When the bullet is stronger than the ballot: Civil War

The anonymous president (Nick Offerman) rehearses his speech before delivering it to the public in Civil War.	Street-level video footage contradicts the president’s assertion that the government is on the verge of “the greatest victory in the history of military campaigns” in Civil War’s opening montage.

Like The Oath, Civil War establishes its premise at the outset. “We are now closer to victory than we have ever been,” an unnamed President (played by Nick Offerman) says as he rehearses a speech before delivering it to the public. “Some are already calling it the greatest victory in the history of mankind,” he continues haltingly, as though searching for the right turn of phrase. Seemingly unsatisfied with the sentence’s ring, he modifies it a bit: “Some are already calling it the greatest victory in the history of military campaigns.” Meanwhile, intercut with shots of the President practicing his speech, handheld video footage shows soldiers and riot police clash with angry mobs.

This opening montage provides two important pieces of narrative information. First, we learn that the country is at war. Both the President’s speech and the handheld video attest to this conflict. However, the street-level footage also serves to refute the President’s assertion that the government is on the verge of achieving “the greatest victory in the history of military campaigns.” In addition to establishing the film’s diegetic historical context, the opening scene simultaneously suggests that the President is a liar.

Many politicians present information in ways that skew facts in their favor, but few have been as brash as Trump in this regard. According to Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post, Trump made more than 30 thousand false or misleading claims during his first presidency. A farcical example from one of his propagandists dates to inauguration day, 2017, when White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer claimed that Trump had “the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration” (cited in Hunt). Spicer made this pronouncement despite photographs showing a much larger crowd gathered at Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration. One is reminded of a famous line from the Marx brothers’ Duck Soup (1933): “Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” Civil War’s opening sequence poses a similar question. The image track pointedly contradicts the President’s words.

We learn very little about the President in Civil War. What we do know is that, in addition to being dishonest, he is an autocrat currently in his third term, who has disbanded the FBI and authorized air strikes against his domestic enemies. These bits of information cannot fail to call to mind Donald Trump.

Most obviously, Trump has made no secret of his desire to remain in office beyond 2029. “There are methods” to circumvent the constitutional amendment preventing Presidents from serving three terms, he told NBC in March 2025 (Welker and Lebowitz). Otherwise, while he did not disband the FBI, he picked a staunch loyalist to head the agency, effectively transforming it from a non-partisan watchdog into a factional attack dog (Goldman). Finally, although Trump has not turned the U.S. military on the civilian population, he has stated outright that he is prepared to deploy “the National Guard or, if necessary […], the military” against the “enemy from within” (Groves). Although the anonymous President in Civil War does not physically resemble Trump, he behaves like him.

I therefore disagree with Michael Sandlin when he proposes that, although we do not know much about the President in Civil War, “we can take an educated guess that he was once a moderate who took a despotic turn” (43). There is no evidence that Civil War’s anonymous President was ever more moderate than the autocrat we see in the film. I concur with Owen Gleiberman that Civil War’s fictional President is “an all-too-obvious […] Donald Trump stand-in.”

On the other side of the movie’s political divide are the so-called Western Forces (WF) of Texas and California. These combined forces have seceded from the Union and declared war on the United States government. Many reviewers have remarked on the incongruity of this pairing. It is indeed difficult to imagine a near-future scenario in which historically Republican Texas and reliably Democratic California would be fighting together against a sitting President. Garland has defended this coupling by saying that he is “not interested” in the “kind of party politics” that pits Democrats against Republicans. What he wanted to do in Civil War was “[pose] a question” rather than take a stance on the U.S.’s current political division.

Numerous critics have applauded this approach. Dennis Etzel, for example, lauds “Garland’s subtlety and nuance in erasing anything that could be read as a politically-biased film from any political party’s side” (2). However, the film does take a political position. Yet it does so not by aligning the WF with anti-Trump resistance but, on the contrary, by portraying them as pro-Trump-like militias.

It is worth recalling in this context the alt-right’s branding of Joe Biden as a despot. As David Faris wrote in 2024:

“The far right has spent years caricaturing America’s mild-mannered, institutionalist President as some kind of jackbooted tyrant” (Faris).  

Although the idea that Biden was a “puppet of the radical left” may seem laughable, rhetoric of this sort fires up the MAGA base (Trump cited in Otterbein and Isenstadt).

It also helps to explain why both sides in Civil War resemble the far right. If one perceives the Nick Offerman character to be a Biden-esque tyrant, then it makes sense that his enemies would be on the right. Conversely, if one sees an image of Trump in the Offerman character, his adversaries would presumably be on the left. However, the film does not depict a right-left opposition of this sort. Rather than presenting a straightforward allegory of the U.S.’s current political divisions, it takes inspiration from the MAGA movement in its depiction of both sides. Offerman’s POTUS resembles the 47th President much more than he does the 46th, and the armed militias evoke much more strongly right-wing resistance groups than they do anything coming from the left.

