Presidents in Movies Always Seem to Know What They’re Doing. In Real Life …

In October 1960, when the novelist Philip Roth was just 27, he shared an unsettling revelation: Reality was outstripping fiction. “The American writer,” he wrote, “has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality.” He ticked off examples of newsmakers that novelists couldn’t dream up: men like the quiz-show scammer Charles Van Doren; the Eisenhower chief of staff Sherman Adams, who resigned after accepting improper gifts; and, presciently, Roy Cohn, the sinister McCarthyite prosecutor who would become, in later years, mentor to a young Donald Trump.

In the 64 years since Roth first made this observation, it has become an oft-repeated refrain that the novel can do only so much to approximate reality’s madness. Cinema and television, though, haven’t done much better. The spectacle of the screen, in some sense, was supposed to — the edict is entertainment and often entertainment alone. Shouldn’t Hollywood have offered us, at some point, a president like one of our last two, Trump and Joe Biden? Or a plot twist akin to this summer’s, in which an incumbent presidential candidate was effectively toppled and his vice president took his place without winning a single primary vote? But showrunners and moviemakers never really foresaw a presidency quite like either of the last two or a campaign like this one. Their work has underestimated both what the American political system is capable of producing and what voters could ultimately stomach.

Consider the American president on film. Morgan Freeman in “Deep Impact,” stoically guiding the nation through the approach of a civilization-annihilating comet. Michael Douglas in “The American President,” as a popular, introspective widower straining to date again. Or Bill Pullman’s President Thomas Whitmore in “Independence Day”: a swaggering Air Force veteran, leading his makeshift squadron into combat against the alien invaders.

The generic cinema president of the 20th century was informed by politicians of that era and the sensibilities they cultivated. In style and rhetoric, the two parties often bled together. In the 1980s and ’90s, to be “presidential” was to be well coifed, almost glossy — the Kennedyesque ethos adopted by Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton in equal measure. Each, for a certain segment of the populace, was a nigh-heroic figure; even for those who disagreed, there remained a halo of dignity around the office itself. It helped that the parties were converging on policy, with Clinton’s Democrats swerving rightward after the rise of Reaganomics: Hollywood’s presidents, Democrat or Republican, didn’t even need to seem so different from one another.

It is difficult to imagine Trump, or Biden, risking his life in the skies to save humanity or summoning the gravitas to inspire a nation. Biden, of course, is hampered by advanced age, something no well-known Hollywood depictions of the American presidency ever reckoned with — that a president in his 80s might, say, struggle to perform in a single televised debate and find his party in revolt, pressing him to stand down. Prestige-film presidents do not forget the names of world leaders or how their sons actually died; they don’t shout out to politicians at a White House event who aren’t there because they are dead. That stuff is more Shakespearean.

And Trump, of course, is sui generis. What movie fathomed a fading reality-TV star’s running for president, winning, eventually trying to steal the next election, inciting a deadly riot at the Capitol, being indicted for falsifying business records, winning the Republican nomination anyway, almost being assassinated, blathering in another televised debate about the fictional consumption of cats and dogs in Ohio — and still running almost even in the polls? Even in the most surreal comedy, this would seem too absurd. TV presidents don’t lie with so much impunity. They possess a degree of tact and reserve that is utterly alien to Trump. In a film, something like the “Access Hollywood” tape might be the pivotal plot device that decides an election.