Is Donald Trump the Manchurian Candidate?

The Manchurian Candidate become newsworthy following the real life assassinations of President John F Kennedy in 1963 and his younger brother Senator Robert Kennedy in 1968, events which seemed to some readers to make The Manchurian Candidate seem prophetic. For its part, the film version was withdrawn from circulation following the murder of JFK.  

To the literal-minded reader, the Kennedy assassinations appeared to have followed the narrative pattern traced in the novel of a lone, utterly alienated assassin acting as the possibly unwitting though effective instrument in a much larger scheme, whether originating overseas or within American. So, was Lee Harvey Oswald, who visited Russia, made into a zombie assassin like Raymond Shaw? 

Writing in The Nation shortly after the assassination of JFK, Condon described being questioned by a South African journalist as to whether he felt any responsibility for the crime. Unsurprisingly for an author of political thrillers, Condon both claimed and disclaimed the relevance to and possible influence of his fiction on real events.

“I told the reporter that, with all Americans, I had contributed to form the attitudes of the assassin; and that the assassin, and Americans like him, had contributed to the attitudes which had caused me to write the novel.”

Condon, a former Marine and political liberal who was an admirer of JFK, argued that the actions of Oswald, like those of his assassin character, expressed a deep seated alienation and resentment that in America could too easily find expression in violence.

“We are not, as some well-meaning European newspaper put it, a violent and unstable people because such toughness was required to tame the wild frontier 125 years ago. We are violent and unstable because we have been so conditioned to these responses that civilized, thoughtful conduct has become impossible for us.”

Since The Manchurian Candidate was published, the Cold War has ended though the milieu of uncertainty and suspicion that it fostered has persisted. The sheer weirdness at times of the American political scene and the prevalence of paranoid conspiracy theories – to say nothing of the epidemic of gun violence – finds expression in the Watergate scandal and in every other scandal that has been labelled “-gate”.

When the film of The Manchurian Candidate was remade in 2004 directed by Jonathan Demme and starring Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep. The setting was shifted to the first Gulf War and the conspiracy originates not with a hostile foreign government but within what many people see as the military-industrial complex.

According to the conservative commentator Mark Steyn, Manchurian Global, the fictional corporation behind the conspiracy as depicted in the remake, is a dead ringer for Halliburton, the company that has been associated, controversially, with Vice-President Dick Cheney. So, was President George W Bush perhaps a Manchurian Candidate?

Originally in the novel the mother character Eleanor was, if the conspiracy succeeded, to have been the power behind the throne of her puppet president husband. In the 2004 film version, Shaw’s mother herself is a candidate for Vice-President rather than the spouse of one, reflecting the political advancement for women in American politics that had occurred since the 1950s. And in recognition of developments in science, the brain washing of the soldiers is effected not with Pavlovian psychological techniques but through nanotechnology.

Period details notwithstanding, The Manchurian Candidate does speak to us. If anything, today we are more ready than ever to accept that conspiracies are everywhere, and that politicians and other people who make up the one percent are depraved as well as corrupt and self-serving. In the age of social media, wholesale public distrust of the political process and democratic institutions has only spread, and, post 9/11, paranoia has become the norm. The Internet makes it easier for us to brainwash ourselves.   

Which brings us to the relevance of The Manchurian Candidate in the current presidential contest. It was author Salman Rushdie, an admirer of The Manchurian Candidate, who, in a TV panel discussion hosted by Bill Maher that was broadcast, ironically enough on September 11 last year – proposed the novel’s relevance to the current Presidential election when he suggested that Donald Trump had been put up to his quest for the Republican nomination by the Clintons.