I can’t stop thinking about a Trump airplane that appears in the beginning of “The Limo,” an episode in Season Three of the classic 1990s sitcom “Seinfeld.”
As the cliché goes, you might miss it if you blink, but it’s there all right. After main character Jerry Seinfeld (Seinfeld) delivers an opening stand up comedy bit, but before we see him get picked up at a New York City airport by his friend George Costanza (Jason Alexander), there is a shot of an airplane with the name “TRUMP” plastered on one side. “The Limo,” as it turns out, was filmed during a brief period when America’s future president owned a failing airline called Trump Shuttle, which he sold to USAir less than two months after “The Limo” first aired.
I avoid superstitious and reductive thinking (or try to, anyway) and do not believe there is any metaphysical or conspiratorial significance behind that plane appearing in the opening of “The Limo.” Trump and his myriad business ventures were ubiquitous in the 1990s, so inevitably they were referenced in popular culture from the time. (If you want to see all of Trump’s personal cameos, check out this video from CollegeHumor.)
At the same time, given the subject matter of “The Limo,” the presence of that Trump airplane is weirdly poetic. Right now Americans face the horrifying prospect that Trump, a white supremacist president with fascist tendencies, will refuse to give up power if he loses the upcoming election. “The Limo,” fittingly, foreshadows that with a comical tale of Nazism in America.
It doesn’t start out that way. At first “The Limo” is simply the story of two pals trying to steal an airport limousine ride by having one of them impersonate its intended passenger, a mysterious man named O’Brien who missed his flight from Chicago. The twist is that O’Brien is the most influential Nazi in America and is scheduled to deliver a big speech at Madison Square Garden in his campaign of (as George correctly surmises) “making hate mongering and fascism popular again.”
This, obviously, is the big reason why that Trump plane stands out. Had it appeared in a more anodyne “Seinfeld” episode, it would have been no more remarkable than other Trump-brand cameos in pop culture works. Yet the Trump plane is symbolically fitting for a story about two characters — one of them clearly identified as Jewish, the other implied to have at least partial Jewish heritage — suddenly mixed up in a nascent white supremacist revolution.
There is another way in which “The Limo” is eerily relevant to this historical moment — namely, in how it mines humor from the awkwardness of the main characters’ predicament. There is something poignant about the social circumstances that allowed the protagonists’ plight to be possible in the first place. For the premise to work, Jerry and George first had to be comfortable enough as Jews in modern America to go about their day-to-day lives assuming they would not face prejudice. They also had to live in an America where white supremacist ideologies, though still present, were not socially sanctioned. Only then could they be shocked by finding themselves with people out who not only hate, but for whom explicitly violent and far right hate is a defining feature of their political identity.
This isn’t to say that America didn’t have a racism problem in 1992. Quite to the contrary: That was the year of Pat Buchanan’s brazenly xenophobic and anti-Semitic presidential candidacy, and even the supposedly centrist Bill Clinton won the Democratic nomination by finding socially acceptable ways of dogwhistling old-fashioned racist ideas. Four years earlier, Republican nominee George H. W. Bush had won the presidency in part by appealing to racism.
Yet only one year before “The Limo” aired, Bush pointedly refused to endorse white supremacist David Duke in the Louisiana governor’s race, despite both of them being Republicans, because of Duke’s “long record, an ugly record of racism and of bigotry.” Less than a month before “The Limo” aired, conservative commentator William F. Buckley, Jr. called out Buchanan for being anti-Semitic, even though Buckley had once been the man’s mentor. Hate was still very much a part of American life, but being a self-proclaimed white supremacist was no longer mainstream. We didn’t have a sitting president claim there were “very fine people” among white supremacists, tell them to “stand by” in the upcoming election and knowingly accept having one of his principal advisers interact with white nationalist groups.
In its own way, perhaps unintentionally, “The Limo” critiqued the complacency of assuming this would always be the case. When George reads the lines from O’Brien’s speech declaring that “the Jews steal our money through their Zionist occupied government and use the black man to bring drugs into our oppressed white minority communities,” he uttered views that were fringe in 1992 but have become increasingly mainstream in the politics of the Trump era. When a reporter mentions that O’Brien supports “the violent overthrow of the government,” she expressed a perspective that seemed absurd in 1992, but is not too far removed from what Trump will effectively accomplish if he loses this election but manages to stay in power anyway.
While I have no idea if director Tom Cherones and writer Larry Charles intended any of this when they made “The Limo,” I can’t help but think of Sacha Baron Cohen, who Charles directed in the comedy films “Borat,” “Bruno” and “The Dictator.” Those were highly political and transgressive comedies, and as Cohen wrote earlier this week, “By getting people to reveal what they really believe, I have at times exposed the ignorance, bigotry and conspiratorial delusions that often lurk just below the surface of our modern lives.”
As an American Jew who has experienced anti-Semitism both prior to Trump’s rise and as a direct result of it, I appreciate the value of this type of comedy more than ever. Yes, it is a coincidence that the Trump plane appears in “The Limo”; it’s also a coincidence that I wound up writing this article at all, given that my only reason for recently rewatching “The Limo” was Charles being kind enough to tweet about my most recent Salon article on the evils of capitalism.
Nevertheless, this is one coincidence that has real symbolic significance for America today.