It’s confirmed: the bone-headed bully of Back to the Future Part II was inspired by Donald Trump.
Asked if Trump was the man he was specifically thinking about when he developed Biff in the second film, screenwriter Bob Gale said absolutely.
“We thought about it when we made the movie! Are you kidding?” Gale told The Daily Beast. “You watch Part II again and there’s a scene where Marty confronts Biff in his office and there’s a huge portrait of Biff on the wall behind Biff, and there’s one moment where Biff kind of stands up and he takes exactly the same pose as the portrait? Yeah.”
The Daily Beast’s Ben Collins explains some of the similarities between the two: “He’s been handed the keys to fortune, he’s unrepentantly used that fortune exclusively for himself, and he’s even become a public advocate for plastic surgery for women in his family.” In other words, Biff is the quintessential evil Republican capitalist.
Of course, in the movie, Biff uses the profits from his 27-story casino (the Trump Plaza Hotel, completed in 1984, is 37 floors, by the way) to help shake up the Republican Party, before eventually assuming political power himself, helping transform Hill Valley, California, into a lawless, dystopian wasteland, where hooliganism reigns, dissent is quashed, and wherein Biff encourages every citizen to call him, “America’s greatest living folk hero.”
“Yeah,” confirmed Gale. “That’s what we were thinking about.”
