Mirrors of Trumpism in "The Oath" and "Civil War", text only

First as farce, then as tragedy: mirrors of Trumpism in The Oath and Civil War

In The Philosophy of History (1837), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel proposes that watershed political episodes only solidify themselves in people’s minds as world-historical events once they have been repeated.

“By repetition, that which at first appeared merely a matter of chance and contingency becomes a real and ratified existence” (332).

He offers this theory to explain Caesarism, which rose during the latter years of the Roman Republic only to fall and then rise again. Had Caesarism not been revived, it may have appeared as a historical fluke. By returning after its defeat, this populist-autocratic ideology, which brought about the Roman Republic’s collapse and the Empire’s establishment, proved itself to be a “Necessity” of human history (Hegel 330, italics in original).

Donald Trump’s re-election in 2024 provides a fine twenty-first-century example of this phenomenon. During his first term in office (2017–21), President Trump openly demonized immigrants, disparaged people of color, vilified liberals, attacked women’s and LGBTQ+ rights, dismantled environmental protections, deregulated the economy, and passed a massive tax cut for the rich while presenting himself as the working man’s champion. Joe Biden’s electoral victory in 2020 seemed to signal a return to more centrist politics after this lunge to the far right. Had Biden’s Vice-President, Kamala Harris, won the 2024 election, Trump’s four-year reign of extreme-right populism would have looked like an aberration. The 2024 election gave the lie to this comforting narrative, confirming a posteriori that the counter-revolution Trump inaugurated in 2017 was a major historical event.

Karl Marx famously alludes to this theory of historical repetition in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852):

“Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history appear, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce” (Marx 15).

Trumpism, however, reverses the events’ order. Based on the 47th President’s first few months in office, the second coming of Trump promises to be a cataclysmic re-enactment of the shambolic first term. Emboldened by winning the popular vote as well as the electoral college, with Republican majorities in both the House and the Senate, a conservative supermajority in the Supreme Court, and Project 2025’s blueprint for a self-coup in his back pocket, Trump is set to reprise the role of right-wing dictator.

Two recent films brilliantly refract these stages in the Trumpian counter-revolution. Fittingly, one is a farce while the other is a tragedy. The Oath (2018), a dark comedy written and directed by Ike Barinholtz, depicts the infighting that erupts over a Thanksgiving holiday when members of an extended family discuss the controversial new pledge of allegiance the President has asked citizens to make. Civil War (2024), by contrast, a dystopian thriller written and directed by Alex Garland, imagines the full-blown rebellion that breaks out when a third-term President refuses to relinquish power. Together, these two films form a fascinating diptych on the Trump era.

From democracy to dictatorship

The “tragic” event to which Marx alludes is Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état on Brumaire 18, Year VIII (November 9, 1799). Having toppled the government and outmaneuvered his political rivals, Napoleon ruled for five years as an authoritarian dictator before declaring the end of the French Republic and crowning himself Emperor in perpetuity.

According to Marx, this tragic historical sequence then repeats itself in the farcical mode when, in 1851, President Louis Bonaparte (Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew) was unable to garner the three-quarters majority that would allow him to run for a second term. Rather than vacating the Presidential palace, Bonaparte dissolved the National Assembly, arrested his political opponents, put Paris in a state of siege, and organized after the fact a legally dubious referendum authorizing his power grab. Within a year, this “little Napoleon” (as Victor Hugo acerbically called him) proclaimed the end of the Second Republic and, following in his uncle’s footsteps, declared himself Emperor for life of the Second Empire.

The historical sequence that Marx analyzes in The Eighteenth Brumaire has eerie echoes in the present-day United States. Marx writes, for instance:

“Every demand of the simplest bourgeois financial reform, of the most ordinary liberalism, of the most formal republicanism, of the most shallow democracy, is simultaneously castigated as ‘an attempt on society’ and stigmatized as ‘Socialism’” (Marx 25).

It is almost as if Marx were talking about Trumpism 170 years before the fact.

