How Trump and His MAGA Movement Were Predicted in 1942

1 January 2026, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

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That was the denouement in the noire movie classic “Keeper of the Flame”, which film is described this way at Amazon:

It’s no surprise that Keeper of the Flame came out in 1942, the same year as Casablanca. In this would-be film noir, the problems of two little people again don’t amount to a hill of beans when it comes to fighting fascism in other countries–not to mention the United States. Spencer Tracy stars as Steven O’Malley, a war correspondent who comes home to write a book about a great industrialist [named “Robert Forrest”] who’s died under mysterious circumstances. He hopes to gain insight from the man’s wife (Katharine Hepburn), but she is reticent to play along with the reporter. It’s not difficult to figure out the “truth” that Tracy discovers, but the film is an interesting piece of period propaganda. Director George Cukor (who also directed Tracy and Hepburn in Adam’s Rib and Pat and Mike) is definitely making what they used to call a message picture, but Tracy and Hepburn’s always-apparent chemistry keeps it fun to watch. –Paige Newman

Trump is no “industrialist,” but otherwise both he and his “Make America Great Again” movement were accurately described in 1942 by the Hepburn character, in that denouement.

Calling this movie a “piece of period propaganda” sounds right, because, in 1942, America was being led by its final great President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and he was clear that while both communism and fascism were dictatorial and thus inimical to the values that dominated among the authors of the U.S. Constitution, fascism was the far bigger threat to take over in this country, because, as FDR had described in his “1936 Acceptance Speech for the Renomination for the Presidency”

And so it was to win freedom from the tyranny of political autocracy that the American Revolution was fought. That victory gave the business of governing into the hands of the average man, who won the right with his neighbors to make and order his own destiny through his own Government. Political tyranny was wiped out at Philadelphia on July 4, 1776.

Since that struggle, however, man’s inventive genius released new forces in our land which reordered the lives of our people. The age of machinery, of railroads; of steam and electricity; the telegraph and the radio; mass production, mass distribution—all of these combined to bring forward a new civilization and with it a new problem for those who sought to remain free.

For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital—all undreamed of by the fathers—the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.

There was no place among this royalty for our many thousands of small business men and merchants who sought to make a worthy use of the American system of initiative and profit. They were no more free than the worker or the farmer. Even honest and progressive-minded men of wealth, aware of their obligation to their generation, could never know just where they fitted into this dynastic scheme of things.

It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.

The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor—these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship. The savings of the average family, the capital of the small business man, the investments set aside for old age — other people’s money — these were tools which the new economic royalty used to dig itself in.

Those who tilled the soil no longer reaped the rewards which were their right. The small measure of their gains was decreed by men in distant cities.

Throughout the Nation, opportunity was limited by monopoly. Individual initiative was crushed in the cogs of a great machine. The field open for free business was more and more restricted. Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise.

FDR recgnized that it would be much easier for fascism than for communism to achieve mass appeal in this country, because America is capitalist, and fascism is dictatorial capitalism, whereas communism isn’t at all capitalist.

In 1942, we were already in WW2 against the three imperialistic fascist powers (Germany, Japan, and Italy); and, so, calling this movie a “piece of period propaganda” seems right; but it — unfortunately for the makers of this movie — turned out to have been wrong, because even in 1942, those “economic royalists” held enough power in the U.S. to squelch the movie — DESPITE its star cast. And even the movie’s director, George Cukor, blamed the movie’s second half (its leftist part) (presumably because of its denouement) for the substantial negative response to it.

As Wikipedia notes in its article about the film:

The film was screened for the Office of War Information’s Bureau of Motion Pictures on December 2, 1942, where it was disapproved of by the bureau chief, Lowell Mellett.

Keeper of the Flame premiered at the Albee Theatre in Cincinnati on January 28, 1943. The film set a box-office record for the city. A few other limited dates followed in February. It premiered at Radio City Music Hall on Thursday, March 18, 1943. Its Australian premiere was at the Metro Theatre in Melbourne in June 1943. The film appeared on American television in March 1957. …

The film was held over for a fourth week at Radio City Music Hall (most films lasted a week),^[54][55] but it did not do well at the box office nationally and is considered the least successful of the Hepburn-Tracy films.^[56][57] It earned $2,190,000 in the United States and Canada and $1,032,000 elsewhere, making an overall profit of $1,040,000.^[2][58]

Reception [edit]

The film generated some political controversy. Republican members of Congress complained about the film’s obviously leftist politics and demanded that Will H. Hays, president of the Motion Picture Production Code, establish guidelines regarding propagandization for the motion picture industry.^[59][60] …

Congressional Republicans hadn’t been satisfied that Lowell Mellett (who had been appointed by FDR himself) rejected the movie; they demanded that the even more right-wing Will H. Hays take over the task of rating movies.

Thomas Bonilla’s Retro Media Library says of this movie:

Keeper of the Flame premiered to a poor reception at Radio City Music Hall on Thursday, March 18, 1943. MGM head Louis B. Mayer stormed out of the cinema, enraged by his having encouraged the making of a film that equated wealth with fascism. Republican members of Congress complained about the film’s leftist politics and demanded that Will H. Hays, president of the Motion Picture Production Code, establish motion picture industry guidelines for propaganda. Cukor was dissatisfied with the film and considered it one of his poorest efforts.

So, this movie, adapted from the 1942 novel of the same name by (Ms.) I.A.R. Wylie, antagonized the head of the studio that had made it. Perhaps for this reason, it didn’t even have the support of its director. Its problem was that it was “a film that equated wealth with fascism.” However, between that time and this time, massive empirical evidence, including scientific analyses of the relevant data, confirm that America at least ever snce 1980, has been controlled by only its billionaires — and this can’t even possibly be any sort of real democracy, but is instead an “aristocracy” or “oligarchy,” such as Wylie portrayed it to be. It certainly ISN’T any type of communism; it is instead a capitalist type of dictatorship; it is a dictatorship by its billionaires — by America’s aristocracy.

Furthermore, those data show that America’s fascism is of BOTH of its political Parties — not ONLY of its overtly fascist one, which is the Republicans (certainly as they are today, the MAGA movement — which was virtually being warned against if not predicted by that denouement). Louis B. Mayer was a Republican billionaire in his time, in the money of our time.

On 1 January 2026, Scott Ritter explains that, because the U.S. empire is now losing its war to conquer the rest of the world, the Trump regime is seeking to escalate right up to nuclear war in order to defeat Russia in the battlefields of Ukraine and ultimately by nuclearly decapitating Russia’s central command in The Kremlin by means of a U.S. nuclear missile to be fired from Ukraine (just 300 miles from The Kremlin). Even during WW2, no world leader was more fascist than this. Trump is virtually a clone of the Robert Forrest character (who isn’t even shown nor heard from) in “Keeper of the Flame”. He’s a tycoon whose political movement is funded by even richer ones in order to extend their empire throughout the world. He’s a stupid psychopath who might be willing to destroy the world in order not to be a “loser,” even if he can’t continue to be a “winner.” And he really IS the most powerful person in the world right now; so, our fate rests in their hands.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.