By Noel Holston
I’ve been thinking about Donald Trump and Angels with Dirty Faces.
You know who Trump is. You may need a reminder about the movie. It’s a classic 1938 crime melodrama in which James Cagney and Pat O’Brien costar as boyhood pals whose lives went in opposite directions. Cagney’s adult Rocky Sullivan is a vicious gangster, O’Brien’s Jerry Connolly a Roman Catholic priest.
The movie wraps up with Rocky getting convicted of murder and being sentenced to die in the electric chair. Father Jerry visits him on death row. He pleads with Rocky to drop his cocky defiance and beg for mercy so that the young hoodlums from the old neighborhood who idolize him — the “Dead End” kids — will feel betrayed and rethink their own criminal ambitions.
Rocky refuses, telling Father Jerry that his reputation is all that he has left. He’s going to walk the last mile with a swagger and “spittin’ in their eyes.”
Jerry walks the corridor with Rocky and shakes his hand farewell. Then Rocky suddenly breaks down and screams for mercy. The guards have to drag the whimpering tough guy to the chair. He dies a coward’s death, and the delinquents who revered him, upon reading the news of how Rocky “turned yellow,” start to question their choices.
In the Trump remake, soon to be a major motion picture —I mean, like, HUGE — the former President of the United States, a career con artist, is finally brought to justice after giving John Law the slip so many times. For his role in facilitating and encouraging the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol and the deaths it caused, he gets 10 years in a federal prison for reckless endangerment and depraved indifference — life, essentially, given his age and obesity.
Still, he loudly maintains that his “landslide” win in the 2020 election was stolen from him and his backers, including the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.
As he awaits the van that will take him to a secure federal prison, Trump gets a visitor. It’s not a boyhood friend. He has none. It’s not an adult running buddy. Jeffrey Epstein is dead. It’s not a priest or a minister. He doesn’t really know any that well. It’s his daughter, Ivanka.
She pleads with him, for the sake of the divided country, to disavow the “big lie” that he was a victim of election fraud and to tell the Proud Boys, the evangelical Christians and the everyday MAGA millions that idolized him that he was always in it for his own gain and glory and never gave a flying fork about them or their issues.
Like Rocky Sullivan, the Donald refuses. He says all he has left is his notoriety, his image as a badass who speaks for America’s beleaguered conservative citizens and isn’t afraid to insult or belittle anybody, regardless of race, gender or disability, who gives him any lip.
Ivanka rides with her father on the golf cart to the prison van. She hugs him farewell. And then, suddenly, Donald J.Trump breaks down, begging not to be put away in a cell without a seat on its toilet and apologizing to all the voters who trusted him and cheered him at countless rallies.
And his followers, including the Proud Boys, watch his pathetic, whimpering display live on TV, and begin to question what they’ve believed and done in his name for the past six years.
OK, the remake’s a fantasy. So was the original movie.
Note: Noel Holston is a freelance writer who lives in Athens, Georgia. He regularly shares his insights and wit at Wry Wing Politics. He’s also a contributing essayist to Medium.com, TVWorthWatching.com, and other websites. He previously wrote about television and radio at Newsday (200-2005) and, as a crosstown counterpart to the Pioneer Press’s Brian Lambert, at the Star Tribune (1986-2000). He’s the author of “Life After Deaf: My Misadventures in Hearing Loss and Recovery,” by Skyhorse.