The box office barnstormer of 2026 arrived early this year. A sleazy banana-republic dictator flooding the American streets with blow. The over-the-border Delta Force extraction squad sent to pluck this schmo out of his impregnable fortress. The bronzed tough-talker who’s firing an RPG up the tailpipe of the international rules-based order – but who gets the job done. Call it: Caracas Thunder.
Sounds like a bit of a throwback, you might be thinking. But, judging by his press conference after the US military’s abduction of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, Donald Trump seemed to have finally achieved his dream of directing his own 80s action movie.
Trump packed in the important tropes. It had been “dark and deadly” out there in the field – but American kickassery prevailed easily. Why settle for just one staple 80s action bogeymen – the tinpot authoritarian (Commando; Missing in Action) or the cartel kingpin (Lethal Weapon; Cobra) – when Maduro, now perp-walking for global audiences, could double up as both? And we never knew it, but it turns out Operation Absolute Resolve is part of a franchise brought to you by Donald J Trump Productions: “We’ve done some other good ones, like the attacks on Soleimani and al-Baghdadi, and the obliteration and decimation of the Iran nuclear sites,” the US president pointed out.
Given that Trump rose to full prominence during the ego joyride of the 1980s, it’s no shock that his foreign policy is donning its headband and emulating that decade’s belligerent cinema. Led by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris and assorted lesser beefcakes, 80s action films were about buffing America’s self-image again after the national debacle of Vietnam (and the depressing corps of movies on that subject). The likes of Commando, the Rambo sequels and Missing in Action made unilateralism literal: a lone meathead serving American righteousness (if sometimes with an Austrian accent) to hordes of anonymous foreign goons, garnishing the mayhem with a killer payoff line when vanquishing the demonised bad guy.
With Maga Republicanism now pushing this cartoonish worldview to even more steroidal extremes, Trump is reverting to the natural frame of reference with which to package up his adventurism in digestible, memeable form. He’s hardly the first politician to lean on pop culture: after the Iran hostage crisis, Ronald Reagan once said he could take some pointers from Rambo about how to handle another such incident. But the current president trumps him for shamelessness: he has literally tweeted a picture of himself as Rocky.
We’re long past irony of course. But is Trump, in customising his own 80s action flick, sincerely living out his own inner fantasies? Intel on his actual movie tastes is scant. He trotted out a placeholder set of five classics in a 2012 Movieline article: Citizen Kane, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Gone with the Wind, Goodfellas and The Godfather. Last year, he was reportedly pushing for Paramount to make another Rush Hour film – though it’s not clear if it’s the franchise, or being seen as a media arbitrator, that excites him most.
Step aside Thelma Schoonmaker; Trump has also apprised us of his scalpel-like use of the remote control when watching films, fast-forwarding past the boring bits to pare them down to 45 minutes max. So when he lauds Jean-Claude Van Damme’s lean, mean Bloodsport as an “incredible, fantastic movie”, it seems more in keeping with that impatience. With the film firmly part of the 80s knucklehead canon, maybe Trump watches the scene in which JCVD’s army captain/ninja does the splits to nutshot an opponent and sees a blinding metaphor for what he’s doing to the Democrat party.
The would-be Badass-in-Chief still has work to do to live up to 80s style, though. His incontinent blatherings on Truth Social and on the mic don’t exactly exit with the hollow-point devastation of a Schwarzenegger quip. Probably to the satisfaction of the Austrian Oak – who actually has weathered into a fair approximation of a respectable elder.
In fact, the angry, inflamed undertone to Trump’s politics and his base correspond more to the Stallone school (Sly now of course being one of the president’s “special envoys” to Hollywood). Reagan was right: there was a lesson in Rambo, at least the first one. That embittered, self-pitying outsiderdom was an ingrained national trait, and that the inverse of the heroic avenger was the loony apocalypse prepper, the lone gunman. Ronald would know: in March 1981, he was wounded by a failed Texan singer-songwriter inspired by Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. And Trump, missing assassination by an earlobe’s width in July 2024, has had his own taste.
So perhaps the president isn’t starring in the movie he thinks he is. It wouldn’t exactly be news to out him as the villain. Maybe the Trump years are actually best seen as a supercharged return to 70s cinema, with its reverberating sleaze, corruption and paranoia. Venezuela as a distraction from Epstein tops anything in All the President’s Men or The Parallax View. Let alone, for the ultra-conspiracy heads, Trump as Putin’s sleeper agent in the control room of fortress America; the ultimate Manchurian Candidate. But who cares what us libtards think, when Trump, tuning into the live feed of the Caracas raid, could lap up his own private action blow-out: “You might never get to see it, but it was an incredible thing to see.” And now of course Greenland is on his radar. Showing next: Class of Nuuk ’Em High.
