The only new movie that I had planned to see this month was Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (not really). But that was before a Black Lives Matter TikTok “influencer” scared me off. Some loon named Lavynder Lee suggested in a video that it would be racist for white folks to see the movie on opening weekend. “This message is to all our wimpy accomplices and ‘white allies,’” Lee emoted in the video. “This message is to all the white people who have ‘BLM’ in their bio…. You can go see [Black Panther: Wakanda Forever] on another weekend. Go see it on the second or third weekend. But the first weekend? That’s for us.”
And not only must I not see the Marvel fantasy, but I should also buy a black person a ticket, then stand outside the theater like a goon to make sure systemic racists don’t ruin the show. “You buy your ticket, you give it to a black person or a black family who can’t afford to go,” Lee insisted. “And then you go sit in that theater, in front of the doors. You make sure that every black person in that theater can enjoy that movie in peace. You make sure that you use your body to block us from anybody who’d be coming in that theater to do us harm. That is your job.” Thoroughly intimidated, I took refuge with a much better and — in the week of the most consequential midterm election of my lifetime — far more relevant new film, the Daily Wire production My Dinner with Trump.
This is a fascinating insider look at the two-years-later reunion dinner of former President Donald Trump and his closest advisers and Cabinet heads. They included daughter Ivanka, son-in-law Jared Kushner, chief of staff Mark Meadows, economic adviser Larry Kudlow, policy adviser Stephen Miller, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, and Senior Counselor Kellyanne Conway. After two years of the Biden administration’s nonsensical Marxist blatherers, from the president and vice president down, it’s jarring to watch thoughtful people speaking in clear, complete, and eloquent sentences.
The dinner took place at Trump’s private club in Bedminster, New Jersey, where the diners reflected on both the great accomplishments of their administration and the catastrophic disaster of the current one. Hence, the documentary is naturally bittersweet — alternating between glory days and dark nights — as well as touching and dramatic.
The first thing that strikes the viewer is, as always, Donald Trump himself. Trump is conservative nitroglycerin. He can blow away progressive forces such as the corrupt media — like no other before him. But then, he just might explode in our faces. He did the latter last Saturday when he foolishly nicknamed the popular Florida governor and his possible presidential rival, Ron DeSantis, “Ron DeSanctimonious,” three days before the Florida election. For all Trump’s bombast, DeSantis is about to manage something Trump couldn’t — win a second term.
Nonetheless, in My Dinner with Trump, the ex-president comes off as a pleasant country squire interacting with close friends. Sitting at the head of a long dining table while appetizing food gets served, Trump appears sincerely proud of everything he and his team managed to do, yet sad about the chaotic decline that followed them. Refreshingly, he partially blames himself for the linkage. “I had two jobs — to run the country and to survive,” Trump muses at one point. “If you think about it, survival was much more difficult.”
Trump humorously admits that he made some damaging key personnel choices: “You know we had great people in this administration, but we don’t get any credit because we had guys like [Gen. Mark] Milley, who a camera hit him in the face and he blew his whole deal. I’ll never forget the way he apologized the following week. He walks over to a church that’s on fire, and he goes, and he apologizes.”
Like the tragic figure of an exiled king, Trump truly laments the total collapse of the southern border he once came close to securing. And he can’t seem to understand the Biden regime’s reckless abandonment of it. He ponders whether it’s intentional or the result of incompetence. Miller provides the simple and accurate answer: “They hate the country. I mean, that’s what it comes down to. And they hate a lot of the people in the country. But I just want to say, because this is so important, people don’t know how much you did on the border.”
Other topics at the dinner such as defense, diplomacy, and economics receive intelligent input from Trump’s experts. For instance, when Trump assails the media censorship that silenced him and continues to do so to other conservatives, saying, “The media is shut, closed, not free, corrupt as can be, and probably scared,” Carson responds with calm, Spock-like logic: “I don’t think people actually recognize what’s happening. Because when we talk about liberties, freedom of speech, they think they can only be taken away by the federal government. But the fact of the matter is Big Tech and the media take it away with a complicit government.”
My Dinner with Trump is a must-see time capsule of an Arthurian moment in American history, the further consequences of which will be made known this very Tuesday. Yet the dinner itself was originally a tiny part of a longer film. DW Entertainment producer and notable independent filmmaker Dallas Sonnier (Bone Tomahawk, Dragged Across Concrete) seized on the segment as the heart of the picture and expanded it, inspired by the iconic ’80s documentary My Dinner with Andre. (Yes, once upon a time, in the ’80s, an intellectual dinner conversation between two artists could make a theatrical hit film.)
“It took many rounds of blessing from the Trump family to get us to the finish line,” Sonnier said. “And we are honestly thrilled they trusted us with this opportunity.”
In the end, the Trump family loved the movie. And so will most of the audience.
Looking for an endearing holiday gift book? Try my romantic Christmas ghost story, The Christmas Spirit, available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other fine bookstores.
