For American Jews, Donald Trump is the sinister stranger on the train

Get off the train, Guy.

Donald Trump’s second presidency is giving rise to a grim new political cinema, infusing timeworn horror tropes with authoritarian porn.

In this new world, American Jews are becoming Guy, the hapless malcontent in Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train” whose failure to plainly repudiate the sociopath sitting across from him puts him and his reputation at grave risk.

It’s hard to resist imagining the barely nascent Trump second presidency in cinematic terms.

Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary, paraded last week in skintight clothing and a $60,000 watch in front of a cage packed with naked men.

The scene – which she posted on social media – had the sexploitative vibe of the plastic covered magazines one would find in the “Men’s” section at the back of what we once called “variety stores.” (If only Russ Meyer had had DHS money to throw away!)

JD Vance, perched in a parka above the Arctic Circle, recalled the 1982 John Carpenter classic, “The Thing:” The hyperconfident American about to cede his soul to a monstrous shape shifter.

Mike Myers likes to play Elon Musk as his own creation, Dr. Evil, embodying Cold War overreach, but the DOGE Meister strikes me more as a 1980s Faust, a combination of “The Falcon and the Snowman” in John Schlesinger’s 1985 movie: a Daddy issues guy triggered into treason by his own self-righteousness. But fueled by uppers.

The creepiest viral video of recent days was the arrest of Rumeysa Ozturk, the Turkish student at Tufts who was surrounded, cuffed and hustled into a van by masked men and women in plainclothes who would only identify themselves as “Police.”

The Greek director Costa-Gavras made movies like these to confront Americans with the abusive martinets their government was propping up overseas.

Now, the martinets are in the house.

Alfred Hitchcock’s specialty was the cocky guy blamed mysteriously for a crime he didn’t commit.

The plot in movies like “North by Northwest”, “Spellbound” and “Vertigo” is fueled in part by a whodunit – tracking down the malefactor who takes aim at a hero who is appealing but also flawed: He is certain of his own capacity for good, he is convinced he is living his best life.

The twist in “Strangers on a Train” is that we – and the hero – know from the get-go who framed him.

The crime is transactional: Bruno, played by Robert Walker, does Guy, played by Farley Granger, the “favor” of murdering his promiscuous wife, and expects Guy to murder his Dad in return. Each man would have an unassailable alibi, and no one would suspect the actual killer, who has no relationship with the victim. “Criss cross,” Bruno says.

It doesn’t help that Guy, a tennis star and paparazzi magnet, has been less than shy about being done with his wife and has been publicly courting the daughter of a senator. It helps even less that he does not make clear to Bruno from the outset that his proposal is disgusting.

It’s a corrupt proposal that recalls Trump’s courtship of this country’s Jews. Trump is gutting funding for universities and trampling on due process in the name of combating antisemitism. He cites the institutional Jewish outcry since the Oct. 7 massacres against a relative few campuses that allowed some protesters to make Jews feel unwelcome and unsafe.

And now he is doing something about it. The wrong thing. The Bruno thing. I mean, Bruno produces results, right? The upshot of the movie, after all, is that Guy weds the senator’s daughter.

And Trump will want his “criss cross,” his quid pro quo: Jewish institutional support for gutting due process and government funding of educational institutions because of offenses he believes to be the equivalent of antisemitic threat, including “anti-white” rhetoric, and the LGBTQ agenda.

I understand at least one reason for Jewish institutional resistance to speaking out: Jews are often blamed for policies they had nothing to do with, and which they even opposed in real time. I chronicled the bad faith bids to blame Jews for the Iraq War.,

The movie ending is cute: A clearly benign fellow, a minister, recognizes Guy and his bride on a train, and they scoot away.

Not unlike what parts of the legacy Jewish organizations are doing right now: ducking and hiding and refraining from clearcut condemnations of erosions of the rule of law. In the Washington Post, Matt Bai berates his old friend, the Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, for not robustly calling out corrupt actions made in the name of the Jews.

It won’t work. “Strangers on the Train” would have been a half hour affair, and not the movie classic it’s become – perhaps it would have been an episode of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” – if Guy had understood the threat Bruno posed at the outset and reported him to the police.

So, not as fun as the movie. No climax on the carousel.

But in many ways, much more satisfying. And the smarter course in real life.