Tim O'Brien, one of President Donald Trump's biographers and the author of the 2005 Trump biography "TrumpNation," has recounted a decades-old episode in which he watched a classic film alongside Trump — and argued that the moment offers a clear window into the thinking behind the president's pursuit of revenge today.

O'Brien made the remarks during an appearance on MS NOW with anchor Stephanie Ruhle, who cited a recent op-ed by conservative columnist Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal — a former Reagan speechwriter who won a Pulitzer Prize for her commentary in 2017. The piece read as a kind of obituary for MAGAism and included the charge that Trump had run the GOP's brand into the ground.

O'Brien agreed with that assessment, but he cautioned against assuming that Trump will simply fade from the scene — or, as he put it, move to a farm upstate, the euphemism American parents have long used to soften the news that a pet is gone.

The discussion followed a Tuesday night speech by Senator-elect James Talarico (D-Texas), in which he said he looked forward to bipartisan cooperation and "the politics of love."

"Donald Trump is not going to be embracing the politics of love anytime soon. But there's certainly, I think, is a desire in the electorate to talk about our problems in a more civilized way. And there's still a lot of work to be done, because Trump's not going away. A cornered Donald Trump lashes out. He's going to exercise his veto power. He's going to stroll into more bunkers, foreign wars, because he can. Possibly," O'Brien said.

He added that the encouraging note, in his view, was that voters saved America from a "dangerous president in a dangerous moment when other institutions didn't."

When Ruhle asked what comes next for Trump, O'Brien's answer was blunt: "More retribution."

"He's been in this moment in lesser ways throughout his life. You know, he almost went personally bankrupt in the early 90s. He went through six corporate bankruptcies. His answer to that was to say, it's not my fault. It's the bank's fault. I won't do interviews. I'll yell at people, I'll pout, but I won't go away. And he didn't, you know?" O'Brien said.

It was at that point that O'Brien recalled a flight with Trump aboard his private jet decades earlier, when the two watched movies on VHS. Sandwiched between Jean-Claude Van Damme tough-guy films was "Sunset Boulevard" — Billy Wilder's 1950 Hollywood classic, in which Gloria Swanson, herself a major silent-era star whose mainstream career faded with the arrival of sound, plays Norma Desmond, a forgotten screen diva seething over her lost stardom, with William Holden as the broke screenwriter drawn into her orbit. The pairing startled the MS NOW panel as it came up.

"There's this epic scene in that where William Holden and Gloria Swanson are on a couch and they're screening one of her silent era films, and she gets outraged, and she stands up into the light of the camera and she says, 'Have they forgotten what a star is? I'll show all of them!' Or something to that effect. And Trump just goes, 'That's such a good scene.' And that's who he is. He doesn't want people to forget he's a star. He won't go away," O'Brien said.

In the film, the character Norma Desmond declares: "Those idiot producers. Those imbeciles. Haven't they got any eyes? Have they forgotten what a star looks like? I'll show them! I'll be up there again, so help me!"

For O'Brien, the parallel was the point: seven decades after its release, "Sunset Boulevard" endures as Hollywood's defining portrait of a star who refuses to accept that the spotlight has moved on — and, in his telling, Trump fixated on exactly that note.

The full interview is available on MS NOW.