Why some call Trump a ‘Manchurian candidate’
“Donald Trump: A Modern Manchurian Candidate?”
These bold words were printed on page A31 on the New York Times atop a column questioning the U.S. president’s affinity for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
It’s not the first time Trump had been called a “Manchurian candidate.” The comparison has been brought up from outlets as wideranging as the Huffington Post, Vanity Fair, Salon and the New York Daily News.
Most of these columns don’t mention what that means. Like many phrases introduced by pop culture (think: catch-22, gaslighting), it’s become shorthand for something — namely, a president controlled by a foreign (these days, most likely Russian) power — even though at this point, wide swaths of the American public likely haven’t consumed the media that bore it.
The phrase first came into existence compliments of Richard Condon, who in1959 wrote a novel — The Manchurian Candidate — in which a platoon of soldiers return from the Korean War after being brainwashed to believe in communism. One of them has become a sleeper agent, controlled by the communist Chinese and Soviet governments to perform an assassination.
The novel was a hit, likely because it made campy pulp out of the era’s political climate.
John Frankenheimer directed a 1962 film adaptation of the book, which was a complete flop.
Perhaps it struck the wrong chord in the midst of the Cold War. Perhaps it was just too hard to follow.
Yet it lived on as a television staple, eventually becoming a cult classic.
And, of course, it was remade into a 2004 Denzel Washington blockbuster, updated to have the soldiers returning from the Gulf War.
That a 1959 book continues to live on in today’s politics, working as shorthand understood even by those who have never seen or read a word of its adaptations, is certainly a testament to how deeply it wormed its way into the American cultural consciousness.