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PORTSIDE CULTURE
WITH VENEZUELA, TRUMP HAS ACHIEVED HIS DREAM OF MAKING HIS OWN 80S
ACTION MOVIE
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Phil Hoad
January 8, 2026
The Guardian
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_ Given his rise during the ego joyride of the 1980s, it’s no shock
that Trump’s foreign policy is to emulate that decade’s
belligerent cinema _
‘We’ve done some other good ones’ … Donald Trump gives a
press conference following the arrest of Nicolás Maduro, 3 January
2026. , Photograph: Nicole Combea/Pool/Nicole Combea -
Pool/CNP/Shutterstock
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
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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
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kingpin (Lethal Weapon
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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.
_His incontinent blatherings don’t exactly exit with the
hollow-point devastation of a Schwarzenegger quip_
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
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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
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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
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– 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”
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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
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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
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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.
* Donald Trump
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* Venezuela
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* 1980s
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* action movies
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* imperialism
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