Behold the Trump voter. In "American Chaos," a textured documentary from Sony Pictures Classics opening Friday, we discover the many reasons older, mostly white voters give for choosing an older man with baggage over an older women with issues of her own.
The film opens with a montage of every American presidential matchup from 1912 (Teddy Roosevelt/Taft/Wilson) through Obama/Romney. Filmmaker Jim Stern delivers his painful observations with a quip. "I'm from Chicago. My heart is in Chicago. Every time I return here, I'm home. I grew up in a political family, Cook County Democrats in a one-party town."
As Stern glumly observes, the 2016 presidential election between Donald J. Trump and Hillary Rodham Clinton came pre-rigged, due to the candidates' means of acquiring wealth and an indelible public image. Trump had hosted his nighttime NBC reality show with its famous tag-line "You're fired!" for years. There he stockpiled viewer chits, votes of appreciation from Americans who felt that their pride in the American way of life had been cheapened by Obama and "Crooked Hillary."
Stern delivers a gallery of Trump voter faces straight out of Diane Arbus. These Trump supporters seem to feel his bio is a kind of blueprint for the restoration of America. They view "illegal immigrants" as "foreign invaders," akin to "killer bees" once heading this way from Latin America. My quibble with his film is it's not quite enough to effectively refute Trump's "big lie." Stern should have elaborated on a couple of beats that go by too quickly. Former President Ronald Reagan's son Ron appears briefly as a liberal talk host. Young Reagan's career arc, as a Yale dropout, professional ballet dancer, TV talk star, prominent American atheist and Reagan family biographer, would in a sane universe lead to a major White House candidacy. Here he's dismissed in a nanosecond as part of the small army of MSNBC commentators who didn't see the Trump wave coming.
"American Chaos" is a sample of the alienated, mostly white voter base that helped put us in our present peril. It's a start, but as the film reveals, the age of Trump is with us for a reason. The pertinent questions are: For how long? And which exit can we take?