It is the early 1950s. A travelling salesman named Ray Kroc, played in the forthcoming biopic The Founder by Michael Keaton, sells milkshake machines to restaurants all over the US. Then he discovers an extraordinary little place in California called McDonald’s, run by the McDonald brothers, who have revolutionised the fast-food business with menus limited to burgers, fries and soda, walk-up counters, huge grills and fryers for speedy, short-order volume. In a blinding flash, Kroc sees how the brothers can franchise their operation around the country. They could be an American church, as ubiquitous as decent people’s houses flying the stars’n’stripes. When we saw Ray in his scuzzy hotel room, listening to a self-motivation LP on a portable record player, we could have guessed he would have corporate-imperial ambitions.

Might The Founder come to be seen as the first example of Trump-era cinema? After all, poor Ray, with his how-to-win-friends-and-influence-people LP, would be a prime candidate for Trump University. And it wasn’t long ago that McDonald’s was shorthand for evil big money in the cinema. In 2004 Morgan Spurlock made a documentary called Super Size Me, about Big Mac gluttony and the profit motive. But The Founder is basically sweet on a great American adventure. It’s the Birth of a Salesman.

In Andrea Arnold’s American Honey, Shia LaBeouf plays Jake, a guy who recruits rootless teens to sell semi-fraudulent magazine subscriptions. He models his trousers and braces explicitly on Donald Trump. He’s not a thousand miles away from fiction’s greatest Trump fan, the serial killer Patrick Bateman in Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Steven Mnuchin, Hollywood producer and now Trump’s choice for treasury secretary. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP

If you think there is no such thing as Trump cinema, consider this: the president-elect’s controversial treasury secretary nominee (and former Goldman Sachs honcho) Steven Mnuchin is a hugely powerful movie investor, with executive producer credits including Mad Max: Fury Road, Collateral Beauty, Inherent Vice, Sully, The Lego Ninjago Movie, Midnight Special, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and many more. Mnuchin even has an acting cameo as a banker in Warren Beatty’s forthcoming Howard Hughes film, which has the very Trumpian title of Rules Don’t Apply. (Mnuchin is a producer on that, too.)

So Mnuchin really is Trump cinema. He has technically stepped back from showbiz, handing over his RatPac-Dune company to fellow producers Brett Ratner and James Packer, but there’s nothing to stop him returning. Writers with anti-Trump movie projects might well thoughtfully bear in mind how much they could annoy a powerful Hollywood producer who is also treasury secretary. In his banking days, Mnuchin was known as the “foreclosure king” for buying up bad mortgages and evicting homeowners. So perhaps the film he should have produced was Ramin Bahrani’s 99 Homes, with Michael Shannon as the sinister realtor making cash out of the home-loan crisis.

Waiting for Trump to trickle down to the cinema in a larger sense could take a while. Even if The Donald scores two terms, he could be gone before anything comes through the pipeline. But the point is that cinema has always been in tune with Trump. It’s an intensely capitalist business, mythologising capitalism, famously run by (and often celebrating) charming/horrible male monsters letting their id run riot. Billy Bob Thornton did so in Bad Santa 2; Robert De Niro will be a grumpy older comic in Art Linson’s The Comedian.

The cinema screen has long been populated by nobodies making it big, or somebodies making it small, but gaining emotional victories along the way: it’s full of success stories and satirical nightmares about male idiots fluking their way to the top. A naive, learning-impaired gardener called Chance mouths banal platitudes that get mistaken for profundity and take him to the heart of political power. A goofy lookalike of the US president called Dave is called upon to impersonate the ailing C-in-C permanently, despite being hilariously unqualified and unsuitable. A star newsreader has a breakdown live on TV and incites everyone to yell: “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more!” A rackety Broadway producer stages a crass, pro-Hitler musical that needs to fail to conceal his profits from the taxman, but it becomes a terrifying success. A plutocrat with aspirations to high office bullyingly promises a special prosecutor to get his opponent, “Boss” Jim Gettys, locked up, but also has an enigmatic wound, deep in his soul, relating to something called Rosebud.

Look for Trump motifs in the cinema and they are everywhere. But the man himself is everywhere as well. Actors from Alec Baldwin to Johnny Depp have derisively played him, though not on the big screen: the hair, the red tie, the suit, the snuffly voice. Yet this is how Trump has been playing himself and promoting his celebrity brand. He has done loads of movie cameos, generally as living shorthand for the glitzy razzmatazz of New York City – films such as The Job (in which America’s future grabber-in-chief asks Denis Leary if he is “banging” Liz Hurley) and Two Weeks Notice (he has an acid exchange with Hugh Grant).

Politics meshes with Hollywood. They are arguably two wings of the same eternal display of power and prestige – liberalism coexisting uneasily with conservatism. Joe Kennedy (father of JFK) was briefly involved in the movie business in the 1920s, and did not trouble to conceal his antisemitism when he said to a colleague: “Look at that bunch of pants-pressers in Hollywood making themselves millionaires. I could take the whole business away from them.” Conversely, and in fine Joe Kennedy style, Donald Trump contemptuously took the whole business of the Republican party and then the presidency away from the “establishment”. Interestingly, Rupert Murdoch, owner of 20th Century Fox, Fox News and perhaps soon Sky TV, is nowadays a restrained, almost mandarin figure compared with Trump, despite having presided over the populism that was to create him.

You could, of course, find a lot of Reagan or post-Reagan cinema – anything with a decent, aw-shucks guy winning out in the end. Forrest Gump is an example (though the rhyme with Donald Trump is unsettling), and I would say also Sully, despite the Mnuchin connection. But it strikes me that quasi-Trump cinema is something different: harsher, more dyspeptic.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network.

When Daniel Day-Lewis’s oilman is seen in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood fanatically hacking away with a pickaxe, and later locked in a strange twilight of mega-rich unhappiness and eccentricity, it is a very Trumpian narrative arc, but perhaps not Trump cinema, exactly, because the man himself isn’t seen as a winner. Perhaps closer is The Social Network, written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher, an unbridled capitalist success story about the creation of Facebook, the network that was to mobilise millions of Trump supporters outside the establishment “mainstream media” and of course spread fake news – a development unguessed at in the film.

Again, the comparison isn’t exact. Mark Zuckerberg is supposed to be an intimidatingly smart Harvard guy, and the point about Trump is that he does not have these elitist credentials; he is the friend of the dumb. We talk about post-truth; how about post-satire? Sacha Baron Cohen’s creation Borat was allowed to say and do outrageous things, on the understanding that he was horrible. Donald does them unsatirically. Broad comedy in Hollywood now often includes outrageous stuff: drugs, booze, inappropriate behaviour. Hollywood loves Horrible Bosses. Trump campaigners, Trump supporters and Trump activists relentlessly trolling people online might see themselves as comedians, as Will Ferrell wild men. But in the final analysis, Trump is anti-comedy, as shown by the grisly troll Milo Yiannopoulos, who incited online abuse against Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones. Trumpism has the anarchism of Hollywood comedy without the humour or talent.

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We arguably come back to Peter Finch in Network in 1976, playing the TV star who is promoted as a celebrity ranter, telling people to scream out of their windows that they’re as mad as hell. Those were the days when people could only shout out of their windows. The host of The Apprentice got them to shout into their smartphones and laptops, their screams of futility and alienation amplified and recirculated on social media, and converted into votes. A season of Trump cinema must start with a 40-year anniversary showing of Network.