Trump Confuses Actual Life with Scenes from Hollywood Movies and TV Shows A LotSearchSubscribeMy BookmarksEntertainmentStyleFoodDrinksSportsLifestyleNews & PoliticsArchiveNewsletterAbout UsFollowOther EditionsYour Privacy ChoicesPrivacy NoticeTerms Of UseSkip to ContentEntertainmentStyleLifestyleShoppingNews & PoliticsSubscribesign inSearch'The White Lotus' Is BackSeth Rogen is the BossBest Single Blade RazorsBest Sketches From SNL50The Best Button-Down EverGetty ImagesNewsDoes Trump Think This Is All a Movie?Does Trump Think This Is All a Movie?Just a working theory.By Erin Gloria RyanPublished: Oct 24, 2024 12:51 PM EDTSave ArticleThis article contains spoilers from the 1978 horror/adventure film Jaws 2. Also from 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs. Oh, and The Purge.There was a telling moment during Donald Trump’s debate with Kamala Harris last month. (There were many telling moments, in fact, most of which were telling us that Trump, mentally, is trying to play poker with a deck of Uno cards.) But one that got lost somewhere among the laughs about “They’re eating the pets!” was when Trump argued with moderator David Muir right after that.Recall that Trump claimed, falsely, in a moment that has since become a meme, that “in Springfield, Ohio, they’re eating the pets.” Muir fact-checked him, saying that ABC had reached out to the city manager of Springfield, who responded, “There have been no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.” Then Trump shot back, “The people on television are saying, ‘My dog was taken! And used for food!’ So maybe he said that, and maybe that’s a good thing to say for a city manager.” Over Trump, Muir said, “I’m not taking this from television. I’m taking it from the city manager.” Trump continued shouting. “But the people on television are saying that their dog was eaten by the people that went there!” Related StorySure Took The NYT Long Enough!For a while now it’s been clear that Trump is, mentally, not all there, but this was the moment when a theory coalesced in my mind. The New York Times finally acknowledged his decompensation–a fact that brought a modicum of brightness to the day of my Esquire colleague Charles P. Pierce. Ezra Klein joined the grand tradition of armchair-psychologizing Trump and decided the former president’s problem–or superpower–is his disinhibition. There’s the question of age, of course: Trump’s speech is undoubtedly similar to the speech of a person experiencing age-related cognitive decline. He rambles. He lies. He straight-up invents things. He recounts imaginary conversations between leaders of countries that don’t exist. He fantasizes about Arnold Palmer’s giant hog. He turns what was supposed to be a town hall with voters into a forty-minute DJ set  punctuated by arhythmic dancing, as confused rallygoers attempt to act like they know the dance, like lapsed Catholics attending mass after the pope has changed a bunch of things around and they no longer know when they’re supposed to sit and stand and say “Amen.” He gets confused about the gender of a sitting governor, of a right-wing influencer. Et cetera. Related StoryTrump’s Weird Little DJ Set Explains A LotBut I think something else might be going on. There may be another dimension to the “Trump’s brain is as smooth as a putting green at the Masters” chorus: Not only is his mind going, but he also appears unable to tell the difference between reality and storylines that he’s seen in a movie or on TV.This month, Trump suggested that a long-term solution to the problem of shoplifting might be “like one real rough, nasty day” or “one hour, and I mean real rough, the word will get out and it will end immediately. End immediately. You know, it’ll end immediately.” Observers were quick to point out that this is the exact plot of a franchise of lowest-common-denominator movies known as The Purge. I don’t know if Trump has seen The Purge or any of the other films in the Purge-iverse. But doesn’t he seem like the sort of guy who would watch a movie like The Purge and take from it that the purge was good, actually?Trump has been doing this for years. Back in 2019, he claimed, to the bewilderment of onlookers, that human traffickers were smuggling women across the border with duct tape on their mouths, and that evidence of Islamic terrorists crossing the southern border by land was rampant. He repeated this story a few times over the course of a few weeks, with different details each time. Fact checkers could find no evidence that this scenario had actually happened or was actually happening–but movie buffs might have recognized both plot points from the 2018 stinker about which the less said the better, Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado.I’ve been keeping a mental list of these moments during which nobody can quite figure out what the fuck he’s on about, and I can’t help but notice that they often resemble scenes in movies. The harrowing helicopter ride that Trump apparently made up? The one where Trump says then–San Francisco mayor Willie Brown confessed “terrible things” about Kamala Harris? The ride that Brown says never happened? Could it have been a hazy mashup memory of that scene from Almost Famous where band members confess their darkest secrets as their airplane goes down? Related Story Putting the “Hell” in Helicopter RideNow that I’m looking for them, I see these moments everywhere. That part of the debate when Trump said that “illegal aliens” were getting gender-affirming surgeries in prison? Homelander