The most damning assessments, however, come from the psychiatrists for whom the need to warn the public about him has become an ethical issue. In line with the Tarasoff Rule from 1969, which compels them to speak out when a patient may present a risk of harm to the public, they variously describe him as “mentally ill”, “a malignant narcissist” and “unfit to rule”.
Coming from different vantage points, NYU professor in authoritarianism Ruth Ben-Ghiat, psychiatrist Gartner and counterterrorist expert Malcolm Nance separately point to how Trump and Adolf Hitler belong to “the same psychological type”. Borrowing from court testimony by the late Ivana Trump about her ex-husband’s liking for reading transcripts of Hitler’s loathsome vitriol, Nance proposes that Trump’s wild accusations, targeting of outsiders and constant repetitions have been modelled on those of the Nazi dictator. “Repeat everything three times,” Nance says, “and the third time it becomes the truth.”
Ben-Ghiat also identifies a parallel between the current moment in US politics and how Mussolini came to power in democratic Italy in 1919. “One of the most crucial moments of authoritarian capture,” she says, “is when traditional elites invite the authoritarian-in-the-making into power.”
Trump remains a mostly background figure until the second half of God + Country, which is co-produced by filmmaker Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele (who, coincidentally, took the photograph of Trump for the cover of The Art of the Deal). But by then the film has already built an eye-opening context for his appearance.
Its title implies a mathematical equation: God + country = the serious threat to democracy outlined in the film, a threat that has come from the rise of Christian nationalism, a multi-denominational body whose creed is, as an evangelical minister puts it, that “America and Christianity are like baseball and apple pie and we celebrate them together”.
Protesters in #Untruth: the Psychology of Trumpism.Credit: DocPlay
Drawing on Katherine Stewart’s book, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, the film clearly outlines the problems built into this notion. Drawing on the insights of constitutional lawyer Andrew Seidel, who reminds us that the separation of church and state is a basic tenet of the US Constitution, the film makes it crystal clear why “there can be no freedom of religion without the government being free from religion”.
Stewart, interviewed in the film, tells us that what unites Christian nationalists “is not a theology but a distinctive political vision”, one which is almost exclusively white. And even if the movement only represents a small portion of the American population, minorities can exert considerable power when voting isn’t compulsory. As Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Moral Majority, proudly puts it: “Our leverage goes up as the voting populus goes down.”
The film makes sense of why Trump strategically and repeatedly refers to himself as “the Chosen One”. And why a vast array of religious artefacts were wielded by those involved in the invasion of the Capitol Building on January 6, 2020. Perhaps the most unsettling sequence in God + Country crosscuts between the Proud Boys kneeling to pray outside the building and the speaker of the House of Representatives inside leading the assembly of those who were actually chosen by the people in the traditional prayers.
#Untruth, the final film in the trilogy, suggests that while Trump isn’t irrelevant in all of this, he is, in the words of Imran Ahmed, the founder and CEO of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, “the result of something else that’s happening that is much bigger”.
The film points to a combination of factors that have led American democracy to the brink. The various ways in which social media has created a climate of mistrust of the government that has moved far beyond the bounds of a healthy scepticism and led to the widespread dissemination of disinformation. That is, as Ann Nelson, the author of Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right, points out, certainly not to be confused with information (factual, documented) or even misinformation (mistaken, uninformed), but is deliberately designed to mislead.
Also culpable, #Untruth argues, is the machinery of the Murdoch media empire with its self-serving mix of business and ideological agendas, and the disappearance of local newspapers and with them “the connective tissue between governments and communities”.
There are also the failings of the Republican Party and its current presidential candidate. But perhaps even more crucial is an American public that, as former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele maintains, has to decide what matters more to it – “lower gas prices, lower inflation or the principles of democracy”.
While not exactly a call to arms – a phrase that leaves itself open to misrepresentation, especially in the current climate – Partland’s powerful and persuasive trilogy is top-notch agit-prop filmmaking.
Stream #Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump & #Untruth: The Psychology of Trumpism on DocPlay and God + Country SBS On Demand.
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