If you haven’t seen the 1997 political comedy “Wag the Dog,” (1) stop everything you’re doing and watch it, then (2) read this review. Otherwise you’ll encounter spoilers.
Directed by Barry Levinson off a screenplay by Hilary Henkin and David Mamet, “Wag the Dog” tells the story of a pedophile president whose spin doctor Conrad Brean (Robert DeNiro) hires Hollywood producer Stanley Motss (Dustin Hoffman) to pretend America is at war with Albania. Brean and Motss correctly gamble that America’s media will be so easily manipulated by their propaganda, the president’s pedophilic predations will be swept under the rug until Election Day is good and over.
In “Wag the Dog,” Brean and Motss have the basic human decency to not actually start a war, but merely fake one. This premise was semi-plausible in 1997 but logistically impossible in 2026. No, for Trump to distract people from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, he has to wage actual wars…. wars that he was planning on waging anyway (former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright predicted to me Trump had designs on Venezuela back in 2019), but which he is now starting willy nilly and in a manic, frenzied state.
Trump’s appetite is not going to be glutted by Venezuela. He has already talked about conquering Greenland, an island of 58,000 semi-independent people who currently choose to be protected by Denmark (many want to be free; some want to stay Danes; practically none want to join the US). The president “jokes” about clearing Gaza Strip of its Palestinian population and turning it into a pricey Israeli resort. He threatens Colombia and Mexico for its narco-terrorism, while ignoring the same which comes from his far right allies in El Salvador and Argentina.
If the heat hadn’t become so intense in the kitchen of the Trump-Epstein scandal, our president probably would have executed his imperialist plans with more aplomb. Instead he is starting to crack, and the whole world is paying for it.
So where do we go from here? The worst case scenario is that Trump divides the world up like slices of a pie between himself, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping. The best case scenario is that this clown car cavalcade crashes because of the egoes and incompetence of those behind the wheel.
Take the fate of Motss, Hoffman’s colorful and brilliant producer who refuses to allow anyone else to take credit for his mastery of the president’s reelection campaign.
“Fuck my life! Fuck my life!” he proclaims. “I want the credit! The credit!”
When I first watched “Wag the Dog,” I shook my head in disbelief that Motss could be so naive as to believe that he could get credit for such an obviously-secret operation. Yet upon further contemplation, the so-called “masters of the universe” — even the brilliant ones — usually cannot avoid tripping over their own pride. If Trump and his crew had wits as well as raw power behind them, I’d consider them unbeatable.
Instead I merely consider this intimidating — not inevitable. No, for Trump and his goons to win, the world will need to forget about movies like “Wag the Dog.” We’ll need to believe that these individuals truly are all-knowing and all-powerful, deserving of every cent they possess, and that we’ve earned little better than to be spoon-fed nonsense by their “betters.” “Wag the Dog,” by contrast, shows that the powerful are bumbling fools who succeed in manipulating us only to the extent that we turn off our critical thinking skills.
Once you start to exhibit healthy skepticism toward the government’s actions and motives, they start to seem less like an Orwellian superstate and more like a collection of cocky crooks just one step ahead of the good guys — and one mistake away from being exposed.
Despite its cynical veneer, “Wag the Dog” contains a flicker of hope in its warts-and-all characterizations of Brean, Motss and the various other power players and pawns depicted in the film. That’s why I hope more Americans turn to it during these dire times.
Back Seat Socialism
Back Seat Socialism is a column by Matthew Rozsa, who has been a professional journalist for more than 13 years. Currently, he is writing a book for Beacon Press, “Neurosocialism,” which argues that autistic people like the author struggle under capitalism, and explains how neurosocialism - the distinct anticapitalist perspective one develops by living as a neurodiverse individual - can be an important organizing principle for the left.
The Albright who said it was worth it to kill half a million children