Leading his star-studded cast of schnooks, Donald Trump is producing his very own ‘Springtime for Hitler’
Zero Mostel starred in The Producers as Max Bialystock, a grifter who seems to anticipate the hijinks of Donald Trump. Photo by Getty Images
By Robert Zaretsky August 17, 2023
I began this past Tuesday the way I begin most days of late — turning to the news reports of a Donald Trump criminal or civil indictment. This week’s indictment was brought by the office of Fani Willis, the district attorney for Fulton County in Georgia. Trump, along with 18 advisers, lawyers, and supporters, was charged with running a “criminal enterprise” which tried to reverse the 2020 presidential election results.
As I skipped from one account to another of Trump’s foray into racketeering and defrauding, I had an uncanny feeling that I had already seen this movie. I don’t mean this as a metaphor for the previous indictments, but literally a movie: Mel Brooks’ The Producers.
Not, mind you, the slack 2005 remake with Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick. Instead, I had in mind the manic 1968 original with Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder. This was, funnily enough, the same year we elected another Republican to the White House who, thanks to the role he played in a criminal break-in and cover-up, was forced to move out six years later. Shortly after, his replacement announced that our “long national nightmare” was over.
Of course, the accuracy of that claim turned out to be questionable. What is beyond question, though, is that we are once again living through yet another long national nightmare, conjured by yet another Republican president who stands accused of orchestrating yet another cover-up of another series of crimes aimed at our democratic institutions. It’s as if the past half-century has been a nightmare from which we, like Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s Ulysses, are trying to wake up.
And what, you are wondering, does this hoary quotation have to do with The Producers and, well, “The Conspirators,” starring our former president (and current perp) Donald Trump? You should ask a fellow named Bloom. But not Leopold Bloom, Dedalus’ nocturnal companion in the alleys of Dublin (who had, oddly enough, been played by Mostel in the play Ulysses in Nighttown). Instead, ask Leo Bloom, the neurotic companion of Mostel’s Max Bialystock on the streets of New York.
Brooks was a fan, but not a scholar, of Joyce’s work. (Full disclosure: I never made it past page 7 of the novel.) “I don’t know what it meant to James Joyce,” he remarked, “but to me Leo Bloom always meant a vulnerable Jew with curly hair.” As for what the movie meant to him, Brooks was equally clear: it was about “two schnooks on Broadway who set out to produce a flop and swindle the backers.”
One schnook is Bloom, an accountant as bland as the beige coat he wears — except, that is, when he turns incandescent during his panic attacks. The other schnook, of course, is Bialystock, an aging theatrical producer with an expanding waistline and exotic combover — except that his remaining hair is black and not orange. His motto, famously, is “When you’ve got it, flaunt it.”
As fans of the movie know, when Bloom arrives at Bialystock’s office to audit his books, he discovers a $2,000 bookkeeping error in his favor. A desperate Bialystock, who was once reigned as “King of Broadway” and now fears the prospect of jail, begs Bloom to jigger the numbers. How hard could it be, he suggests, to “move a few decimal points around.”
Soon after the overwhelmed Bloom agrees to this minor instance of fraud, he has an epiphany. A theater producer, he tells Bialystock, whose face registers every nuance of the shift from astonishment to avarice, could make more money with a flop than he could with a hit. The key, he explains with a devilish smile, is “creative accounting.” Since the IRS audits box-office successes, not failures, a producer could, quite literally, make a steal by raking in investments large enough to dwarf the production costs. You could then make off with the sizable profit and, as Bialystock and Bloom intended, take off for Rio.
Or take back the White House.
This is where artistry merges uneasily with reality. Max Bialystock decides to defraud dozens of wealthy old ladies, like the one memorably played by Estelle “Touch me, feel me” Winwood, to fund his effort to make himself rich. On the other hand, Donald Trump, after a long career of defrauding customers and contractors, planned to defraud tens of millions of Americans not of their money, but instead of their votes, to make himself president again.
In a word, Trump orchestrated a confederacy of schnooks to produce a successful coup only to see it flop. Whereas Bialystock gathered a collection of flaming lunatics who he believed would bring down the curtain on Springtime for Hitler by the end of the first act, Trump hired, in the words of one cast member, an “elite strike force team” which would, in the words of a second cast member, “release the Kraken,” while a third member dabbed frantically at make-up dripping down his sweat-dappled cheeks.
In the wings of Trump’s production there were not nostalgic Nazis like Franz Liebkind (played by the show-stopping Kenneth Mars), but instead neo-Nazis like the fine people who marched in Charlottesville. There were also unassuming and obscure individuals like the bespectacled Department of Justice lawyer Jeffrey Clark who, like the bespectacled and bland Leo Bloom, thought that teaming up with Trump would help him avenge the indifference the world had always shown him.
While the parallels go on, the coup did not. Trump and his 18 co-conspirators failed to bring the curtain down on democracy. And yet, The Producers leaves us laughing; “The Conspirators” not so much. It is too fantastic to believe that just as Max Bialystock, the former king of Broadway, ends up in prison, Donald Trump, the former president who would be king, will do so as well. The events of late 2022 and early 2023 may well prove to have been a dress rehearsal for the opening of Wintertime for America.
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