According to a 2020 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies:

“Far-right terrorism has significantly outpaced terrorism from other types of perpetrators, including from far-left networks and individuals inspired by the Islamic State and al-Qaeda” (Jones and Doxsee).

Because current events of this sort provide Garland with the cultural raw material for his film, the rebels in Civil War end up looking like far-right militias, even while their enemy resembles a right-wing autocrat. Garland may have taken pains to avoid overtly endorsing one side or the other, but wittingly or not, both warring factions in his civil-war dystopia refract today’s far right.

What the film lacks is a depiction of the left. In its place, we have a handful of journalists whose itinerary we follow as they travel from New York City to Washington, DC. Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) is a seasoned photojournalist loosely based on Lee Miller (1907–77). She and her colleague Joel (Wagner Moura), a reporter for Reuters, want to drive to the nation’s capital to interview the President before he is overwhelmed by the insurgent Western Forces. They are joined on their journey by Sammie (Stephen McKinley Henderson), a veteran reporter for the New York Times, and Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), an aspiring war photographer who idolizes Lee.

Lee shoots color photos with a digital camera. A freeze-frame punctuated by a shutter click reminds us that we are observing the action from her point of view.	Jessie shoots on black-and-white film stock. Another freeze-frame, once again accompanied by the sound of a shutter click, reminds us that we see the action from her point of view.

As Wheeler Winston Dixon argues, Civil War is primarily these journalists’ story. “Despite its title,” Dixon contends, “Civil War is not interested in the conflict as much as it’s interested in those who document it.” Dixon makes a compelling case that the film is more about the press than it is about the war they cover. As he notes, the battles depicted on the screen are often filtered through Lee’s and Jessie’s camera lenses. Freeze frames punctuated by shutter clicks frequently remind us. that we are observing the action from their point of view. In Dixon’s estimation, the movie functions much like the journalism it depicts: more as an objective observer of incomprehensible mayhem than a partisan supporter of one side or the other. In his view, the incongruous political affiliations represented in the film, combined with the viewer’s frequent inability to tell who is fighting on which side, serve to divert attention away from the political turmoil and toward those who document it.

However, fact-based journalism itself has become a polarizing partisan issue in recent years. As Garland says in an interview cited by Dixon:

“Something terrible, it seems to me, has been happening to the press. I wanted to put the press as the heroes. [...] If it’s a film about checks and balances, one of the biggest checks and balances you have on government is the press” (Garland cited in Dixon).

Neither Garland nor Dixon names the source of this “terrible” thing that has happened to the press, but they could. Trump has arguably done more to undermine public confidence in traditional news media than any other living U.S. citizen. Calling unflattering coverage of him “fake news” fabricated by the “radical left press” – by which he means anything to the left of Fox News – Trump has barred unsympathetic journalists from his press conferences and mounted assaults on such media outlets as National Public Radio, the Public Broadcasting Service, CBS, and the Associated Press. In this politically charged environment, even Garland’s non-partisan approach to depicting the civil war by filtering it through the eyes of detached reporters can be construed as promoting the “radical left.”

Incidental references to excesses associated with the far right do give the film a leftist slant. For example, in a formulation that pushes the Trump administration’s antipathy to fact-based journalism to its hyperbolic conclusion, Sammie warns Joel that “they shoot journalists on sight in the capital. They literally see us as enemy combatants." Otherwise, Lee gained her reputation by taking a “legendary picture of the Antifa massacre.” The geographical location for the film’s front line refers indirectly to this fictional slaughter of anti-fascists. Situated in Charlottesville, Virginia, where the infamous Unite the Right rally took place in 2017, the film’s diegetic front line is the empirical battle ground where clashes between neo-Nazis and anti-fascists left one person dead and dozens injured.

References to xenophobic nationalism take a particularly hair-raising form when the four protagonists and two of their colleagues, Tony (Nelson Lee) and Bohai (Evan Lai), stumble upon a detachment of soldiers dumping corpses into a mass grave. Jessie and Bohai, who were travelling in a separate car, are already captives when the other journalists arrive on the scene. A high-angle crane shot reminiscent of photographs that Lee Miller and her colleagues took of Nazi concentration camps shows the two prisoners kneeling beside a massive pit. When Joel tries to negotiate the captives’ release by explaining that they are his colleagues, a militiaman in red plastic sunglasses, chillingly played by Jesse Plemons, points his assault rifle at Bohai and asks Joel: “This guy’s your colleague?” Upon receiving an affirmative response, he nonchalantly squeezes the trigger.

