How movies foretold the perils of the Trump administration

We bear witness daily to President Trump executing his authoritarian agenda; he is systematically dismantling checks and balances mandated in the U.S. Constitution, first seizing and then deploying state police power to suppress his opponents, and using federal police power to criminalize any dissent. He is also stacking the courts and bureaucracy with loyalists, eliminating subject-matter expertise across the executive branch, making clear he will use a militarized response to any protest -- actual, fabricated or imagined -- and compelling states to gerrymander voting districts to give him more Congressional acolytes in the next election.

Lessons I learned from movie night: How great movies can provide a prophetic narrative of the inherent perils of the Trump administration

The President's acts are cultivating an atmosphere of fear, misinformation, distrust in expertise and distrust in the outcomes of state-run elections, while gaining the submission and compliance of heretofore powerful individuals, entities and institutions that once stood at the vanguard, committed to the rule of law,  brought on by his use of both legal and extralegal means.

Confronted by the daily unfolding of these threats to democratic norms, I turned to cinema as a lens for reflection, re-screening four classic films -- "Dr. Strangelove," "Fail Safe," "The Manchurian Candidate," and "Being There" -- each offering narratives that eerily mirror the perils currently emerging in the Trump administration.

"Dr. Strangelove or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb"

The 1964 film, "Dr. Strangelove," co-written, produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Peter Sellers, satirizes Cold War-era political and military leadership. It uses caricature and exaggeration to expose themes of incompetence, arrogance and malicious intent that directly imperil national and global security. The film's central crisis -- a rogue general unilaterally launches a nuclear attack based on paranoid delusions about communist infiltration -- unfolds not as grand strategic maneuvering, but as a comedy of errors where the supposed guardians of civilization reveal themselves as inept, self-interested or overtly dangerous.

Characters such as General Ripper act on delusional conspiracy theories, demonstrating incompetence and mental instability. The U.S. president is portrayed as diplomatic but nearly powerless in the face of systemic failures and the arrogance of his military advisers, notably General Turgidson, whose suggestion to "reinforce success" by escalating nuclear war with the loss of "no more than ten to twenty million" Americans reflects a grotesque detachment from human consequences. Dr. Strangelove, the president's adviser and a former Nazi, embodies both intellectual arrogance and latent, if not explicit, malice -- the willingness to plot global survival schemes that echo eugenic or authoritarian ideas.

The War Room sequences and the handling of the crisis lampoon not only personal but also institutional incompetence -- the very mechanisms designed to prevent nuclear catastrophe instead accelerate it due to overengineered safeguards, lack of oversight and unchecked authority. The existence of a Soviet doomsday machine, whose deterrent value is nullified by secrecy, highlights arrogance and gross cross-national misunderstanding.

The national and global peril is made literal: The world is destroyed through an absurd mistake and the inability or unwillingness of leaders to prevent disaster, with the ending montage of nuclear detonations serving as the ultimate portrait of leadership failure. The meta-commentary in critical analysis underscores the film's enduring resonance as a cautionary tale about the dangers posed by unfit or self-serving leaders, and by systems that empower them with unchecked authority.

With reference to the Trump administration, the narrative implication is that governance marked by conspiracy-driven decision-making, personal arrogance, personal grievances, disregard for expert systems and protocols, and willingness to stoke existential fears -- whether through incompetence or malice -- places the nation (and world) in precisely the kind of artificial and unnecessary peril satirized in "Dr. Strangelove."

"Being There"

"Being There," the 1979 political satire directed by Hal Ashby and starring Peter Sellers," is a satirical drama that explores the phenomena of systemic incompetence and the hazards posed by empty, image-driven leadership. Its protagonist, Chance, is a completely unqualified mentally challenged gardener whose only knowledge of the world comes from television; through a series of misunderstandings, he is mistaken for a sage political figure, quickly rising to national prominence. The entire political and economic elite, awash in arrogance, project meaning onto Chance's vapid platitudes, seeing wisdom where there is only naivety or nothingness. This is not merely personal incompetence, but institutional and societal as well. The president and other officials interpret Chance's remarks as profound insight, shaping policy and public messaging around the simplistic, accidental utterings of a man who barely understands their basic context.

This dynamic satirizes systems that confuse image with substance, promoting unqualified individuals simply because of their appearances or the mistaken interpretations of elites; in turn, this enables structural hazards, as decisions of national significance are rooted in misunderstanding or deliberate deception. The illusion, reinforced by media coverage and public enthusiasm, is that such a person must be insightful since everyone else believes it -- creating a vacuum at the heart of public life that invites calamity by default.

Applied to the Trump administration, the film's themes point to the perils of unqualified or performative leadership -- a system so arrogant and detached that it not only fails to perceive incompetence but also actively recasts it as virtue, endangering the nation by operating on appearances, media manipulation or self-delusion.

