Returning to Clint Eastwood’s Absolute Power on the 20th anniversary of its release, on Valentine’s Day 1997, I was hoping that its story of a womanizing president of the United States trying to cover up the murder of his own mistress by Secret Service agents might find some echo in reality now that we have an unabashedly bad guy in the Oval Office for real.

What I found was a politically resonant cultural document of its own times that does, in certain fascinating ways, lead us to the place we are now, even though a mere sex-murder does pale in comparison with the worst we might imagine Donald Trump coming up with.

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Clint plays Basic 1990s Clint, as Luther Whitney, seasoned old jewel thief and art forger, a widower with a DA for a daughter (Laura Linney), always making old-codger jokes about himself. On one of his nighttime robberies, he finds himself behind a two-way mirror in a bedroom closet full of jewelry and cash when President Alan Richmond (we learn later) arrives and engages in rough sex games with the much younger wife (Melora Hardin – Jan from The Office) of his elderly mentor and backer (EG Marshall in his last role) on the other side of the glass. Things get violent, she screams and stabs Richmond, and in come the Secret Service and they shoot her in the head. As they prepare to make it look like a botched robbery, Luther now realizes he’s the perfect suspect and flees into the night.

Things get interesting with the arrival of Richmond’s brassy chief of staff, Gloria Russell, played with absolutely no directorial restraint by an almost unhinged Judy Davis. Although she isn’t the first lady (who is mentioned but never seen), she is a note-perfect Gingrich-era misogynistic nightmare of pushy womanhood in the workplace, utterly ruthless, screechy, insulting, addicted to having the last word. It’s perfectly clear that the root of her character is the caricature of Hillary Clinton then solidifying in the aftermath of the recent failure of her healthcare reform initiative. And that caricature was effective enough, iron-cast enough, to still affect public perceptions of Clinton in last year’s presidential race. Davis’s performance is laughable and almost unforgivable, and the only person capable of dialing it back would have been her director, Eastwood. But he chose not to, a cultural faux-pas to match his idiotic “empty chair” speech at the 2012 Republican national convention. As a Californian, and as an energetic sculptor of his own public image, Eastwood always comes off as a relatively liberal Republican, but sooner or later, as in these two instances, he’ll remind you how egregiously, noxiously by-the-numbers rightwing he can be.

Ineptly written as it is (by All the President’s Men’s William Goldman of all people), and as lackadaisically directed, Absolute Power is middling to terrible 90s Clint; indeed, these days it comes as a cheap twofer with its equally disposable follow-up True Crime. But it arises out of its particular time and place with all contemporary pathologies and paranoia intact. Back in the mid-90s, the right, newly ascendant and boasting a surprise majority in Congress, was in the process of achieving complete overreach on the Clintons. Rightwing conspiracy theorists and old Arkansas enemies were dredging up – making up – revolting lies about the Clintons that were gobbled up eagerly on the paranoid right in the last days before the internet arrived. Bill Clinton was a drug-smuggling murderer, they said implausibly, and, a tad more plausibly, a slave to the never-ending demands of his own wayward penis – a rapist at worst, a sex-pest at best.

Hillary – of course – had to be a secret lesbian at the head of some feminazi cabal, on the basis of nothing more than her having said she wasn’t the Tammy Wynnette, Stand by Your Man-type “Little Woman”. As the Starr report would later confirm, these apocalyptic moralists had some very dirty minds indeed, and such was the soil in which Absolute Power was cultivated. Davis joins the ranks of other, marginally subtler cod-Hillarys in movies such as The Manchurian Candidate (Meryl Streep) and Primary Colors (Emma Thompson), but she’s so far out to sea here that she can no longer spy the land.

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Elsewhere however, there are some pre-echoes of other, less terrible things to come. Deep in the cast we find Dennis Haysbert as the more extreme and fanatical of the two Secret Service agents (Scott Glenn is the other). When he later played President Palmer on Fox-TV’s 24, Haysbert, with a little help from Morgan Freeman in Deep Impact, defanged most racist expectations of what a black president might be like in office, partly laying the ground for Barack Obama’s landmark victory in 2008. Better yet, homicide detective Ed Harris’s partner is played by Penny Johnson (later Penny Johnson Jerald), who played Haysbert’s scheming First Lady-Macbeth, Sherry Palmer, in the same show. She would also play Condoleeza Rice in the rightwing miniseries The Path to 9/11.

To find a crazier, more dangerous president than the frankly rather hapless Alan Richmond, one has to reach back to Jason Robards’ megalomaniacal variation on a power-mad Richard Nixon (renamed Richard Monckton) in the great but almost forgotten 1977 TV miniseries Washington: Behind Closed Doors, or Martin Sheen’s psychotic candidate Greg Stillson in The Dead Zone (“Hallelulya gentlemen, the missiles are flying!”).

Or, of course, one might simply look at the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, put there by the same forces that did the Clintons in.