Watch Donald Trump Talk About the Loneliness of 'Citizen Kane' In An Old Interview
Donald Trump identifies with the protagonist of Citizen Kane — though he doesn’t seem to have learned much from him. In a fascinating interview that was shot around 15 years ago by documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, the future Republican presidential candidate shared his interpretation of, and personal connection to, Orson Welles’ 1941 masterpiece. The clip, edited together by Morris with scenes from Citizen Kane, has recently been making the rounds again online (thanks to writers at Slate and New York Times Magazine). Watch it above.
At times, Trump’s discussion of the film —about the rise and fall of fictional newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane — is surprisingly thoughtful. “The table getting larger and larger and larger, with he and his wife getting further and further apart as he got wealthier and wealthier — perhaps I can understand that,” he says of one of the film’s most famous images. “In real life, I believe that wealth does in fact isolate you from other people. It’s a protective mechanism. “
At other times, his interpretation of Citizen Kane seems downright bizarre. Trump describes the lead character’s “great rise” and “modest fall,” as if the entire film weren’t about how Kane’s overwhelming hubris destroyed his life. And even in this brief interview, Trump’s view of women shines through. He describes Kane’s marriage as bad for him and not quite so bad for his wife — “there were benefits for her” — a character who is so miserable in the film that she tries to kill herself. Either way, Trump seems to place a whole lot of blame for Kane’s torment on his married life. When asked by Morris what advice he’d give Kane, Trump immediately says, “Get yourself a different woman.”
Throughout this election cycle, many people have drawn comparisons between Trump and the fictional Kane. If his conversation with Morris is any indication, Trump didn’t take the film’s greater lessons to heart — but then again, he’s not one for introspection. As the candidate told his own biographer in 2014 (in quotes that were recently unearthed by the New York Times) “I don’t like to analyze myself because I might not like what I see.”
Morris put together the Trump/Citizen Kane clip after filming the businessman for an interview that was used in Morris’s 2002 Academy Awards ceremony short (the final version features Trump talking about King Kong). An archived page on Morris’ website says that the Kane conversation was supposed to be part of a larger project, called the Movie Movie, in which notable figures (including former Soviet Union president Mikhail Gorbachev, also interviewed for the Oscar short) are placed into films they admire. That project was abandoned, but Morris has since called his mini-Trump/Kane movie “one of the best things I’ve ever done.”
“I actually wanted to publish it in the New York Times [during election season], but the circumstances under which I did that movie made me vulnerable to a lawsuit and at this point in my career, I don’t want to go there,” Morris told Collider earlier this month. “But it’s amazing…. What’s interesting is that Citizen Kane was meant as an anti-fascist/anti-capitalist melodrama and for Donald Trump it becomes just another kind of misogynistic claim that misses the point.”