Roger Stone is probably the most colorful character in American politics, and extraordinarily has been for 50 years. This brilliant and hilarious documentary on him is long overdue and it is here now because, aside from the candidate himself, Stone is the man most responsible for Donald Trump’s 2016 Presidential election win.
He is the thread that runs through the Republican Party from its reinvention as the ‘New Right’ in the 1960s with Nixon all the way to Donald Trump, and his approach can be summed up in his statement: “politics is show business for ugly people”. He’s also memorably described in the doc as “a body-building dandy, a category as far I’m concerned of one”. This flamboyant, camp, ex-musical theater actor who sports a huge tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back, one of the last surviving members of Nixon’s infamous “CREEP”, – the ‘Campaign To Re-elect the President’ (most of the other leading members having served jail time) has become the ‘Forrest Gump’ of US Republican politics, and has defined, even masterminded, the party’s massive shift from its Eisenhower-era ‘good guy’ image to the Neo-Conservative, ‘dirty tricks’-loving, ‘corporate pirate’ party, whose mantra like Stone’s is ‘win at all costs’.
Roger Stone ticks all the boxes for what previous generations would have called a ‘fascist’ and judging by this doco he would probably not deny it. Small wonder then that he has now been distanced from his most recent project, the current US President.
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