The Trump administration wants to be Charles Bronson so bad

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Trump Term 2: The Crackdown

The most iconic characters from the American action movie canon mirror the average American voter in their ideological inconsistency.

DVD-boosting custom car aficionados become globetrotting superheroes whose love for illegal street-racing is only matched by their love of family. John Rambo began his on-screen life as an anti-authoritarian, highlighting the ways that our country abandons its veterans and punishes unconventional lifestyles. He followed comfortable boomers through their various psychoses, helping boost the myth of American prisoners of war in Vietnam before wrapping up with a showdown against menacing Mexican drug cartels.

In a packed field of gun-toting flip-floppers, few shoot-em-up stars can compete with Paul Kersey. At the start of 1974’s “Death Wish,” actor Charles Bronson plays Kersey as a bleeding-heart New York City architect. Kersey has carried an aversion to guns into adulthood after his father was accidentally killed by a hunter. A brutal attack on his wife and daughter – carried out, in part, by a young Jeff Goldblum, as a member of one of those violence-for-violence’s sake bands of hooligans popular in ‘70s cinema – knocks something loose in Kersey’s brain.

He spends the rest of the movie wandering the streets of Fear City-era New York, trying to make himself a tempting target for muggers, so that he can surprise them with a pistol tucked in his coat. The movie has it both ways for most of its runtime, painting Kersey as deeply broken and sad, while giving audiences plenty of cheap thrills in his showdowns with unfortunate, knife-wielding muggers. His story satisfies the American urge for a Wild West gunslinger to mete out frontier justice while painting the whole idea as silly and childish. (He’s partially inspired to take up arms by watching a staged gunfight in a low-rent theme park in Tucson, Arizona.)

Kersey is shot before being run out of town by the actual forces of law and order. He’s pushed to abandon his entire life, including his institutionalized daughter, but he ends the movie smiling and pointing a finger gun directly at the camera. The sequels followed the same vigilante, but had none of the original’s nuance. Producers saw easy money in American bloodlust, letting Kersey’s violence and racism escalate across four regrettable sequels.

We don’t know if anyone in the Trump administration has ever seen a “Death Wish” movie, but their increasingly violent reaction to the boogeymen in their heads feels lifted from later Kersey. Following the death of a close friend, the admin is promising widespread retribution to anyone who even looks like the people they believe did harm. Increasingly concerned with violent crime in American cities, Trump is pushing for armed crackdowns when he’s not ordering extrajudicial killings of alleged drug-dealers in the Caribbean.

Like Kersey, the aggrieved wimps of the Trump administration view themselves as avenging angels against the worst excesses of a soft-on-crime liberal era. In actuality, they’re more like Kersey’s co-worker, who opens the first movie desperate to spray blood on the walls.

“The underprivileged are beating our godd**ned brains out,” he frets. “You know what I say? Stick them in concentration camps, that's what I say.”

Unfortunately, Kersey’s coworker’s worldview comes to dominate the series that began with a taut and interesting action thriller. We can only hope that Trump’s second term fades to black in the manner of the original Kersey: unhinged and smiling, but ultimately powerless.

 What do you think? Is America in its straight-to-video era? Will the Trump administration be able to exploit the phantom of violent crime until 2028, even as cities are safer than ever? Tap the speech bubble icon at the top of this email to sound off in the comments.

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