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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
World
David Smith in Washington

Maggie Haberman on Trump: ‘He’s become a Charles Foster Kane character’

Trump at the White House before his departure. ‘He can be very charming and and disarming when you meet him, particularly at first. But inevitably he shows displeasure or anger.’
Trump at the White House before his departure. ‘He can be very charming and disarming when you meet him, particularly at first. But inevitably he shows displeasure or anger.’ Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

“The word ‘Rosebud’ is maybe the most significant word in film, and what we all watch. The wealth, the sorrow, the unhappiness, the happiness just struck lots of different notes. Citizen Kane was really about accumulation and, at the end of the accumulation, you see what happens and it’s not necessarily all positive.”

These words were spoken in 2008 by an unlikely film critic named Donald Trump. Perhaps he glimpsed himself as if in a mirror. Like Kane in Orson Welles’s masterpiece, Trump was a swaggering capitalist and media star who forayed into politics, was brought down by hubris, and now rattles around a gilded cage in Florida.

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