It was hard to think about Donald Trump last week while relaxing in a comfortable chair 50 yards from the beach on the French Riviera. As I took a sip from a glass of Côtes du Rhône and went through my notes, I caught a stray snippet of conversation between a man and woman walking on the sidewalk adjacent to an apparently “clothing optional” beach.
“Did you hear what he said?” the woman asked, impeccably dressed in a red and black chiffon evening gown.
“What?” replied the man, who was wearing a Brion Tuxedo with a claret-colored cummerbund.
“’Six genders. Real hater on Jesus,’” she said, quoting Trump’s attack on James Talarico, the Democratic Senate candidate from Texas. “He mispronounced ‘vegan’ as ‘vagan.’”
“Enough. Please . . .”
By then the couple was out of earshot, but the man’s “enough please” comment lingered.
I was in Cannes to attend the 79th annual film festival with “The First 100,” a documentary I produced that chronicles the first hundred days of Trump’s second term. Along with our executive producer, Greg Wagner of “Law and Order,” I screened the film outside of competition to an enthusiastic group of filmmakers from around the world — and encountered festivalgoers and people from all walks of life who are weary of hearing about the president.
The Cannes Film Festival is an amalgamation of the super-rich, working-class filmmakers and those with a dollar and a dream who come from all over the world. The super-rich and A-list celebrities hang out on their super yachts and take smaller boats to shore, dock and enjoy the festivities before returning to the isolation and safety of their floating fortresses, where they throw the most exclusive parties to which no average Cannes attendee has a chance of being invited. The kind that, in other venues, Donald Trump and his billionaire Cabinet members love to attend.
Meanwhile, the poor millionaires hang out in the marina on their smaller yachts. They venture into the town square, often smelling of cocoa butter — or, much worse, rotting fish and stale beer — to eat, mingle and retire to their private environs close enough to everyone else to be gawked at incessantly. Their parties are considered a step down from the most exclusive, but they often require official festival credentials.
Everyone else? They stay in hotels on the beach and villas in the surrounding countryside, and walk through the small shops and restaurants, looking for parties where they can network and be seen.
It is a microcosm of the world’s society, with one important exception: Nearly everyone attending the festival is well educated. They are smart and well-traveled, and it appears an overwhelming majority of them despise Trump. While America’s home-grown narcissistic leader would obviously enjoy being the topic of endless conversation, especially at the billionaire soirées, he was vilified at parties from the bars near the festival venue to the largest super yacht — even as those talking say they don’t want to talk about him.
The rich and powerful in America who oppose Trump are well known; he diminishes their criticisms by saying the country’s rank-and-file love him. On Wednesday, the president claimed 99% of the people in Israel love him, and that he could be prime minister there if he wanted to.
“I am so tired of him,” a young filmmaker from Turkey said, finishing the sentence by observing he’d never seen anyone as repulsive and despotic as Trump. “And I’m from Turkey!”
“I am so tired of him,” a young filmmaker from Turkey said, finishing the sentence by observing he’d never seen anyone as repulsive and despotic as Trump. “And I’m from Turkey!”
Then there was an outlier: Ainsley, a Floridian celebrating her birthday by traveling to Cannes and partying with festival goers. With the requisite tan and Mar-a-Lago face, she was obviously “MAGA for life” even before she declared so before a crowd outside of Le Majestic hotel. Yet she too expressed a deep disdain for Trump in the most extreme terms: “He lied. He lied to us all. He’s part of the deep state. I’m tired of his lies and I’m tired of talking about him. He has to go.”
A self-described “Marjorie Taylor Greene superfan,” Ainsley explained her definition of the deep state: a group of greedy billionaires, which includes Trump, who want to “replace” white people in Ukraine and the United States with a “lower species.”
“Lower species?” I asked her. “Like cats and dogs?” What she said afterward I simply won’t repeat.
Her anger with Trump is based on America’s economy and the wars in Iran and Ukraine. The economy “absolutely sucks,” she said. “He tells me everything will magically get better when the war is over. I just don’t believe him. He started one war and said he’d end the other [in Ukraine] and he lied. We were all fooled.”
But the thing that bothered her most was “losing good MAGA members like Greene and Thomas Massie.” According to Ainsley, the president is “replacing MAGA with pure Trumpers.”
In other words, not only is the dog chasing its own tail, but it appears to be eating it as well.
As former first lady Michelle Obama recently said, many MAGA members followed Trump because they thought they weren’t being heard. That was Ainsley’s chief gripe about him: “He said he cared. He said he listened. He didn’t mean any of it. He used me.”
