For more than a year, I’d been developing a great metaphor. It explains the former Right’s hostility to President Trump despite — or because of — his unprecedented successes: a completely sealed border, a radical drop in murders (to the lowest rate since 1900) crime, a U.S.-imprisoned South American dictator-drug lord, the destruction of a pre-nuclear terrorist state, and many others. I was about to introduce my analogy to the world, when the great Victor Davis Hanson beat me to it, last week on the Miranda Devine podcast.
Our mutual conclusion: Donald Trump is like the classic Western hero, the Gunfighter. He rides in from the wilderness to a community threatened by savage forces which only he has the skills to defeat, yet requiring a brutality that disturbs, even outrages, the community elite. So although he saves the community, he can never be a part of it, and must ever remain the outsider.
This is why the cabin door shuts on John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards in the last shot of The Searchers, and what Alan Ladd’s Shane expresses so simply yet eloquently at the end of Shane. “Joey, there’s no living with a killing. There’s no going back from one. Right or wrong, it’s a brand, a brand that sticks. There’s no going back. Now you run on home to your mother and tell her — tell her everything’s all right. And there aren’t any more guns in the valley.”
And if you want to know why Hollywood can’t and won’t make Westerns anymore, it’s because they dread how it inspires men like Trump.
I make the Trump-Shane comparison in my new political thriller, The Camelot Trail: A Slade and Cork Mystery, being published by Aethon Books this October.
“Now that’s what I call a cliffhanger,” Slade said.
“It resembled one in 2008, with the election of a Marxist, pro-Muslim, America-bashing President,” said Cork. “Even more so in 2015, when he signed the Iran Nuclear Treaty.”
“I’m having Afghanistan flashbacks,” said Slade.
“Iran would have attained the nuclear bomb in three years, the midterm of his marionette — the first woman President.”
“Bullet dodged.”
“And I voted for her,” said Cork with a slight shudder.
“Only Shane rode into town and beat her — an orange-haired Shane.”
“His victory enraged the Swamp creatures, which scrambled to destroy him. They fabricated a Russia connection out of thin air — and they still couldn’t prevent him from scrapping the Iran Nuclear Deal. All seemed lost. Until Red China provided a lifeline — and a virus — potent enough to expel the President. Under his corrupt successor, Iran’s nuclear weapons program went back online. And the alien invasion of America began in earnest.”
“Except Shane wasn’t dead,” said Slade. “Just wounded, and hell bent for leather.”
Naturally, if someone’s going to steal my thunder, it’s comforting that it be someone as brilliant as Victor Davis Hanson. VDH expressed my Trump as Western hero concept far more intellectually than I was going to. So I’ll let him speak for me a bit.
“In John Ford’s movies — The Searchers for example, and George Stevens’ Shane — there’s this architype. And he’s a moral person in his strategic or ultimate outlook, but he feels that society is corrupt … and is sinful in that they see people hurt, but they won’t take action to help them, because the means necessary are unattractive or are contrary to civilization. So when these societies become frozen or inert, and they can’t deal with this existential problem, they may turn to someone … It was just typical in The Searchers, where these farmers and the legal system — the Indians have come in and they’ve slaughtered these people, and they’ve kidnapped these two girls, and somebody has to go out and get them, and they bring in John Wayne, and he has a very shady past, he’s racist, and he brings her back. Because he alone has the skills to do it.’
VDH then references Shane as the best example. “He’s a guy who’s an absolute killer. But he goes into this Jackson Hole valley, sees all these sodbusters are wonderful people, and the cattle barons are slaughtering them and taking things. He’s very quiet, says, “I’m done with it. I want to be like you.’ And finally they say, ‘We can’t handle this. They’re killing us.’ And then he puts on his guns, and he goes in, and he kills the bad guys. And then he realizes that he is polluted himself, and he can’t reside in that community.”
Trump has the same problem. Not from the deranged Left, who would hate him if he cured cancer, but from the shaky middle and false Right. Voters overwhelmingly hired Trump to deport all illegal aliens. But when they see ICE arresting them, criminals no less, they get queasy and their support drops.
Iran has been threatening death to America for 47 years, killing its share of Americans, while developing a nuclear bomb. When Trump is the first President to terminate the threat, the former Right — Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Joe Kent, Marjorie Taylor Greene, others—turn pro-Iran peaceniks. They’re like the townsfolk in High Noon who abandon Gary Cooper’s town taming Marshall Will Kane to the vengeance of four outlaws.
Fortunately for the country, and community, Trump is as tough as the classic Western hero, and much tougher than his opponents. As he proved two summers ago in Butler, Pennsylvania, taking a shot to the head then standing up, fist raised and crying, “Fight!” And as Iran may soon find out again.
And if you want to know why Hollywood can’t and won’t make Westerns anymore, it’s because they dread how it inspires men like Trump, and Victor Davis Hanson, and me. Few liberal writers could conceive, let alone create, a Western that isn’t Brokeback Mountain 2. And they know a female gunfighter would be laughed off the screen. But would they try to depict a Western hero? That’ll be the day.
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