The final item in Greil Marcus’s last Real Life Rock column (originally posted at Pitchfork.com) has taken on a new urgency in the light of Trump’s pick for Secretary of State and the leaked CIA “assessment” confirming “Russia intervened in the 2016 election for the purpose of helping Donald Trump win the presidency.”
Joerg Haentzchel, a journalist at Süddeutsche Zeitung (Munich, November 9) “Tonight I’ll watch The Manchurian Candidate again.” But you can watch it in your head, as images from the film float through real, ordinary life. The symmetries are natural, obvious, coded in our history, written in our imaginations—we can’t help seeing this story. Soon enough there will be a new Oval Office portrait, the new president framed by the old Lincoln faces, to match this scene from the movie and Pete Souza’s official White House photograph:
And that next portrait could be more than an inevitable presidential symmetry.
The Manchurian Candidate is a 1962 movie about a right-wing U.S. presidential candidate created by China and the Soviet Union as their front. Donald Trump has said that in his capacity as president-elect he would meet with Vladimir Putin before taking office. Constitutionally, and legally, he would have no legitimate position to do so: for a private citizen to negotiate on behalf of the United States with Russia would be treasonous. And why the urgency?
Presume that Trump is carrying hundreds of millions, or even a billion or more in debt to private Russian financial entities. At that level, in Russia, there is no difference between private holdings and the state. Presume that Trump wants to clear that debt before taking office, and that in exchange for that, he would offer Putin a free hand in all surrounding countries—not to mention Syria, or anywhere else. That would of course leave Putin as Trump’s blackmailer, but as with Trump’s Atlantic City casino, the debt in question would now be the responsibility of the United States, not Trump.
The United States has elected a white supremacist, a classic anti-Semite, and a man for whom women are commodities to be bought and sold. It may have also elected a Russian agent.