You’ve Been Trumped Too

Even when you’re stand­ing on the right side of his­to­ry with your chest puffed out, it’s very easy to make bad art. You’ve Been Trumped Too is the dread­ful, oppor­tunis­tic cine-swipe at Don­ald Trump from direc­tor Antho­ny Bax­ter which has all the impact of a blind fruit-fly careen­ing direct­ly into Mount Rush­more. It picks up from Baxter’s 2011 orig­i­nal in which Trump’s deci­sion to build a golf course in Aberdeen­shire, Scot­land, comes under close scruti­ny, par­tic­u­lar­ly his meth­ods of clear­ing out the locals to make way for the slick-haired elite.

Despite being reduced to lug­ging a pail from a near­by stream to get water for her dinky cot­tage, 92-year-old wid­ow Mol­ly Forbes sol­diers on regard­less, the prover­bial thorn in Trump’s gen­er­ous­ly pro­por­tioned side. Bax­ter jumps on this sto­ry and milks it for the pur­pos­es of poten­tial­ly humil­i­at­ing the self-styled bil­lion­aire who, at time of writ­ing, is still in the run­ning to take the high­est office on Plan­et Earth. Yet, with the dai­ly tor­rent of rev­e­la­tions and scan­dals that flow onto news­pa­per front pages like water from a High­land spring, there’s lit­tle here to get the anger up high­er than it already is.

It doesn’t help that Bax­ter him­self is inef­fec­tu­al as both a jour­nal­ist and a film­mak­er, always try­ing to place him­self with­in the eye­line of his of lens or empha­sise what he’s doing rather than what Trump is doing. As a piece of sto­ry­telling, this is a total non-starter, as we jump about at ran­dom across the Trump time­line, admin­is­ter­ing lots of small jabs rather than a sin­gle knock-out body blow. Bax­ter and the team head over to the Repub­li­can Nation­al Con­ven­tion to con­front Trump sup­port­ers face-to-face, all of whom seem unin­ter­est­ed in the fact that their busi­ness mag­nate god­head has dam­aged a water pipeline half way across the globe.

Add to the mix some tru­ly chaot­ic edit­ing and lots of hyper­bol­ic music, and you’ve got your­self a right old mess of half-cocked screen activism. Bax­ter even man­ages to get an inter­view with Trump him­self, but the fact that he can’t get this sound­bite-spout­ing buf­foon to say a sin­gle inter­est­ing thing is telling in itself. If you’re read­ing this and Trump is the Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca, then it’s soft, preach­ing-to-the-choir jour­nal­ism like this which will be to blame.