With Venezuela, Trump fulfilled his dream of making his own action movie in the 1980s | film

TBarnstormer hit the 2026 box office early this year. A sleazy dictator from a banana republic is flooding America’s streets. A Delta Force extraction squad was sent across the border to snatch this shmoo from his impenetrable fortress. The stern, bronze-coloured speaker who fires an RPG into the exhaust pipe of the international rules-based system – but it gets the job done. We call it: Caracas Thunder.

Sounds like a bit of a throwback, you might be thinking. But judging by the press conference he held after the US military’s kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, it appears that Donald Trump has finally fulfilled his dream of directing his own 1980s action film.

Trump is packed with important metaphors. It was “dark and deadly” on the field – but the American kicks easily prevailed. Why limit ourselves to just one of the movement’s primary bogeymen of the 1980s – the petty autocrat (Commando; Missing in Action) or the cartel leader (Lethal Arming; Cobra) – when Maduro, now a global fan, can double in both roles? And we never knew it, but it turns out that Operation Absolute Resolution is part of a franchise brought to you by Donald J. Trump Productions: “We have done some other good work, such as the attacks on Soleimani and Al-Baghdadi, and the destruction and destruction of Iranian nuclear sites,” the US President noted.

Considering that Trump rose to full prominence during the ego trip of the 1980s, it is not surprising that his foreign policy wears a headband and mimics the aggressive cinema of that decade. Led by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, and an assortment of beefcakes, the action films of the 1980s were about improving America’s self-image once again after national defeat in Vietnam (and a host of depressing films about it). The likes of Commando, the Rambo series, and Missing in Action made monogamy literal: a lone figure serving up the American right (albeit with an occasional Austrian accent) to hordes of nameless foreign goons, and embellishing the chaos with a killer payoff line upon defeating the diabolical bad guy.

With MAGA republicanism now pushing this cartoonish worldview to further extremes, Trump is returning to a natural frame of reference from which to package his adventures into an easily digestible form. And he’s not the first politician to draw on popular culture: After the Iran hostage crisis, Ronald Reagan once said he could take some advice from Rambo on how to handle another such incident. But the current president outdoes him for his chutzpah: He tweeted a photo of himself as Rocky.

We’ve long since gotten over cynicism, of course. But is Trump, in his appropriation of 1980s action films, sincerely living out his inner fantasies? Intel on his actual cinematic tastes is minimal. He offered a placeholder group 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 Paramount to make another Rush Hour movie — though it’s not clear whether it’s the franchise, or being seen as a media arbiter, that interests him more.

Thelma Schoonmaker stepped aside; Trump has also told us he uses the remote control like a scalpel when watching movies, fast-forwarding after boring parts to cut them down to a maximum of 45 minutes. So, when he praises Jean-Claude Van Damme’s lean style, meaning Bloodsport, as a “brilliant, stunning film,” it seems more in line with impatience. With the film being a fixture of ’80s movies, perhaps Trump watches the scene in which the army captain/JCVD ninja splits to take down an opponent and sees a blinding metaphor for what he’s doing to the Democratic Party.

The Badass-in-Chief still has work to do to live up to his ’80s style. His uninhibited cackle on Truth Social and on the microphone doesn’t quite emerge from the hollow devastation of Schwarzenegger’s sarcasm. Perhaps it was to the satisfaction of the Austrian oak – which had already succeeded in overcoming the fair approximation of a respected elder.

In fact, the angry, inflammatory tone of Trump’s politics and his base is more in line with the Stallone school (Sly is now, of course, one of the president’s “special envoys” to Hollywood). And Reagan was right: there was a lesson in Rambo, at least the first one. That bitter, self-pitying outsider was an ingrained national trait, the opposite of the heroic avenger was the crazed, lone gunman prepper of the apocalypse. Ronald knew it: In March 1981, he was shot by a failed Texas singer-songwriter inspired by Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. Trump, who failed to assassinate him by displaying his earlobe in July 2024, had his own taste.

So maybe the president isn’t starring in the movie he thinks he is. It wouldn’t exactly be news to consider him the villain. The Trump Years are perhaps best seen as a fraught return to 1970s cinema, with its sleaze, corruption and thundering paranoia. Venezuela as a distraction from Epstein tops anything in All the President’s Men or The Viewpoint. Not to mention Trump, to the extremist conspiracy heads, as Putin’s sleeper agent in the control room of America’s citadel; The ultimate Manchurian candidate. But who cares what we liberals think, when Trump, listening to a live broadcast of the raid in Caracas, manages to unleash his own outrage: “You may never get to see it, but seeing it was unbelievable.” Now, of course, Greenland is on his radar. Show next: Nuuk ‘Em High class.