David Lynch’s Career ‘Officially Over’ Trump Jokes as He Reads Breitbart Article

President Donald Trump read aloud at a campaign rally in South Carolina Monday from a Breitbart News article about how Hollywood director David Lynch had spoken highly of him in an interview with Britain’s Guardian newspaper.

Breitbart reporter Ben Kew’s article, published on Saturday, quoted the Blue Velvet director telling the Guardian that Trump “could go down as one of the greatest presidents in history because he has disrupted the thing so much.” Hours before going on stage with South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, the president tweeted out the article to his millions of followers:

“Director David Lynch: Trump Could Go Down as One of the Greatest Presidents” https://t.co/AcgnIZNh6e

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 25, 2018

Trump returned to the story on stage in West Columbia, South Carolina Monday night. “He’s a Hollywood guy,” the president said as he read Lynch’s quotes, “and plenty of them voted for me.”

“Of course, there goes his career,” Trump joked as he read Lynch’s praises, later mocking the so-called “elites” after Lynch said “no one is able to counter [Trump] in an intelligent way.”

“There’s David Lynch,” Trump concluded, waving a printout of Kew’s article. “Enjoy it, because his career in Hollywood is officially over.”

Lynch himself has a mixed political background, voting, according to his Guardian interview, for socialist independent Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primaries before picking Libertarian Gary Johnson in the general. Decades ago, Lynch was equally unafraid to buck the Hollywood political orthodoxy and express his admiration for President Ronald Reagan, saying that he “mostly liked that [Reagan] carried a wind of old Hollywood, of a cowboy.”

Lynch, born and raised in the “Inland Empire” of the Pacific Northwest, helped to create the cinematic aesthetic of the Reagan era through the nostalgic yet darkly critical Americana of his films and television series. Lynch’s work is often outwardly negative on Hollywood and coastal elite culture, preferring more timeless settings in small-town America.

The four-time Academy Award nominated director of Twin Peaks is known to still use a simple one-line biography: “Born Missoula, Mont. Eagle Scout.”