Anyone wanting a reminder of how a certain Donald J Trump ended up living for four years in a home on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington could do worse than start with British filmmaker/journalist James Fletcher’s new documentary, The Accidental President.
In his bid to understand how Trump first ended up in the White House, Fletcher has spoken both to insiders in the court of King Donald, among them his senior counsellor Kellyanne Conway, and to some of his most outspoken and acerbic critics, for example ‘The West Wing’ creator Aaron Sorkin and broadcaster and chat show host, Jerry Springer.
Fletcher had originally planned to release his film to tie in with last autumn’s 2020 US Presidential election. But the pandemic intervened, which is why viewers have the chance to watch the film now, over a month after Trump very reluctantly vacated the White House.
The subject matter may seem familiar. Hundreds of books, thousands of articles and millions of tweets have been devoted to working out just how and why Trump became President. This, though, is the first documentary entirely dedicated to the subject.
It’s not a novel thesis but Fletcher’s witnesses nearly all argue that Trump wasn’t expecting to win the 2016 election.
Fletcher showed a chutzpah in securing his interviews that Trump himself might have admired. You couldn’t have found anyone closer to the former President than Kellyanne Conway. Somehow, Fletcher got hold of her cell phone number. He texted her, saying “you don’t know me, I am from the UK, I am interested in making a documentary.” The White House Chief of Staff called him back. Conway’s ‘people’ were worried that he might have been planning to set her up. He reassured her that he simply wanted to hear her side of the story.
“That’s what we got,” Fletcher remembers. Conway was relieved to have an engagement with a journalist which wasn’t the usual gladiatorial-style combat she was accustomed to with the Washington press corp. She had promised Fletcher 15 minutes but ended up giving him almost an hour.
The director recruited Piers Morgan in equally opportunistic fashion. He spotted Morgan in a pub in London and approached him. Morgan agreed to an interview and they set a time to talk. “He personally knows Trump. He was on the Celebrity Apprentice. They go back a long way.”
The Accidental President isn’t supportive of Trump in any way and yet it will still make very uncomfortable viewing for her Democratic opponent in the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton.
“The decisions that were probably imposed on her, or very heavily encouraged as good ideas, did her a lot of damage. She was shielded from the media. She never really had the opportunity to connect with people,” the filmmaker explains of how Clinton mismanaged her campaign by being far too aloof. His films shows “the appalling moment” when Hillary is giving an interview to a black radio station and claims she carries hot sauce with her wherever she goes.
“She [Clinton] had spent the last 20 years living in this extraordinary bubble, surrounded by secret service agents, living this very privileged life and had become distanced in the way people do when they live like that,” Fletcher says of why Hillary seemed so out of touch.
No, Fletcher isn’t planning a second documentary, looking at the 2020 election. “I don’t think it was as interesting or as crazy as 2016. I am not sure there are a whole raft of new lessons from the last election, other than there was a pandemic which changed everything and the Biden people were very sensible to keep Joe [Biden] in the basement in Delaware and let Trump set himself on fire, which he did.”
On this side of the Atlantic, Fletcher has made campaign films for both former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron and the current incumbent, Boris Johnson. He is at pains to point out that these were paid jobs and he wasn’t doing them out of any ties to the Conservative party. “In the Cameron case, it was very interesting to be around someone hoping to become a leader of a G8 nation and to see all that went on in the background. The Boris Johnson Mayor of London campaign was not unlike the Trump thing. It was a bit of a laugh. No-one thought he was serious. He was incapable of explaining why he wanted to be Mayor of London in front of my camera. It took 20 takes and lots of rehearsals to get him to sound in any way convincing.”
The pandemic severely slowed down the release of The Accidental President. “Festivals were cancelled. Cinemas were closed. All our plans were absolutely ground to a standstill.” In the end, the film was made available online earlier this year. “We had to pivot rapidly. But thank god we had the option to stream because otherwise we would have been sitting on a dusty shelf somewhere, going out of date at a perilous speed.”
Fletcher has been encouraged by the early response to The Accidental President. Most viewers have accepted it presents a balanced picture of its notorious subject. “People from both sides of the aisle agree that is the case. We interviewed a number of Republicans, a number of Democrats and others in the middle. We were tough on Hillary Clinton but it was tough love on what her campaign got wrong,” the director reflects. “In the end, this is a historical document about an insane election – about how a games show host became the most powerful person on the planet.”
After all his research, Fletcher, like many others, still takes the view that Trump’s 2016 election campaign was “a publicity stunt that got out of hand.” Nor was he taken off guard by the violence that broke out on January 6, with the storming of the US Capitol by Trump supporters claiming the election had been stolen from their hero. “When you now watch the film and you see what was being served up as an offering in 2015/2016, you can’t be massively surprised…Trump has this ability to whip people up!”
The Accidental President is available on Apple TV+, Amazon, iTunes, Google Play and YouTube now.