Otherwise, Marx asserts:

“[Louis Bonaparte] constitutes himself chief of the lumpenproletariat […], who recognizes in this scum, offal, refuse of all classes the only class upon which he can base himself unconditionally” (Marx 75, italics in original).

We can regret Marx’s language here without failing to recognize a prefiguration of the fanatical alt-right MAGA supporters that Hillary Clinton pejoratively dubbed a “basket of deplorables” in 2016.

Most obviously, the political sequences that Hegel and Marx analyze in their writings on Caesarism and Bonapartism move from republican-democratic forms of government via authoritarian autocracy to bona fide imperialism. It is too soon to know whether this will be the USA’s fate, but there is little doubt that the Trump administration has been moving in that direction. Dismantling the State bureaucracy with alarming speed, threatening his political opponents with imprisonment, deporting perceived enemies of the state with little due process, and openly contemplating unprovoked invasions of US-friendly countries, Trump has shown himself to be an aspiring dictator with expansionist ambitions. Meanwhile, Trump is publicly musing about running for a third Presidential term, even though the Constitution specifies that “no person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice” (22nd Amendment). Michael Moore was wrong in the short term when he predicted that Trump would be “the last President of the United States” if he got elected in 2016. It is too early to know whether Moore’s prediction will be proven right in the long term.

A house divided: The Oath

This recent and near-future history forms the socio-political backdrop for The Oath and Civil War. The first film’s premise is presented in an opening title card: “I pledge my loyalty to my President and my country and vow to defend them from enemies, both foreign and domestic.” The cacophony of a street-level news report on people protesting this so-called “Patriot’s Oath” then erupts on the soundtrack. The din abruptly stops when the image of a mixed-race couple shaking their heads in disbelief appears on the screen. A counter-shot shows White House spokeswoman Kerry Nance (Beth Dover) on television, assuring viewers that no one is going to be forced to sign the oath, but the couple remains unconvinced. “Are they serious?” Chris Powell (Barinholtz) rhetorically asks his wife, Kai (Tiffany Haddish). “This is crazy,” she replies in concert with him. Even as Nance explains that citizens have until Black Friday – the day after Thanksgiving – to sign the oath, Kai and Chris agree on the spot that they will not endorse this violation of their civil rights.

Despite spokeswoman Nance’s reassurance that nobody will be compelled to sign this new pledge of allegiance, we learn as the film progresses that among the domestic enemies mentioned in the oath are people who do not sign it. A de facto enemy of the State is someone who does not vow to support it unequivocally. The oath thereby creates the social division it names. By its logic, one is either a staunch patriot or a national menace. Because this loyalty oath asks people not only to pledge their allegiance to President and Country but also to “defend them from enemies,” it has the effect of dividing the country into two camps: self-appointed vigilantes and those subject to persecution.

Through four principal couples, the film shows how different people might react to an injunction of this sort. At one pole of the social division are Kai and Chris, who immediately perceive the oath to be an assault on their basic freedoms. At the opposite end of the political spectrum are Chris’s brother, Pat (Jon Barinholtz), and his girlfriend, Abbie (Meredith Hanger). These two couples form the film’s central axis of antagonism. Whereas one couple represents twenty-first-century progressives, the other personifies white-collar Republicans in the Trump age.

Nearly everything about these two couples sets them apart. Although both are clearly bourgeois, plot details and elements of costume design code one couple as countercultural lefties and the other as yuppies in the mainstream. While Chris and Kai have a Toyota Prius (the self-respecting lefty-liberal’s stereotypical car par excellence), for instance, Pat and Abbie drive a Porsche 911. The former brother drinks red wine from a long-stemmed glass while the latter opts for beer and Southern Comfort with Cokes. In a nice visual encoding of their cultural affiliations, Chris’s burgundy corduroys and red patterned shirt contrast with his brother’s pastel plaids and mint-green polo shirt. Similarly, while Kai dresses in earth tones and natural fibers, Abbie sports preppy outfits fresh out of a Ralph Lauren catalogue.

