the rationalization engine.
You start bad. You tell yourself it’s temporary. Then you discover you’re good at it. Then you decide the ends justify the methods. Then you become the thing you swore you weren’t.
Trump doesn’t mirror Walter White psychologically—but he mirrors the logic of self-justification:
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I’m the only one who can fix this.
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They forced my hand.
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Look what they made me do.
The Godfather
Power is personal. Loyalty is everything. Betrayal is unforgivable. Legitimacy is inherited, not earned.
And yes—this is where the “Fredo” jokes probably came from. You don’t need to speculate much to see how family dynamics and cinematic mafia logic blur together.
6. What’s Missing: Europe, Process, and Ordinary Competence
Notice what isn’t in the library.
Almost no European films—unless Americans are rescuing Europeans from their own incompetence.
No stories about:
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Functional bureaucracy
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Incremental improvement
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Boring but effective governance
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Coalition-building without domination
In Trump’s cinematic universe, Europe exists mostly as:
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A dependency
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A punchline
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A place that needs saving—or scolding
This isn’t xenophobia so much as narrative exclusion. If it’s not in the movie, it’s not real.
7. Why This Matters (And Why It’s Dangerous)
If you treat politics as cinema:
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You prioritize spectacle over stability.
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You confuse decisiveness with wisdom.
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You assume legitimacy follows action, rather than constrains it.
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You mistake institutions for props.
And worst of all:
You start believing that history has a runtime and a third act where everything resolves.
It doesn’t.
States don’t fade to black. They accumulate damage.
8. A Request to the Reader
This is where you come in.
I want your submissions:
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Films I missed
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Shows you recognize in the posture, language, or decisions
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Specific scenes that feel eerily familiar
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Genres that explain reactions better than ideology ever could
Because this isn’t about Trump alone.
It’s about what happens when a media-saturated generation finally gets the levers of power—and governs not from theory, but from muscle memory learned in the dark.
History books didn’t prepare him.
But the movies did.
And that should worry us more than it has.
T H E P E A C E B O A R D
Now what the heck is this?
Seen plainly, it sounds absurd: a vaguely defined, quasi-institutional council, chaired by a former president, gesturing toward global order without the ballast of existing legitimacy. But if you stop trying to read it as policy and instead read it as cinema, it snaps into coherence.
The Peace Board is not an organization. It is a final-act device.
This is the synthesis of everything that came before: the disaster bunker logic of Greenland, the shadow governance of Sicario, the grievance-soaked sovereignty of Craig-era Bond, the Clancy fantasy of decisive men rescuing the state from its own weakness. It is the boardroom version of the villain’s lair—except the villain, in this narrative, believes himself to be the only adult left in the room.
Picture it properly.
Not as a committee with bylaws, but as a table. Heavy. Polished. Dimly lit. The kind of table where history is “handled,” not debated. Around it sit men who have seen things, done things, paid for things. There are no activists here, no civil servants, no process people. Just survivors, operators, patrons.
And at the head: the elderly statesman Blofeld archetype. The action hero who aged into command.
The man who doesn’t run anymore—but decides.
This figure is crucial. Cinema has trained us to read age not as decline, but as accumulated menace. The older villain is more dangerous because he has already won once. He doesn’t threaten; he reminds. He speaks softly about order, stability, inevitability.
“This is not a man to trifle with.”
That line matters. It’s pure genre.
In these films, peace is never democratic. Peace is imposed by those willing to make hard choices while others wring their hands. The Peace Board is the fantasy that the messy world can be stabilized if you just remove it from the public square and put it back into a closed room with the “right” people.
Notice what the Peace Board does rhetorically:
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It bypasses the UN without explicitly attacking it.
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It replaces legitimacy with gravitas.
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It reframes peace not as reconciliation, but as management.
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It turns global conflict into a corporate turnaround problem.
This is The Accountant scaled up to geopolitics. Balance the books. Cut losses. Neutralize volatility. If that requires force, secrecy, or moral shortcuts, so be it. The spreadsheet must close.
And here’s the most cinematic part: Trump as the reluctant final boss who insists he’s actually the guardian.
In these stories, the villain and the savior often share the same skillset. What separates them is narrative framing. Trump’s self-conception—whether sincere or performative—aligns perfectly with this trope: I’m the only one strong enough to hold this together, and everyone else is either corrupt or naïve.
The Peace Board is not about peace. It’s about control in a world imagined as permanently on the brink.
That’s why it resonates with a certain audience. It speaks the language they already know. It feels like the end of the movie where the chaos finally stops—not because justice prevailed, but because someone took responsibility and locked the doors.
The danger, of course, is that real history does not end after the credits. There is no sequel reset. Institutions hollowed out in the name of decisive order do not magically reconstitute themselves.
The Peace Board is cinema attempting to overwrite civics. A closing montage pitched as governance.
And that is why it feels so uncanny. Not because it’s unprecedented—but because we’ve all seen this movie before.