Telling The 'Guardian' Some Unwelcome Truths...

On to Mamet’s much-documented swing to conservatism, from his stand against the NFL’s kneeling-during-the-anthem protests to his support for Donald Trump. It seems so far away from the leftist leanings of his youth, the critiques of capitalism clearly visible in American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross.

“I was never, ever a communist,” he says. “All you need to know about communism is that Marx was a sponger. He lived off Engels’ family who had a furniture factory.”

He was raised as a “red diaper baby”, he adds – meaning his parents were communists – so even to say he is a Republican “sticks in my throat”. But he is a conservative because “I would like to conserve those things I grew up with: the love of family, the love of the country, love of service, love of God, love of community.”

You can just imagine the look on the interviewer's face at this point, can't you? And there's more:

And love of the American constitution too. “For those who say the constitution is over 200 years old and can’t still be relevant, I say, ‘Well, what about the Ten Commandments?’ What’s going to rule in its place? Savagery.”

And there's still no escape for our hapless interlocutor: 

Mamet became a vocal Trump supporter during his presidency, which can’t have been easy in the Democratic stronghold of California. “Well, he did a great job as a president.” Really? “Well, if you put everything you see on these little screens aside and look at what happened during the Trump presidency. We told China to knock it off. We told Nato to start paying their fair share. We moved the Embassy of the United States to Jerusalem in Israel, fixing the only instance in history of a country that didn’t have an embassy in its capital city. Gas prices were down. There was the lowest black unemployment in history …”

The sweat must by now be rolling down his back.  

There was also Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was rigged. Does Mamet believe America’s democratic process to be flawed too? “It’s an interesting question. I grew up in Chicago, which was run as a mob’s fiefdom by Mayor Richard J Daley. So all elections were rigged. The idea that people are not going to steal elections is ignorance because people steal elections all the time. The question is: ‘What was the extent of the election rigging?’ I don’t know. But was it questionable? Yes.”

Poor guy will need therapy after that interview!