One reason why Donald Trump can call this his favourite movie is that while it is critical of power, it’s also in thrall to power, and isn’t capable of imagining a world outside that power.
In the very opening of Citizen Kane, the music really tells you what ‘Rosebud’ is. When Kane is dying, all the musical motifs and atmospheres of his childhood are presented and the search for ‘Rosebud’ has really been told to the audience right away. At the end of the film, before the camera discovers the sled, the theme is given out again. And of course it also recurs at key moments of conversation between Kane and all the leading characters. [And for the disastrous opera debut,] we needed something that would terrify the girl and put the audience a bit in suspense. I wrote the aria in a very high key which would make most performances sound strained. Then we got a very light lyric soprano and made her sing this heavy dramatic soprano part with a very heavy orchestration which created the feeling that she was in quicksand. Later on, that aria was sung many times by Eileen Farrell, who had the voice to sing it absolutely accurately in that key, and it sounded very impressive. Some writers have said that the singer in the film performed it deliberately badly, but that's not so. She was a good singer performing in too high a key.
— Bernard Herrmann (Sight and Sound, 1971)
Trump is not Kane, he is not even his corrupt rival Boss Jim Gittes […] because Gittes works in the shadows. Trump is post-Kane and post-satire: he advertises his own cruelty and mediocrity because they garner him support. The main difference between Trump and Kane is that Kane is a human tragedy and Trump is an American one. Both were raised in privilege, but Charlie Kane had brains, talent, and charm: all qualities which eluded Trump. The tragedy of Kane is how he misused them. The tragedy of Trump is that he was trapped time and again by numerous Gittes of his own (Stormy Daniels, E. Jean Carroll, Billy Bush…), but he still won high office, because Americans were past caring about all that.
— Julien Allen (Reverse Shot)
Synopsis: Newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane is taken from his mother as a boy and made the ward of a rich industrialist. As a result, every well-meaning, tyrannical or self-destructive move he makes for the rest of his life appears in some way to be a reaction to that deeply wounding event.