Donald Trump’s Bizarre Oscars Smear Campaign Against ‘Django Unchained’

The following article by Marlow Stern was posted on the Daily Beast website March 3, 2018:

During the 2013 Academy Awards season, the then-reality TV host waged a one-man war against Quentin Tarantino’s revenge-Western, which he branded ‘very racist.’

Last month President Trump, armed with cue cards advising basic human responses, held a listening session at the White House.

Over ninety agonizing minutes, time he’d much rather be spending on the links or devouring cable news, Trump sat and listened to students, teachers and parents impacted by gun violence. It was the least that the most pro-NRA president ever could do, really, after a teenage gunman armed with a legally-purchased AR-15 assault rifle opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, claiming 17 lives.

The president didn’t stick to the cards for long.

Borrowing a page from Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone with shit” playbook—or the film Kindergarten Cop—Trump floated the idea of paying “a little bit of a bonus” to arm and train teachers. Then he pivoted to the “bad things” happening to kids on the internet, followed shortly by “the level of violence” in video games, because look at all the school shootings in Asia.

Next up in the blame game was Hollywood: “You see these movies, they’re so violent. And yet a kid is able to see the movie if sex isn’t involved, but killing is involved. And maybe they have to put a rating system for that. You get into a whole very complicated, very big deal but the fact is that you are having movies come out that are so violent with the killing and everything else that maybe that’s another thing we’re going to have to discuss.”

Given the president’s softcore credentials and alleged penchant for porn stars, this take isn’t all that surprising. But if his broadside against movie violence sounds familiar, it should, because it echoes his bizarre Oscars smear campaign against Quentin Tarantino’s 2013 film Django Unchained.

You see, Donald Trump loves the Oscars. In an alternate universe, Hillary Clinton would be president and Trump would thus adhere to his typical Oscar-night routine: angrily live-tweeting the ceremony, and then calling in to Fox & Friends the following morning to recap the night. Or perhaps he’d even be walking the red carpet, telling ABC that he deserved to be nominated in the “Best Looking Actor” category, as he did in 2011—back when he was a Democrat.