FRONTLINE’s season premiere investigates American political leaders and choices they’ve made that have undermined and threatened democracy in the U.S.
In a two-hour documentary special premiering ahead of the 2022 midterms, FRONTLINE examines how officials fed the public lies about the 2020 presidential election and embraced rhetoric that led to political violence.
Here’s a trailer with the intro to the report. In just two minutes it captures how great a threat to democracy the former guy and his party are.
The entire show is just under 2 hours long; I happened to catch the last 45 minutes when it aired last night. It was riveting. It is a damning portrait not just of Trump, but of the Republican Party. There’s a warning, because some of the show contains graphic scenes from the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Here's some of the themes introduced right up front.
- An existential threat.
- Partisan warfare.
- Moral compromise.
- Warnings ignored.
- Democracy is for losers
The show is organized around a timeline, showing step by step how from 2016 on to January 6 and beyond, Trump showed who he was from the first and how the Republican Party decided the pursuit of power through Trump was more important than anything else. It shows that even January 6 was not enough to persuade the GOP to recant their bargain with the devil. You’ll see time after time, at every opportunity to distance from Trump, they chose power over democracy.
Find time to watch this. It’s that important.
Here’s a link to the Frontline webpage where it can be found along with supporting videos.
Here’s the Youtube version:
Watch this, and share it. This is two hours that will remind short attention span America and the amnesiac nattering nabobs of the punditry what we’ve been through since 2016 — and how great the threat still is.