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Hi, Abe. My wife's crazy, too |
In 1939, director Frank
Capra made a movie, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” in which a starry-eyed
idealist (played by Jimmy Stewart) in love with democracy runs up against the
forces of greed, corruption, hypocrisy – you name it – as a fledgling Senator
from an unnamed state out west.
Smith’s first name is
Jefferson, but his idol is Abe Lincoln; he gets choked up just by gawking at
the Lincoln Memorial (“Gee whiz,” he splutters. “That’s Mr. Lincoln, there he
is.”) He’s read all the storybooks, and he arrives in our capitol brandishing
the childlike notion that “There’s no compromise with the truth.”
In the famous filibuster
sequence, Smith proclaims that “Men should hold it (liberty) up in front of
them every single day of their lives,” to a blasé body of colleagues. They
eventually get up and leave, and Smith is left talking to just the President of
the Senate and the audience in the gallery. It looks like one of those lost
causes that Joseph Paine, the other, senior Senator from Smith’s state, used to
say were the only causes worth fighting for. But when Smith finally passes out
from exhaustion, Paine breaks down and confesses his complicity with the corrupt
powers-that-be. In the end, Smith is triumphant (although comatose).
Could such a movie be made
today? Sure, with a few changes.
In “Mr. Trump Goes to
Washington,” a naïve (“Nobody knew it was so complicated”) young man of 70
comes to Washington with the determination to do big – yuge – things (“Make America great again”).
Just as Mr. Smith’s
primary objective is to build a camp for boys, Mr. Trump’s is to build something,
too: a wall. And just as Smith’s dream project is stymied at every turn, so is
Mr. Trump’s – first by the recalcitrant Mexican government, then by those pesky
budget constraints.
Even so, Mr. Trump has a
fine time in the White House, signing executive orders and holding them up for
everyone to see, and firing off tweets in the early-morning hours to entertain
his base. (Smith, too, represented the common man.)
Mr. Trump admires Lincoln,
also. “He was a man of great intelligence, which most presidents would be” he
enthuses. “But he was a man of great intelligence, but he was also a man that
did something that was a very vital thing to do at that time. Ten years before
or twenty years before, what he was doing would never even have been thought
possible. So he did something that was a very important thing to do, and
especially at that time.”
Like Jefferson Smith,
Donald J. Trump is a man who will not give up. When the wall looks as if it
will not get off the ground, he takes his lost cause to the people. At a rally
somewhere, he rails at length against the dishonest media and the lies that are
sabotaging his project. “The wall will be a beautiful thing,” he tells the
crowd. “It will be a great wall, the greatest wall in the history of the world,
the Great Wall of Trump…”
As Trump rhapsodizes, he
suddenly keels over, from a testosterone overload. As he is carried from the
podium, his fans pledge to send in their nickels, dimes and quarters. Mr. Trump
will get his wall, as Mr. Smith gets his camp for boys.
While the director of this
remake might have to pay handsomely for a star of Jimmy Stewart’s magnitude, on
the other hand he’ll save on casting for Mr. Trump’s love interest. That would
be Mr. Trump.
