Gallo’s Humor 

The reviews were unanimous: “Metal”—“The hardest image of all time just dropped”—“That jacket is so damn nice.” On the last point, there was little debate; the jacket was, in fact, “so damn nice.” 

The former president stuck out his thumb and smiled from ear to ear. The shaggy looking man to his left who few outside the fringes of cinema or politics could name wore a fitting grin. If nothing else, it was good to see Vincent again. 

“Standing next to the greatest president the USA has ever produced,” wrote Vincent Gallo, the Palme d’Or-nominated filmmaker behind cult classics Buffalo 66 and The Brown Bunny. “How proud I am to be in this photo.”

Though some feigned shock in the comments below, most who have followed the arc of Gallo’s mercurial career were less surprised—the former mafia intern who played bandmate to Jean-Michel Basquiat and walked the runway for fashion’s best—Saint Laurent—has long been an eccentric but somewhat-celebrated fixture of the new American right. 

Gallo included four more images in his Tuesday post to Instagram, including one that featured a young, smiling Gallo rocking a peace sign next to then-President Ronald Reagan. Gallo also included an image of the Fox News host Greg Gutfeld ripping a heater. “Thanks to Gutfeld for making it happen,” read part of the caption.

The self-described “Donald Trump of Cannes” also included an image of his long-rumored girlfriend, Afton “Star” Burton, the onetime fiancee of that Charles Manson. Gallo allegedly met Burton, who donned a Trump hat at the TPUSA event, when the former (who looks strikingly similar to Manson) was prepping for a biopic on the Family that never got off the ground. The rest, as they say, is history. 

Gallo and Star cut odd but welcome figures at the Turning Point USA event. If MAGA is anything, it’s the wildest political movement in the history of American politics.

It wasn’t the first time Gallo had appeared at a Republican event. In 2014, he was spotted with the Bush twins taking in New York City fashion week. A month later he spoke to the Women’s National Republican Club in New York City.

“The Republican Party needs hipsters,” the shaggy-haired filmmaker told a room full of waspy Manhattanites. “If it wants to broaden its base, it needs hipsters.”

Gallo isn’t the first punk to break free from the grasp of liberalism. 

The former Mumford & Sons guitarist Winston Marshall and the American basement rocker Ariel Pink teamed up in early 2021 to parody the Hunter Biden laptop scandal after both men faced backlash for their rightward turn. Fans of the Smiths frontman Morrissey felt “betrayed” when they learned of the rocker’s nationalist beliefs. 

And punk legend Joey Ramone once penned a song to his favorite TV anchor, Fox News host Maria Bartiromo: “I watch her every day, I watch her every night, she’s really out of sight, Maria Bartiromo, Maria Bartiromo,” crooned the late rocker. 

For all of his controversies—and there have been many, many, controversies—it was still interesting to see Trump with Gallo if for no other reason than Gallo’s track record as one of the most unyielding independent filmmakers in the history of American cinema. 

No one could’ve made Buffalo ’66 but Gallo. Battling the snow, battling Christina Ricci (in more ways than one), and battling himself, ’66 is revered to this day for its unrelenting look at the underbelly of the forgotten America that propelled Trump into the White House.

Gallo’s 1998 masterpiece tapped into the struggles of America’s white working class in a way Hollywood could never. Lonely, dysgenic, left to die in the blizzards of upstate New York, Gallo’s tour de force is some of the most unabashed and real filmmaking since John Cassavetes, the pioneer of American independent cinema, laid the groundwork years before.

The film was lightning in a bottle for Gallo, who was invited to screen it at the 1998 edition of Sundance Film Festival.

Writing for Film Comment, Gavin Smith noted that ’66 was “arguably the festival’s best film” and that it had “naturally gone home prizeless.” Controversy found Gallo at the judge’s table where he feuded with the Taxi Driver scripthand Paul Schrader after a feisty Q&A session where Gallo did not hold back his opinions on the unfolding Clinton-Lewinsky scandal.

“Schrader was so offended by my comments at the Q&A that he walked into the voting and said, ‘Under no circumstance will Vincent Gallo win any prizes tonight,’” said Gallo in response to the charade.

But another witness suggested Gallo had been “his own worst enemy” throughout the festival. A raving madman, unrelenting to the core, a flagrant and unforgiving ball of dizzying energy. Sound familiar? 

“I like Donald Trump a lot and am extremely proud he is the American President,” Gallo wrote in a 2018 piece published by the fashion magazine Another Man. “I’m sorry if that offends you.”

Standing next to the party bearer all these years later, Gallo’s uncompromising support for the Republican Party finally paid itself forward with an image for the ages.