When Donald Trump took the podium after the dramatic arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, it seemed he had finally achieved his dream of directing his own 80s action movie. Packed with all the tropes of the era’s belligerent cinema, Trump’s press conference was a celebration of American might triumphing over a “dark and deadly” foreign adversary.
Given Trump’s rise to prominence during the ego-fueled 1980s, it’s no surprise that his foreign policy increasingly emulates that decade’s macho action films. Led by the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Chuck Norris, these movies were about restoring America’s self-image after the national debacle of Vietnam. Unilateralism was the order of the day, with lone meathead heroes serving up American righteousness to hordes of anonymous foreign goons.
With Trumpian Republicanism pushing this cartoonish worldview to even more extreme levels, the president is reverting to the natural frame of reference to package up his adventurism in digestible, memeable form. He’s hardly the first politician to lean on pop culture – after the 1985 Hezbollah hostage crisis, Ronald Reagan once said he could take some pointers from Rambo. But Trump trumps him for shamelessness, having literally tweeted a picture of himself as Rocky.
Whether Trump is sincerely living out his own inner fantasies is up for debate. His actual movie tastes remain a mystery, though he has previously championed the 80s action classic Bloodsport as an “incredible, fantastic movie.” This impatience with anything too cerebral aligns with his reported habit of fast-forwarding through boring bits to pare films down to 45 minutes max.
The would-be Badass-in-Chief still has work to do to fully embody 80s action hero cool, however. His incontinent blatherings on Truth Social and at the podium lack the hollow-point devastation of a Schwarzenegger quip. Perhaps the Trump years are best seen as a supercharged return to the reverberating sleaze, corruption and paranoia of 70s cinema. Venezuela as a distraction from Epstein, anyone?
Regardless, as Trump tuned in to the live feed of the Caracas raid, he could lap up his own private action blow-out, declaring: “You might never get to see it, but it was an incredible thing to see.” With Greenland now on his radar, the next installment in the Trump action franchise could be just around the corner.