The vigilante in sunglasses then begins interrogating his captives. What he wants to know is their nationality. When Joel, who is Latino, says that they are American, the soldier asks him what kind of American he is. Upon hearing that Joel is from Florida, the interrogator concludes: “Central.” Joel’s life expectancy becomes very short at this point. When Tony mutters that he is from Hong Kong, his captor dismissively says, “China,” and shoots him with as much compunction as he would have swatting a fly. The remaining journalists are saved only by the arrival of Sammie in an SUV. Having hung back from the group and observed the scene from afar, he is able to break up the hostage situation by driving directly into it. He then orders his colleagues into the vehicle and speeds away under a hail of bullets.

This spine-chilling scene pushes the anti-immigration sentiment propagated by the current U.S. administration to its extreme conclusion. Although we do not know which fictional side the Plemons character is on (the government or the WF), his real-world analogues are readily identifiable. They are the ethno-nationalists and militant xenophobes that form Trump’s fanatical base.

In this harrowing scene, the two Asians die, and the Latino’s life is overtly threatened while the two white people are praised for being “real Americans” (even though their lives, too, are clearly in danger). By having race and nationality intersect in this way, the scene depicts an act of impromptu ethnic cleansing as well as informal immigration control being conducted at the barrel of an AR-15A3.

In the context of a near-future United States, this alignment of ethnicity and nationality calls to mind the frequent comparisons made between Trumpism and Nazism. The Nazi-like salutes that Steve Bannon and Elon Musk – two of Trump’s kindred spirits and somtimes allies – gave to cheering crowds do little to discourage the comparison. Nor does Trump’s alleged remark that “Hitler did some good things” (cited in Merica). Stéphanie Trouillard provides a particularly helpful synthesis of parallels that historians have drawn between the two ideologies. Elements in common include:

• sustained attacks on “the ‘enemies within’ who must be removed from the body politic”
• the leader’s “absolute certainty about his own genius”
• “ruthless determination to remove any impediments to achieving [the leader’s] objectives” 
• “extreme nationalism” coupled with “an appetite for expansion” 
• “a sense of unfettered power”
• “the subservience of a large proportion of the […] business elite” to the leader
• incitements to violence
• anti-intellectualism and contempt for expert knowledge
• attacks on the press
• tightened control of the police services, the judiciary, and the military 
• an initial “failed coup” followed by a political revival through legal channels

The latter point refers, in the case of Nazism, to Hitler’s unsuccessful Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 and his appointment to the chancellorship in 1933. In Trump’s case, it references the storming of the U.S. Capitol in 2021 and the 2024 election. These two sequences of events bear directly on this article’s overarching argument.

According to Slavoj Žižek, “the [2021] intrusion of the mob into the Capitol […] wasn’t a serious coup attempt, but a farce.” Žižek submits as evidence the ridiculously clad QAnon supporter that entered the Capitol Building wearing a kitschy horned Viking helmet. This man in his absurd cosplay outfit “personifies the fakeness of the entire mob of protesters.” Analogously, Žižek argues, “throughout the 1920s, Hitler and his gang were mostly taken as a bunch of marginal political clowns.” Reversing the order of events in Marx’s famous dictum, Nazism appeared “first as a farce […], then as a tragedy.” Will the same thing hold true for Trumpism? Žižek asked as early as 2021.

“Will [...] the farce repeat itself as tragedy? Will the carnivalesque storming of the Capitol be followed by a serious violent (or, even better, not so violent) coup d’état?” (Žižek)

Little did Žižek know at the time that Trump would be re-elected four years later. Rather than staging a “serious” coup in the aftermath of the 2020 election, Trump came to power in 2024, as did Hitler in 1933, through a legal political process.

Nor could Žižek know in 2021 how closely Trump’s first moves once back in office would track Hitler’s. As Giorgio Agamben reminds us:

“No sooner did Hitler take power (or, as we should perhaps more accurately say, no sooner was power given to him) than […] he proclaimed the Decree for the Protection of the People and the State, which suspended the articles of the Weimar Constitution concerning personal liberties.” (Agamben 2)

The current U.S. administration has not yet had an event comparable to the Reichstag Fire that enabled the Nazis to declare an indefinite state of emergency. Should such an event occur, and should Trump respond by suspending outright the rule of law, we should not be surprised to see a civil war erupt on the scale of the one depicted in Garland’s film.

In Civil War, the event that finally removes the autocrat from office is a shower of bullets. Let us hope that we do not reach a stage in U.S. history where the only check on the President’s power is a loaded gun.