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A young actor born in the Midwest said she had left the United States because she was “just done with it all.” She wanted a life without “worshipping at the altar of hatred” she saw in the United States. She had second thoughts when she found that she couldn’t book acting gigs overseas since she was an American. “I was told on a couple of occasions that I wouldn’t get the job because the company didn’t want to hire Americans,” she said, explaining she then worked to get dual German citizenship. “Now, thankfully, I am employable.”
While being an American overseas is difficult, those not from the United States find the Trump era difficult for another reason. For Anthony, a filmmaker from Italy, “it is like mourning the loss of a parent. You come to love America, its culture, and you see one man killing it. I love America.”
Many expressed a sadness that rises above the anger they feel for the president. Luiz, a French cab driver ferrying festivalgoers around Cannes, does good impersonations of both a Long Island accent and a Southern drawl, said he loves talking with Americans. But he doesn’t like to talk about Trump. “It is very painful,” he said. “Americans love to talk and so do I. [They] are very friendly. Russians? They never smile. Americans do.”
Still, the United States, despite Trump’s influence, remains admired and respected — at least the film industry and, by extension, American culture. A large mural of Charlie Chaplin and Jackie Coogan in the 1921 film “The Kid” graces the front of a prominent building in Cannes. The official posters for this year’s festival feature Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis from “Thelma and Louise.”
It is that love for the United States that thoroughly frustrates those around the world who thought our country represented freedom and diversity. It is also the reason why those outside the U.S. are as numb as those of us living here as we confront the reality that our country is “run by a despot worse than Putin or President Erdoğan,” as the Turkish filmmaker explained. “I wanted to do a film about your country, but I wouldn’t watch it if I did. I couldn’t. It’s too painful and it’s like bad fiction.”
That America’s reality is considered “bad fiction” by many of the filmmakers gathered in France says something.
That America’s reality is considered “bad fiction” by many of the filmmakers gathered in France says something.
Some of the festivalgoers, including an outspoken woman I met from Romania, decried the lack of political documentaries “focusing on Trump and authoritarianism that is rising around the world.” But she didn’t make one either. Many filmmakers told me that those who hold the purse strings don’t consider such filmmaking a good investment.
“Nobody likes Trump, but we’ve seen what he’s done to entertainment and the media in the states,” a British filmmaker explained, referencing the president’s lawsuits against CBS News, ABC and the Wall Street Journal, as well as his attacks on late-night hosts Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel. “Nobody wants to put themselves in his crosshairs.” (As Bruce Springsteen said in a May 20 appearance on Colbert’s “Late Show,” Colbert lost his job because Trump can’t take a joke.)
Following the screening of our documentary “The First 100,” a young filmmaker from a small town in rural Virginia said he “completely understands” how those outside of the United States feel. “I wonder every day how this will end, and at the same time I’m sick of talking about it,” he explained. In his hometown, “[w]e have a huge Trump store that sells his memorabilia. They want to rename the city after him. It’s like we’re all drunk from being around him.”
The growing fear is that the political hangover will be worse than the political inebriation itself.
A German filmmaker I met felt it necessary to lecture me on America’s two-party system: “Your John Adams said you shouldn’t have any political parties. You have just two parties. That’s the American problem. You don’t have any choices. We have more political parties.” But he warned that the failures of the United States aren’t just about Trump. “I have traveled to festivals all over the world in the last few years. I don’t know that I can define why freedom is failing, but I see that it is — everywhere.”
Black actors at a party sponsored by the State of Georgia’s film office pointed to Trump’s inherent racism, misogyny and greed, as well as his transactional and narcissistic tendencies, for the underlying dread. “But we’re so tired of it,” a 79-year old actor explained to me. “We know what’s wrong and we know some people are trying to do something about it, but we’re numb. We’re hit with it every damn day. When people ask me if I like Trump — because I won’t talk about him much — I say ‘hell to the NO.’ I just need a break. Hell, we all do.”
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Maybe that’s the reason why people from a variety of cities, states and countries want to take a breath. We shouldn’t ignore Trump, his crimes or his existential threat for all humanity. But maybe we can still take a break from him. Trump won’t like it, but that’s a sacrifice we should be willing to make.
In Mougins, France, a village just outside of Cannes, a server in a small restaurant had the response we all should adopt.
I asked him if Trump was often a topic of discussion in the mountain retreat Pablo Picasso once called home. “Thfffpt,” the waiter exclaimed. He looked like Bill the Cat in the “Bloom County” comic strip as he stuck out his tongue and made a sound that sounded like “Aack.” Mougins, the waiter said, was a home for poets and artists that had endured for centuries.
“Trump is a fool,” he told me. “If we survived Napoleon and Hitler we can survive a fat man with a bad haircut from America.”
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Hello, my name is Asma E Nur. I am a tech blogger.
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