Donald Trump has long loved releasing propaganda videos that make him look both strong and attacked by powerful elites. He dropped a new one Saturday, featuring a two-minute montage of the former president looking powerful while a speech — about a talented person being built up by the public only be torn down — plays on the soundtrack. If the voice sounds familiar, that’s because it’s Matt Damon. If the monologue sounds familiar, it’s because it’s from the movie Air.
Trump is now cutting web videos w/ Matt Damon’s Air monologue as narration… pic.twitter.com/cBMBOaUr0Q
— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) June 10, 2023
The speech comes from the home stretch of the docudrama, which details Nike successful attempts in 1984 to court the collegiate Michael Jordan with both money and a shoe designed in his honor. It’s not hard — if you remove all the details about Jordan’s life — for a narcissist with a martyr complex to see how the speech could be about him, too:
“People are going to build you up, and God are they going to, because when you’re great and new, we love you. Man, we’ll build you up into something that doesn’t even exist. You’re going to change the f*cking world. But you know what? Once they’ve built you as high as they possibly can, they’re gonna tear you back down. It’s the most predictable pattern. We build you into something that doesn’t exist, and that means you have to try to be that thing all day, every day. That’s how it works. And we do it again, and again, and again. And I’m going to tell you the truth. You’re going to be attacked, betrayed, exposed and humiliated. And you’d survive that. A lot of people can climb that mountain. It’s the way down that breaks them, ’cause that’s the moment when you are truly alone. And what would you do then? Can you summon the will to fight on, through all the pain, and rise again?”
In the film, this plays over images of the real-life Jordan, as he quickly becomes an NBA superstar, as he’s raked over the coals for matters now mostly forgotten by history, as his father is murdered, etc. In Trump’s ad, this plays over images of him looking mighty and defiant — as opposed to looking like a dingleberry, which happens way more often.
It’s not clear if the Air audio clip was properly licensed, but let’s assume that it wasn’t. Let’s also assume that neither Damon, a noted Democrat, nor the film’s director Ben Affleck, who also plays frequently barefooted Nike honcho Phil Knight, would appreciate that a guy who just got indicted — again — was using their work for his own benefit.
Being associated with Donald Trump rarely pays off. Just ask his Diet Coke guy.
Air now streams on Amazon Prime.
(Via The Daily Beast)