The strongest opposition established between these two sets of characters is undoubtedly the one between Abbie and Chris. Both of these politically engaged social activists spend much of the film following media updates on the national crisis as the deadline for signing the oath approaches. However, while he is up in arms about the government crackdown on people protesting the oath, she “mixes it up” online, as she says, with “haters and losers.”

The “haters” to whom Abbie refers here are presumably people protesting the oath, who, according to a right-wing newspeak the film does not need to spell out for us, are deemed “haters” of their country. The other category, “losers,” borrows one of Trump’s favorite insults for his detractors. Together, these two designations capture both the tone and the tenor of the Trumpian culture war. It goes without saying that this catch-all group of haters and losers would include Chris. He and Abbie are opposites, each offering a negative mirror image of the other.

Between these two extremes fall the more moderate conservatives and liberals in the family. Chris’s parents, Eleanor (Nora Dunn) and Hank (Chris Ellis), are social conservatives who have signed the oath but do not want to talk about it. Alice (Carrie Brownstein) and Clark (Jay Duplass), Chris’s sister and brother-in-law, are left-leaning liberals opposed to the tyranny the oath represents. When Alice divulges to Chris that she and Clark have signed the Presidential pledge of allegiance, not out of conviction but for fear of retribution, Chris is crestfallen. When Kai later confesses during one of Chris’s outbursts that she, too, has signed the oath, the crusading liberal is forced to confront the fact that he is a minority of one within the family circle.

One of the film’s strengths is that it does not lionize or romanticize Chris. Although the movie promotes his political point of view, it does not endorse him as a person. Rather than taking the easy, predictable, and potentially cloying approach of presenting the viewer with a slate of good progressives on one side and bad reactionaries on the other, the film pokes fun at virtually all the characters, including its most obvious mouthpiece. The Oath is a political satire, not a morality tale. It depicts the pernicious effects of a toxic social climate rather than acts of heroic or villainous people. The movie beckons U.S. to embrace Chris’s politics even as it portrays him as a neurotic, overbearing, and at times insufferable curmudgeon.

The film accomplishes this feat by contrasting the extended family as a whole with people they encounter in two short scenes set outside the Powells’ home and especially during the long final sequence. The first scene takes place during a car trip Chris makes with his mother and daughter on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. Travelling behind an erratically maneuvered SUV, the trio observes the vehicle speed up and swerve to cut off the sedan in front of it. A man with a shaved head and a military jacket then gets out of the SUV and starts yelling at the woman in the car whose passage he blocked. When the man punches the sedan roof and orders the woman out of the car, Chris decides to say something. In response, the enraged hooligan fetches a hunting knife from his vehicle, slashes the woman’s tires, and menacingly approaches Chris. “Fuck you!” he yells at Chris before turning and walking away. “Get the fuck out of my country!”

The last sentence here clarifies that this scene depicts not simply a road-rage incident, but the behavior of a newly energized social strata flexing its proverbial muscles. One recognizes in this exchange the threats and taunts that segments of the U.S. population felt increasingly comfortable making while a bigoted bully was in the White House. An incarnation of the infamous “deplorables” castigated by Clinton, this man, who threatens a terrified woman because he does not like the way she drives and who tells the recognizably liberal Chris to get out of “his” country, embodies the alt-right trolls that appeared on the scene almost as blindingly as Trump did in the mid-2010s.

The second scene presents another chauvinistic patriot lashing out in public. Set in a chain restaurant, it shows an elderly white man slam his cane on the table of a mixed-race group of twenty-something-year-olds discussing the oath. “These punks are talking bullshit against our country,” the enraged man informs diners in the restaurant. “You should feel grateful that you live in this country,” he hollers back at the group when they protest. Here again, although this man is not in a physically superior position to his adversaries, he feels empowered to berate them in public. Together with the road-rage scene, this exchange depicts the oath’s predictable fallout, polarizing the nation into self-righteous nationalists and their perceived enemies.

