I wondered why Megyn Kelly didn't probe into what Trump saw in "Citizen Kane" and "All Quiet on the Western Front."

She asked what was his favorite movie and his favorite book and never stopped to ask why. I wanted to know more. A reader sent me this, footage from an Errol Morris project that became a short at the 2002 Oscars. Various celebrities talked about film. Trump's material didn't make the final cut, but he talks quite a bit about "Citizen Kane":



He says a rich man can be unhappy — even more unhappy than his wife — because wealth can distance you and insulate you from other people. He also says the right word matters — that "Kane" wouldn't be the same without that word "rosebud." He does not take what I hear as a prod to talk about the oft-discussed sexual connotation of "rosebud."

Here's a 2002 New Yorker article about the Errol Morris project, with this about Trump:

On camera, Walter Cronkite was telling Morris about “The Best Years of Our Lives.”... Donald Trump was waiting, with mounting impatience, in the wings. Mikhail Gorbachev and entourage were trudging up the stairs. And Iggy Pop was in the greenroom.

When Cronkite was finished, Morris thanked him...  “I'd like to try to sneak you in before Gorbachev,” he said to Trump. “This is insane, by the way.”

Then Gorbachev strode into the studio, with two bodyguards and his regular translator, Pavel Palazhchenko. Gorbachev and Trump shook hands, and Gorbachev said something to Trump in Russian. “You're not changing,” Palazhchenko translated.

“You're not changing,” Trump replied, almost embracing Gorbachev, before waving him forward: “You go first, Mikhail.”

Gorbachev talked about "Gone with the Wind" — which he called "the people's drama." Morris prompted him to talk about "Dr. Strangelove." Gorbachev hadn't seen it, but he knew enough to say something wary about nuclear war.

As for "All Quiet on the Western Front." I've seen some Kelly watchers mocking Trump on the assumption that — since he also said he didn't have time these days to read whole books — he just dredged up a title he remember from his school days. Maybe he's that shallow, but we're shallow if we don't take the trouble to remember what is in that book and the significance of that material to anyone who would purport to have what it takes to serve as Commander in Chief.

You can read the summary of the book at Wikipedia here, but let me quote a 1986 essay by Mordecai Richler titled "1944: The Year I Learned to Love a German":

But what I did know is that, hating Germans with a passion, I had read only 20, maybe 30, pages before the author had seduced me into identifying with my enemy, 19-year-old Paul Baumer, thrust into the bloody trenches of World War I with his schoolmates: Muller, Kemmerich and the reluctant Joseph Behm, one of the first to fall. As if that weren't sufficiently unsettling in itself, the author, having won my love for Paul, my enormous concern for his survival, then betrayed me in the last dreadful paragraphs of his book:

''He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.

''He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.''

... Since ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' once meant so much to me, I picked it up again with a certain anxiety.... The novel also has its poignant moments, both in the trenches and when Paul Baumer goes home on leave, an old man of 19, only to find insufferably pompous schoolmasters still recruiting the young with mindless prattle about the fatherland and the glory of battle. Strong characters are deftly sketched. Himmelstoss, the postman who becomes a crazed drillmaster. Tjaden, the peasant soldier. Kantorek, the schoolmaster. On the front line the enemy is never the Frogs or the Limeys, but the insanity of the war itself. It is the war, in fact, and not even Paul Baumer, that is the novel's true protagonist. In a brief introduction to the novel Remarque wrote: ''This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war.''