said something like that on The Boys. (Great show, by the way.)The bizarre tangent from the summer when Trump recounted a conversation with a man (who may or may not exist) lamenting an imagined law that requires all boats to have electric batteries (which definitely doesn’t exist)? And this subsequent statement (and I urge you to let me know in the comments if you understand any of it, because I sure as hell do not):“So I said, ‘Let me ask you a question, and [the guy who makes boats in South Carolina] said, ‘Nobody ever asked this question,’ and it must be because of MIT, my relationship to MIT—very smart. He goes, I say, ‘What would happen if the boat sank from its weight? And you’re in the boat and you have this tremendously powerful battery and the battery is now underwater and there’s a shark that’s approximately ten yards over there?’ ”He then went off on another tangent alluding to the fact that there were a lot of shark attacks because the sharks were angry, before returning to the original tangent.“So I said, so there’s a shark ten yards away from the boat, ten yards or here, do I get electrocuted if the boat is sinking? Water goes over the battery, the boat is sinking. Do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted, or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted? Because I will tell you, he didn’t know the answer. He said, ‘You know, nobody’s ever asked me that question.” I said, ‘I think it’s a good question.’ I think there’s a lot of electric current coming through that water. But you know what I’d do if there was a shark or you get electrocuted, I’ll take electrocution every single time. I’m not getting near the shark. So we’re going to end that.”Could that all be a reference to Jaws 2, in which the shark is (I told you there'd be spoilers!) killed by being tricked into biting a submerged electrical cable? Or a scene from Rambo: First Blood Part II where Rambo is tortured via underwater shocks? Could there be a little bit of the original Jaws mixed in there? Did he watch a film about the horror that befell the crew of the USS Indianapolis? I might have to take a look at Mar-a-Lago’s Roku search history to find out. In a Tucker Carlson appearance, Trump went off about the Panama Canal, noting how many people died from mosquito bites during its construction and how it was one of the nine–or seven—wonders of the world. “You know, he says, ‘Nine wonders of the world.’ You could make nine wonders. He would’ve been better off if he stuck with the nine and just said, ‘Yeah, I think it’s nine.’ ” The unnamed “he” in that quote is probably President Joe Biden, who once famously gaffed that there were nine wonders of the world. However, Biden’s misquote was in reference to the Grand Canyon, not the Panama Canal. Could Trump’s Panama Canal factoid have come from a recent viewing of a certain Morgan Freeman–narrated IMAX film about the canal? Or is it possible Trump was up late one night switching between Newsmax and the History channel, as old men are so wont to do? There’s his newish obsession with “the late, great Hannibal Lecter,” whom Trump references with gusto. In this case, the only plausible explanation is that he is experiencing a multi-layered fantasy, both assuming incorrectly that the insane asylum where Lecter is kept in The Silence of the Lambs is a real place and confusing the definition of “asylum” the place with “asylum” the legal status offered to people who face danger and persecution in their home countries. Trump believes that “migrants are seeking asylum” means that the crazy guy down the hall from Lecter who hisses that he “can smell [Jodie Foster’s] cunt” is crossing the southern border thanks to Kamala Harris. This is an absurd thing to suggest, since as far as I know, Harris doesn’t even have a producer credit on Lambs. Donald Trump has never wanted to serve his country; he’s always wanted to be a star. He’s now turned America into his film set. He gives jobs to people who look like they’d play a guy in a movie about the government. He hand-picks advisers and surrogates from Fox News appearances, like a great-aunt who took an Ambien and turned on QVC just in time for the Turquoise Spectacular. He became president because enough Americans watched him pretend to be a successful businessman on the reality-TV program The Apprentice. But now, as the thread connecting his wild mind to reality frays, it seems like his brain believes not only that he is acting-directing the biggest, most tremendous film of all time but that other films and TV shows he’s seen are part of his own cinematic universe. I hope, for all of our sakes, that he hasn’t yet seen Alex Garland’s Civil War (now streaming on Max and, perhaps, in the addled mind of a former president near you).Related StoryQuiz: How Well Do You Remember The Trump Years?Watch Next Advertisement - Continue Reading BelowNewsFederal Workers Don’t Exactly Grow on TreesMexico Might Sue Google Over “Gulf of America”How Will SCOTUS Respond to This Trump Request?DOGE’s Latest IRS Maneuver Is, Flatly, AppallingAdvertisement - Continue Reading BelowThese Book Bans Sure Seem Effective!The Trump Administration Can’t Lie Out of ThisWhat in the Mitch McConnell Is Going On?!Wing Nuts in Idaho Are More Wing-Nutty Than EverElon Musk Has Dealt the CFPB a Dishonorable DeathDemocrats Dunked on Marjorie Taylor GreeneWell, That Was Transcendentally WeirdHow Do Young Men See the World? 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More like, confusing his country with 1940s Germany.... 