It has become commonplace in recent years to claim that Trump values loyalty above all other attributes. John Bolton famously pushed this truism a degree further, arguing that Trump expects “fealty” rather than simple allegiance. This desire for unfaltering devotion has motivated the President’s cabinet picks, impelled him to pardon the rioters that stormed the U.S. Capitol Building in his name on January 6, 2021, and governed his decisions about whose political careers to promote or sabotage in down-ballot elections. The Oath depicts what happens at the micro-scale of the family when the President follows such base instincts.

The event that brings the clan together at the film’s end is the intrusion of two representatives from the Citizens’ Protection Unit (CPU) into the Powells’ home. Having received a tip that Chris was allegedly preventing someone from signing the oath, these armed militiamen (played by Billy Magnussen and John Cho) arrive to interrogate the armchair radical. We learn early in the film from a television report that the CPU “has been accused of being responsible for the disappearance of several dozen activists,” so the threat represented by these officers’ arrival is serious. In a silent but resonant allusion to current events of the late 2010s, these agents wear the informal uniform of white polo shirts and chinos that Trump’s neo-Nazi and white supremacist supporters sported at such events as the 2017 Unite the Right Rally, where clashes between protestors and counter-protestors left more than 30 people injured and one person dead.

During the initial stages of the Powells’ encounter with the CPU, Pat and especially Abbie are warm and welcoming to the agents. They switch allegiances only when Mason (Magnussen), the more aggressive of the CPU pair, physically assaults Chris and threatens his family. At that point, they join in the effort to suppress the intruder. However, the adversaries become locked in a stand-off. The family incapacitates the officers, but Mason vows to make it his life mission to hunt down Chris and his family if he gets out alive. The Powells do not have the stomach to murder him, but they see no other way out.

Just as Chris musters the courage to put a bullet in Mason’s head, Clark, who has spent most of the film sick in bed, emerges from the bedroom and tells people to turn on the news. The President has stepped down, a reporter informs the viewing audience, making the former Vice-President (played by Bruce Boxleitner) the current President. As the latter says when he takes the podium, all Reserve troops and National Guard units deployed to major cities have been recalled, registration for the Patriot’s Oath has been repealed, and all operations undertaken by the CPU have been suspended. “Now is not the time for division,” the acting President concludes. “We must come together.”

We know with post-2021 hindsight that this is not the way President Trump finished his first term. On the contrary, having lost the election with 232 electoral votes to Joe Biden’s 306, he called the election “rigged,” rejected the results, mounted a farcical legal challenge to overturn them, pressured the Georgia secretary of state to “find” him more votes, and when all else failed, called on his faithful supporters to rally in front of the Capitol Building and to “fight like hell” in order to “save America.” As fate would have it, among the most militant brigades that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was a group called the “Oath Keepers.”

In summary, The Oath extrapolates from current events of the late 2010s to imagine what might happen if a polarizing President formalized what Trump did informally. In contrast to what happened in the real world, the film ends when this statesman recognizes that the social turmoil he instigated has spiraled out of control. Civil War’s point of departure inverts this conclusion. Rather than showing a President backing down and leaving office in the face of mass protests, it envisions what might happen if a leader in this position refused to relinquish power.

When the bullet is stronger than the ballot: Civil War

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.

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.

Works cited

Agamben, Giorgio. Sate of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Bolton, John. “Presidents expect loyalty. Trump demands fealty.” New York Times, January 5, 2025,https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/05/opinion/trump-loyalty-cabinet-presidents.html. Accessed April 18, 2025.

Dixon, Winston Wheeler. “American wasteland: Alex Garland’s Civil War.” Senses of Cinema, no. 110, August 2024, https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2024/feature-articles/american-wasteland-alex-garlands-civil-war/. Accessed April 18, 2025.

Etzel, Dennis Jr. “Civil War.” Journal of Religion & Film, vol. 28, no. 2, article 10, 2024,
DOI: https://doi.org/10.32873/uno.dc.jrf.28.02.10.

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