Last week, shortly after President Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, Roger Stone tweeted, “Somewhere Dick Nixon is smiling.” Then he had a cigar. And then he told Politico about it.

It’s no surprise that Stone was celebrating. He had been lobbying Trump to fire Comey for weeks, according to multiple sources. This was staggeringly inappropriate in a way that’s become commonplace in the early days of the Trump administration: Stone, alongside his former lobbying partner Paul Manafort, was being investigated by the FBI for possibly illegal contact with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign.



As such, it turned out to be a good week for Netflix to release the documentary Get Me Roger Stone. He’s a man whose fingerprints are all over some of the worst aspects of American politics in the past five decades: Watergate, lobbying, negative advertising, the 2000 recount, the Clinton conspiracy complex, and, perhaps most famously, Donald Trump. He’s a consummate Republican insider—he’s worked in various capacities for Nixon, Reagan, both Bushes, and Trump—who nevertheless presents himself as an anti-elitist crusader, a link between GOP officials and angry members of the white working class. (Stone, who dresses like a mix between Tom Wolfe and the Penguin, refers to the bulk of voters as “non-sophisticates.”)



Still, there is also a sense that Stone has fooled the media into thinking that he’s a puppet-master when he has actually played only a bit part. Get Me Roger Stone takes its name from one of Stone’s few moments of genuine self-awareness. “First they say, ‘Who is Roger Stone?,’ then they say, ‘Get me Roger Stone,’ then they say, ‘Get me a Roger Stone type,’ and finally, they say, ‘Who is Roger Stone?,’” Stone says. It’s a good encapsulation of the transience of fame, of the political variety and otherwise. But Stone’s fluctuating relevance also gets at the documentary’s main problem, which is that it seems uncertain if Stone has engineered our bad political moment or is merely a symptom of it.

Get Me Roger Stone opens with Stone looking on from the shadows as Trump, a giant visage on the screen, gives his “law and order” acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in July of 2016. The message is unmistakable: Roger Stone helped create Donald Trump.

