Trump’s Fight to Win: A Review of Trump’s Rosebud – The American Spectator

If someone from a foreign country, or maybe another planet, asked you to recommend a truly objective and insightful documentary film on former President Donald Trump, what would you suggest? I would be stumped. Or at least I would have been until I watched Robert Orlando’s new film, Trump’s Rosebud.

Full disclosure — I know Orlando. He and I worked together on The Divine Plan, his film on Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and the end of the Cold War. I already knew that he did excellent work. But that said, Trump’s Rosebud might be his most impressive work, given the sheer overwhelming task of trying to put together a genuinely objective and yet insightful documentary film on the creature that is Trump, a man who most either love or hate. Few people hate Reagan and John Paul II, but Trump is as detested as he is loved.

How can a filmmaker fairly capture that man?

Orlando Pursues an Objective Understanding of Trump

In pursuit of his goal, Orlando interviewed a cast of experts, all of them conservatives. A liberal will immediately wince, assuming that means the film is biased to the right, except that it isn’t. One of the interviewees, for instance, is Bill Barr, whom Trump supporters have come to loathe. And even though all of them are conservatives, they’re clearly much more capable of trying to objectively understand Trump than a group of emotional liberals could. These are a bunch of conservatives candidly assessing the unique animal that is Trump, interviewed one by one and interwoven in a cohesive story with beautiful cinematography, black-and-white imagery, and creative sound. The documentary, overall, is visually and intellectually captivating. (READ MORE: The Magical Thinking of Never Trump)

Robert Orlando also interviewed Sebastian Gorka, Rachel Bovard, Steve Deace, Newsmax’s John Bachman, and The American Spectator’s own R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., and Jeffrey Lord. The starting point for all, and the beginning of Orlando’s search, is Trump’s self-admitted favorite film: Orson Welles’ epic Citizen Kane. 

Yes, that is Trump’s favorite film. Think about that. Let that sink in.

That film, of course, starts and ends with Charles Foster Kane’s beloved “Rosebud.” The film is about the quest of an investigative reporter to figure out just what was the cryptic “Rosebud.” We find out partly, but, in a deeper sense, never really. Orlando, whose favorite film likewise is Citizen Kane, tries to get to the true Trump, taking you along his personal cinematic odyssey. Like the viewers of Citizen Kane, the viewers of Trump’s Rosebud might never fully figure out Trump’s own enigmatic Rosebud, but they will be pulled in nonetheless. Like Welles’ film, Orlando’s is hard to stop watching.

Trump Is a Fighter

I’ll leave that journey to each of you who will watch the film, but several things stood out to me that I believe bear on where Trump stands now and going into 2024.

Barr, Trump’s former attorney general, offers very insightful comments throughout the film. He is often sympathetic to Trump’s travails though also, at times, critical. He notes that Trump felt that he, as president, was being falsely accused and victimized by an unfair political investigation. His critics need to realize that. It fueled Trump. At the same time, Barr criticizes Trump as a “very petty man…. It’s all about him.” 

That’s Donald Trump. He’s indeed all about him. That also explains why Trump never backs down.

Barr notes that Trump is someone who must win. He saw himself, and does still, as locked in mortal combat with his opponents. Or, as Barr puts it, what makes Trump “feel fully alive is being locked in a contest with an enemy, an opponent where the most important thing for him in any transaction is to get the better of the person who’s sitting on the other side of the table. He must win that day.”

Love or loathe him — and this is what his biggest fans love about him — Trump is a fighter, as relentless as the left-wing enemies who keep pursuing him. They punch him night and day, and he punches right back. You would think he would be worn out, but he’s ready to outlast them. He’s going 15 rounds. (READ MORE: Gingrich to Levin: Trump Is Getting the Last Laugh)

We saw the seeds of this in 2016. Trump’s enemy then was “the Swamp,” “the Establishment,” and “Crooked Hillary.” Trump took them on as the fighting outsider, which folks outside the Swamp, the Establishment, and the big cities reveled in. They cheered his every swing.

In 2016, notes Rachel Bovard, the senior director of policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute, this helped explain “why Hillary Clinton was going to be ineffective against him and why … all of the Republicans were ineffective against him. And that was because he’s not a creature of the political system.” The outsider took on not only Washington but the liberal New York media, which became obsessive in its hatred of him: “The media spawned him as much as the media hates him and wants to destroy him,” observes Bovard. “He’s their creation to a very great extent, and it’s vice versa. He is also propping them up. I mean, the minute Trump left office, you saw the ratings drop for CNN, for MSNBC … for these networks that made themselves around Trump drama.”

They couldn’t get enough of kicking Trump. And when he kicked back, they cried foul and grew angrier. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. When partisan “journalists” went after President George W. Bush, a defeatist Bush turned the other cheek and left office with the lowest approval ratings of any president since Jimmy Carter.

Says Bovard, “What attracts people to Trump is that he would sort of flip off the media … and spar with them.” More than one person interviewed in the film describe Trump as giving the proverbial “middle finger” to the media, to Washington, to the Establishment. He went into the Swamp swinging. 

“This is why,” insists Gorka, “he had to be destroyed.” He was too “uncontrollable.” He was different. “He’s a citizen, not a politician.” Citizen Trump.

They Won’t Bring Trump Down

It was Trump vs. the Swamp.

“These people came out of the swamp with teeth and fangs and claws,” says Bovard. “And they turned on an elected president in ways that we’ve never seen before. You saw the institutions of government turn out against a democratically elected president and say, ‘No, no voters, you’re not in charge. We’re in charge.’”

That’s where we are now, where progressives who bark about “democracy” are obsessed with keeping Trump off 2024 ballots. They’re trying to tell voters no. They will be in charge of whether Trump is on the ballot.

Trump, however, wants them to know that he’s still in charge, and they are not going to knock him down.

“You’re just not going to bring him down,” observes Barr. “He will keep marching ahead, and that’s an admirable trait…. [A]nyone else would be curled up under the bed with the kind of crap that he had to take on a daily basis.”

In the end, that fighting tenacity might well be Trump’s Rosebud, the key to figuring him out in the past and going forward into 2024. He has decided that he must win. He is not going to permit his left-wing enemies to beat him. For “Citizen Trump,” that is the objective. 

Orlando closes his film by saying that your happy ending, should you want it, depends on where you stop your story. That was certainly true for Kane, whose story ended tragically. How will it end for Trump? Orlando is leaving that judgment not to the filmmaker or the viewer but to a history that remains to be seen. 

In the journey of Citizen Trump, we are all spectators.