Donald Trump as ‘The Third Man’

Graham Greene’s screenplay concerns the rude awakening of Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), an American author of hokey Western novels, who has come to bombed, exhausted, cynical Vienna to accept a job offered by his old friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles). The very day Martins arrives, he learns that Lime has been killed only hours before, in a suspicious traffic accident. In his subsequent effort to find the perpetrators and clear Lime’s good name, Martins discovers that his friend actually faked his own death and escaped the occupying British military police.

Con man

It further develops that Lime is the mastermind behind a deadly criminal enterprise that steals precious penicillin from military hospitals and sells it on the black market in doses so diluted that patients inevitably die. Almost as reprehensibly, Lime cuts a deal with the Russians to betray his devoted actress girlfriend Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli), a Czech refugee living in Austria on a forged passport. Lime emerges as a quintessential con man, a charming cad seemingly devoid of conscience, who thinks only of himself, exploits others and then disposes of them, a man who… Say, does Harry Lime remind you of anyone?

Yes, I know. Donald Trump never stole penicillin from a military hospital. What was I thinking?

‘A part of me’

When the enormity of his friend’s misdeeds finally dawns on him, Martins reacts with justifiable outrage. But Anna reacts differently. Even when told of Harry’s crimes — against society as well as against her — she remains fiercely loyal. She’s angrier at Martins for betraying Lime than she is at Lime for betraying her.

“I don’t want him anymore,” she explains. “I don’t want to see him, hear him. But he’s still a part of me. That’s a fact. I couldn’t do a thing to harm him.” In the film’s famous final scene, when Anna is left alone and vulnerable in an unforgiving city, bereft of a support network or even a valid passport, Martins conscientiously tries to help (even at the cost of missing his flight home); but Anna brushes past him without so much as a glance.

Living vicariously

Why would Anna reject this decent man while going belly-up for an abusive scoundrel? If you view Anna through a Donald Trump prism, you’ll derive a useful contemporary lesson: Anna is a surrogate for Trump’s loyal base — that 33 percent of American voters who swallowed Trump’s Kool-Aid in 2016 and have been addicted to him ever since.

Notwithstanding his tax cuts for the rich, misguided tariffs, dismantling of Obamacare, cozying up to Putin, attempts to deport 800,000 children of undocumented immigrants, or revolving-door staff, Trump’s approval rating hasn’t suffered since his inauguration. This, even though Trump sold out his supporters to benefit his pals in the top 1 percent. They love Trump not despite his arrogance but because of it — because they can live their inhibited lives vicariously through his brazen bluster.

Hopelessly rational liberal pundits, meanwhile, are the Holly Martins of this story, earnestly trying to rescue all those red-state Annas from the Harry Lime in the White House. As I watched this past week’s TV interviews with Trump’s alleged paramours Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels, my inner Holly Martins kept shouting, “What on earth did you see in that guy?” The Annas reply: "He’s still a part of me. I couldn’t do a thing to harm him."

They resent Stormy Daniels for betraying Trump more than they resent Trump for betraying them. And if you try to tell them they’ve been sold a bill of goods, they brush past you without so much as a word or a glance.

“You don't love someone because they're perfect," says a character in Jodi Picoult’s novelMy Sister’s Keeper. "You love them in spite of the fact that they're not." It’s something to keep in mind next time you’re tempted, like Holly Martins in The Third Man, to make sense of the imbalance between Donald Trump’s virtues and his flaws.