Donald “Lonesome Rhoades” Trump
April 9, 2025 | 802 words | Politics, Vintage Movies
Last month Donald Trump was seen reprimanding the President of Ukraine in a televised sit-own at The White House that was positively cringe-worthy to watch. He berated the beleaguered foreign leader with remarks such as “you have no cards” and “you should have taken the deal,” as if talking to a recalcitrant child.
This month President Trump is busy trying to re-engineer world trade by way of “shock and awe,” without consulting any of our trading partners.
Say what you will about his second presidential incarnation, but there is certainly no grass growing under Mr. Trump’s feet.
It has been a roller-coaster first three months, providing plentiful grist for the mill of many an esteemed political and social commentator. Amateur and professional observers alike are struggling to understand how things got to this point, how such an individual could have gotten elected not once, but twice, to the highest office in the land.
Allow me to turn your attention to an old movie from the 1950s about the meteoric rise of a crude populist through the power of first radio and then television, and suggest how it might offer up a little window into the bizarre Trump phenomenon we are living through right now.
My local independently-owned film emporium recently featured a showing of A Face in the Crowd, the award-winning 1957 movie written by Budd Schulberg, directed by Elia Kazan, and starring Patricia Neal, Andy Griffith, Walter Matthau, and Tony Franciosa.
At first glance the disheveled two-bit drifter by the name of Larry Rhoads we meet in a backwater jail cell bears no resemblance to the handsome young on-the-rise real estate mogul Donald Trump who first burst onto the society pages in the 1980s.
The movie’s small Southern town boasts a little radio station, and that station has a cub reporter whose job is to uncover local color. She discovers a drunk Larry Rhoads sleeping it off in a jail cell, shoves a microphone in his face and gives him a chance to sing a song, and maybe spout off a little. Our down-on-his-luck protagonist comes to life and we are introduced to a natural born story teller full of folk wisdom that goes down easy with the listening audience.
Patricia Neal’s cub reporter christens Andy Griffiths’ character “Lonesome Rhoads,” and the branding begins. He is a ratings star, and it’s not long before an advertiser wants to move the radio program to a larger market (nearby Memphis) and sponsor Mr. Rhoads folksy diatribes.
Lonesome has an uncanny ability to read any room and knows where his bread is buttered. His relationships are all strictly transactional, as we say today. When a hot shot young ad man (Tony Franciosa) offers to bring the Lonesome Rhoads act to New York City and to television, our small-town hero is able to adapt, and he soon extends his appeal to a national audience.
Before long captains of industry are seeking his sage advice on how to appeal to the common man and increase their market share in the process. A veteran politician who eyes a presidential run is introduced to Mr. Rhoads by a wealthy doner, and Lonesome schools this man on how elections are now going to be won or lost on television, and how he – the veteran politician – needs to loosen up and let his hair down, so as to broaden his appeal among the common folk.
Mind you this script was written a few years before the infamous Nixon-Kenndey televised debates, where Nixon went on to lose a close race after coming off as uptight and extremely uncomfortable in front of the camera.
The script is prescient on a number of fronts, not least of which is how unreliable and unstable our political life has become in an age when public opinion is so easily manipulated.
In the movie, the hero we initially root for as he rises through the ranks through endearing blend of charm, native intelligence, and force of will eventually falls from grace and loses his mass appeal. And he loses our sympathy, too, as the story reveals him to be someone with no moral core, who doesn’t believe in anything beyond ratings.
Lonesome Rhoads is eventually overwhelmed by fame and it corrupts him. He turns into a megalomanic and becomes cynical. He takes the little people who gave him his popularity for granted. Once that cynicism is exposed, his time at the top is over.
The movie ends in the middle of the night, with our hero screaming his slogans from a balcony to an empty room below, with an applause machine going off on cue. The proto-typical echo chamber. It remains to be seen how the Donald Trump story will end, but the vintage film A Face in the Crowd may have pointed the way.
Robert J. Cavanaugh, Jr.
bobcavjr@gmail.com