High Noon in America: Trump and the Story of the Classic Western

The following article is sponsored by D’Souza Media LLC’s new film “Vindicating Trump” and is written by Dinesh D’Souza.

Before I came to America, I had no direct familiarity with Americans or American culture. My knowledge was largely through the lens of movies, most commonly Westerns. I saw a whole bunch of them, and my favorites include For a Few Dollars More starring Clint Eastwood and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance starring Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne. The Western is, above all, a morality tale and, as such, it provides a remarkably clear and insightful way to look at Donald Trump and our current crisis.

In the typical Western, we first see a small town, which is generally named Shinbone or Pleasantville or something like that. A quiet place, with happy people, and an old sheriff with a tooth-brush mustache. The sheriff is a good guy, but he is a man of platitudes. He disdains the use of force; he envisions a kinder, gentler Shinbone. And in a peaceful environment, his approach is the right one. People gather for drinks and conviviality at the local saloon. They get their foodstuffs at the local provision store.

Then the harmony of the town is viciously disrupted when the gangsters arrive. The arrival of the gangsters is highlighted with a shocking display of violent depravity. This is intended to convey to the audience that the old harmony is gone. Shinbone is not the same place that it was before the gangsters arrived.  With ruthless dispatch, the outlaws take over the town. They take over the saloon and the provision store. They overpower the old sheriff and, in doing so, the outlaws become the law. They insult the young girls and women. They terrify the population into submission. Shinbone now faces an existential threat. The evil is consolidating itself; it seems invincible.

And then, over the mountain, comes a lone rider. He’s an outsider; not a lot is known about him. The townspeople aren’t sure what to make of him, because he’s rough, he seems uncouth, and most of all they don’t know what his motives are. But the gangsters recognize right away that this man is their real threat. He is normal on the surface, but he is also, as the bad guys immediately realize, a figure of uncommon strength and power. And he has their number.

The gangsters put him to the test, and he quickly shows that despite his evident circumspection, he has no intention of submitting to their authority. So, they resolve to destroy him in one way or another. They will stop at nothing. They try to buy him off, to intimidate him, to turn the people of the town against him, even to beat him up and kill him.

But the man proves uncommonly resilient. He takes some heavy blows, but he doesn’t go down for good. He is persistent. He is strategic. And he’s very quick on the draw. He is a match—more than a match—for the bad guys put together. And eventually there is the great shootout or the great draw. The gangsters have rigged the odds. Despite their superiority in firepower, they are determined to cheat.

The hero is on to the cheating, but he is not himself a cheater. He fights fair and shoots straight. And in the end, through sheer mastery of the arts of combat, he defeats the gangsters. Sometimes this is accomplished with the help of some allies from the town; sometimes he does this all by himself. Either way, the bad guys get their comeuppance.

But then we get to the crucial ending scene, and it is always the same. The threat from the gangsters is over. Not permanently—because new gangsters can always show up. But it is over, for now. And the townspeople are jubilant and grateful. And some of them would like the outsider to stay. He might be needed to deal with new gangsters in the future. But the man never stays. He gets on his horse, and he rides away.

Now why does he do this? The reason is a subtle, but important one. The outsider could have stayed. In fact, he could have ruled the town as a gangster himself. He has shown he has the power to defeat the gangsters, so he could easily become the new gangster. But our hero doesn’t want to do this, and this is what makes him our hero. His goal is to make Shinbone great again. And so, having done his job, he leaves. And in doing so, he shows the town that he was always on their side. Before that, the people knew he was against the gangsters, but they didn’t know he was for them. In the end, they know.

That’s fiction, the way we like it. But it also seems to be reality in America today. America, after all, is Shinbone. The Left and the Democrats—they are the gangster regime that takes over the town. The old sheriff represents the old Republican establishment, well-meaning but utterly incapable of facing the gangster threat. And the man who comes over the mountain, and leaves in the end—that’s Trump. We are living out today the script of a classic Western, and the only suspense is to see how this story will end.

This article is adapted from Dinesh D’Souza’s forthcoming book Vindicating Trump. D’Souza’s movie of the same title is in theaters nationwide on September 27.

To get movie tickets and pre-order copies of the book, go to vindicatingtrump.com.