"Fail Safe"

"Fail Safe, the 1964 Cold War thriller, directed and co-produced by Sidney Lumet and starring Henry Fonda," portrays a near-apocalyptic disaster resulting from the interplay of systemic incompetence, technological error, and intellectual arrogance within the military and political hierarchy. The film's plot is catalyzed by a critical mechanical failure: A single squadron of American nuclear bombers mistakenly receives an authentic attack order due to a computer malfunction. The subsequent attempts by military and civilian leaders to resolve the crisis are frustrated by inflexible safety systems, communication breakdowns and bureaucratic rigidity -- demonstrating how even well-designed institutions can, through blind adherence to protocol, fail spectacularly.

The advisers and strategists around the president -- especially Dr. Groeteschele -- exemplify arrogance and moral detachment. Groeteschele's insistence that millions of deaths are an acceptable price to "win" a nuclear war, and that the president should exploit the error for maximal strategic gain, reveals philosophical malice masked as rationality. Ultimately, the president's decision to destroy New York City (where his own wife is located) as penance and to stave off Soviet retaliation drives home the point: Even those acting from duty are implicated in moral catastrophe, forced to commit atrocity by systems designed for safety.

The film's message is that catastrophic peril arises when leaders -- out of hubris, overconfidence in complex systems or inability to admit systemic error -- place nations and the world at existential risk. The analogy to the Trump administration is clear: unchecked confidence in poorly understood systems, elevation of dangerous advisers, scapegoating, and the willingness to risk enormous consequences for perceived strategic or political gain all threaten national security.

"The Manchurian Candidate," the 1962 psychological political thriller directed and co-produced by John Frankenheimer and starring Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey and Angela Lansbury, is a rumination on the infiltration of malicious intent into the heart of the political system. The story depicts how a decorated war hero is unknowingly turned into the perfect weapon by our foreign adversaries, with the active collusion of domestic leaders driven by ambition and malice -- most notably his own mother, Eleanor Iselin, who engineers a plot to install herself and her puppet husband at the apex of American power via assassination and mind control.

The Iselin family represents the toxic blend of incompetence (Senator Iselin is a buffoon manipulated by others), arrogance and overt evil (Eleanor's willingness to sacrifice her son and countless others for personal power). The narrative deploys elements of farce and tragedy to highlight how conspiratorial thinking, demagoguery and media manipulation strip away the safeguards of democracy, enabling not only foreign adversaries but also home-grown authoritarians to subvert the system for their own gain. Media and image play a central role in the ascent of demagogues, distorting reality and selling "heroes" whose actual loyalties and competencies are nonexistent or thoroughly corrupted.

The film's resonance with modern-day politics is explicit in scholarly analysis since its release, which note its predictive value for periods when the lines between foreign subversion and domestic autocracy are blurred (think Helsinki 2018 and Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson 2025). When the highest offices are occupied by those indifferent to facts, susceptible to propaganda and driven by self-interest or malice, national peril is not merely possible -- it is inevitable.

The Trump administration: Satire made real Administration

Across these films, the peril to our nation and the world emerges not from external enemies alone, but from within -- institutions and individuals entrusted with the public good, failing through a spectrum of fatal flaws.

Incompetence reigns. When the unqualified ("Being There"), the paranoid ("Dr. Strangelove"), or the rigid believers in technological infallibility ("Fail Safe") are elevated in government, either through accident, image, self-deception or by being voted into office by an electorate more consumed by cultural issues than fact, disastrous decisions become inevitable .

Arrogance poisons judgment. A recurring willingness among leaders to dismiss expertise, indulge in strategic bravado or elevate image over substance accelerates disaster; cynics like Gen. Turgidson or Dr. Groeteschele, and the elites fawning over Chance, are less interested in truth or safety than in self-aggrandizement or ideological purity.

Malicious intent. At its most distilled ("The Manchurian Candidate"), malicious intent is found in the deliberate subversion and betrayal by people like Eleanor Iselin, whose hunger for power eclipses any loyalty to family or nation, and who embodies the ease with which supposed "patriots" reveal their true nature as quislings and thereby become the very threat they claim to oppose.

The ultimate detriment is not merely loss of life, but the erosion of trust, reason and democratic safeguards -- leaving the nation and its citizenry exposed to ruin directed or enabled by their own leaders.

The warning from these films is plain: The nation's greatest peril is not necessarily the enemy outside, but those within who, following the script of satire and tragedy, would gamble with its future -- our future -- for their own lust for power, oblivious or indifferent to destruction left in their wake. These stories, often dismissed as dark comedy or dystopian fantasy, instead read as grimly prophetic blueprints -- which, when followed, lead almost unerringly to the brink.