'The Comey Rule' Trailer And The Problem Of The Trump Voice

The first full trailer for Showtime's The Comey Rule, an adaptation of former FBI head James Comey's tell-all book A Higher Loyalty, is here, and with it the first proper look at Brendan Gleeson's Donald Trump.

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As we've noted before, the neck is spot on. The hair looks a little thick, maybe, and the face at large is a bit jarring at first glance. It looks like Gleeson's been mucking about with a Trump Instagram filter, though presumably that'll wear off.

The really weird thing is Gleeson-Trump's voice. We heard a few snatches of it in the teaser, but the growl will be the main way he's going to communicate, and it's odd hearing that voice come out of Trump's face.

"Jim Comey, he's more famous than me," he grunts.

"I wanna know what you can do to lift this Russia cloud," he rumbles.

"Comey, he's a bad guy, a dishonest guy," he glowers.

Now, generally, Trump doesn't growl. At rallies, there's that mixture of showy hectoring and shrugging disingenuousness, the pantomime mimicry of enemies, the conspiratorial winking, the whinnying, the fragile boasting.

Showtime

The issue for an actor and director being that those shades don't sound particularly threatening. Gleeson's fine actor, and carries a general vibe of cantankerous danger with him, but there's only so conventionally threatening he'd be able to make his Trump with that voice.

Nasal petulance wouldn't be the ideal register for The Comey Rule's picture of Trump, which looks to be as a gangster heading up a shadowy cabal of impossibly powerful, borderline omnipotent operatives.

It's tricky to gauge exactly how wise the super-serious treatment that Trump and his people look like they're going to get will be. On the one hand, the election interference in 2016 was the most deeply troubling example of how fragile democracy can be. There's enormous drama there, and important drama too, but drama which has appeared in fragmented pieces over the last four years. Untangling the timelines could do a lot of good.

Showtime

On the other, jamming Trump and accomplices into the straightforward strictures of the kind of Big Bad you've seen in all sorts of rote dramas before now turns them into mythic figures. Playing Trump and acolytes in the grammar of a crime syndicate in particular – as if they exist in the same universe as The Wire or The Sopranos or Boardwalk Empire – doesn't really do justice to how incompetent and opportunistic the Trump administration is and was.

Emperor Palpatine would not have allowed Eric Trump anywhere near the Empire. Stringer Bell would not have kicked off about Parasite winning an Oscar ahead of Gone With the Wind. Tony Soprano would not have hired Anthony 'The Mooch' Scaramucci.

There's also the fact that it's all real, and it's still happening, and it's stranger than anyone could possibly have written it. That's the real sticking point of any dramatisation of the Trump presidency: whatever you create, however darkly your villain growls, reality will outrun you very quickly.