"Every single family has been touched by this": "#Untruth" director Dan Partland diagnoses Trumpism

Dan Partland ended our recent conversation by referencing the paradox of tolerance: To maintain a tolerant society, it holds, tolerant citizens must retain the right to not tolerate intolerance.

“So how does that work?” he mused. “It's a puzzle. I definitely think it doesn't help to shut people out. I also think it doesn't help to not acknowledge the moral failing. It’s tough.”

Nevertheless, the director of "#Untruth: The Psychology of Trumpism" believes Trumpism only ends when people who stand against it figure out some way to grant those under its spell some grace and forgiveness. This, more than other maladies hanging over from whatever happens in November, might be one of the most arduous undertakings of a generation.

Even now Donald Trump is promising retribution on his perceived enemies if he’s re-elected, assuring his followers assembled in Wisconsin on Saturday that getting undocumented immigrants out of Colorado “will be a bloody story.”

Such frightening statements and the behavior accompanying them moved Partland to make “#Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump,” allowing progressives to trauma bond in August of 2020. “#Untruth” takes on the harder puzzle of explaining why his followers continue to be drawn to him despite his penchant for spewing dangerous xenophobic, sexist and bigoted rhetoric. People are clearly invested in getting some answers. A week after its release, it is the #1 ranked documentary on Apple TV.

As Election Day 2024 draws nearer, many have been moved to reference anew Adam Serwer’s 2018 essay in The Atlantic — the title of which matches its conclusion: “The cruelty is the point.”

“It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another,” Serwer wrote. “Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.”

Through “#Untruth,” Partland endeavors to explain the reasons such malice has taken hold of America’s body politic through interviews with psychologists, historians and sociologists — along with politicians and other government figures who either witnessed its manufacture firsthand or were immersed in it.

Former Trump White House aide Anthony Scaramucci recurs here, only now joined by former RNC chairman Michael Steele and former Republican congressman and Tea Party activist Joe Walsh.

Partland credits Walsh for being uncommonly clear in articulating the grievance driving the MAGA movement. “That's a really essential thing to include,” the director says, “because every single family has been touched by this. Everyone is affected by it. And dismissing it as an anomaly isn't a very valuable stance. I think that we have to really engage and understand and have some compassion for these emotions and offer better solutions than what Trump is offering.”

In our conversation, we discussed why Partland believed “#Untruth” is a necessary follow-up to "#Unfit" and the value documentaries like this one may have in helping Americans to someday dismantle the apparatus that keeps Trumpism alive.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Let's go back to #Unfit for a moment. There was a lot of noise around its release in 2020, and justifiably so. Did you suspect you would be making . . . I don’t know, would you call #Untruth a sequel? Did you think that you would be making this afterward?

It is certainly kind of a sequel. And no, of course not. We could only see as far as the 2020 election, that Trump would either be reelected or he would be defeated, and if he were defeated, then that would be the end of that. We didn't give sufficient weight to the fact that even in the four-year period since, he really was able to remake American politics — really able to remake the Republican Party — in his own image, and in a way that has proved really enduring. There's really no analog to someone who has led the party to so many successive electoral defeats — from the 2018 midterms to the last presidential, to the next midterm and a myriad of special elections in between — continuing to enjoy so much power in that political party.

When did you decide that #Untruth was necessary?

I think it started to become clear pretty early on, you know? I mean, something was clear on January 6, [2021] that Trump was not going to go gently into that good night. He was going to hang around and he was going to continue to be an influence. I think there was a brief moment on January 7th, 8th, 9th, or whenever — until Kevin McCarthy went down to Mar-a-Lago — where it seemed like the Republican party might cast him off. But at the point that he was brought back into the fold, we started seeing that there was a larger picture.

You have to go back to the genesis of the first film, during the Trump era. We were all consuming so much news, and every day, there was just a tremendous amount that was happening. The coverage is bouncing around from one scandal to the next. But despite this voracious appetite for consuming news, I felt like I was not getting any more insight.

So right from the genesis of that project, the whole idea was to try to take a step back and see if there was another perspective that daily news coverage wasn't well equipped to share. And what became clear on #Unfit was that there was this whole other story that started from Trump's personal psychology.

When you're living in an autocratic society, the personality ticks of the leader end up reverberating outward. Here, every different facet of his personality was being inserted into policy and the mechanics of the government. And so you had to follow that.

But what we weren't seeing was that there's a larger trend going on, which is the psychology of authoritarianism in general. Why are people drawn to this man at this time? Because there have always been characters like Trump: would be strong men who present the world with easy answers that speak effectively to people's emotional concerns, without having a thoughtful analysis of how to solve the problem itself.

. . . Now the issue isn't really Trump so much. What we really have to think about is what's going on in our culture, with American society, although it's happening all over the world. Why at this point in human history is the momentum of a pluralistic Western democracy lost? Why is democracy back on its heels? People around the world are preferring authoritarian figures to take over and make decisions for them that are, frankly, disenfranchising people.

#Untruth joins this sort of library of documentaries that break down Trumpism in very succinct, easy-to-digest ways. And yet I also feel as if the low-information voter, the kind of person you'd want to put this in front of, would not tune in to it. I ask this of a lot of documentary filmmakers: Who is this for?

People ask this question all the time, it's a really good one. I think that I've thought about it differently. On the way into #Unfit, I was very focused on a specific profile of voter, of the audience, which was people who were smart and politically engaged, who were maybe politically conservative, who really didn't like Trump because he wasn't really a conservative, but they liked Republican politics so much that they felt like they would vote for him anyway. That was the target in my mind and as a political activist. That was what fascinated me: I couldn't understand how you could see so much of this and still feel like, “Yeah, but I'm going to vote for that guy.”

So the goal of that film was to say to that particular voter, “Really? Do you see this? Really?” . . . I suspect these films speak to the very few people who are maybe teetering. The message can land with them. Their greater impact is about activating everyone else.

It's a question of making a powerful and succinct argument and reducing the chaos to something that's a little bit more actionable, a little easier to hold on to . . . the idea of these films is to reach some people on the margins, but more important is to give language and focus to how we talk about these things, and hope that reverberates out in other media and conversations, at family dinner tables and everywhere else.

Some of what the film distills is the fact that there are so many venues disseminating disinformation, whether the actors are Russian or others, and that all of it is tied to authoritarianism’s rise. But it can be difficult to talk about. I know this firsthand, from trying to explain the mechanics of Russia’s disinformation campaign based on what Alex Gibney had to say in “Agents of Chaos.” And I found myself saying to people, “I know this sounds crazy, but this is happening, this is real.”

So as a filmmaker, how do you take these concepts that seem almost fantastical if they weren't happening, and put them into a framework that makes sense of the truth behind the disinformation?

Well yes, they are hard things to talk about.

One of the things that a film like this really can do is it can put that concise argument down together, right beside the evidence. So the construction of the film really is to hear the ideas from the experts and then see the evidence. Hear the idea, see the evidence. And the evidence is plentiful.

We're in a media-dense universe. And you can illustrate these points. It's not difficult to do when you're, you know, when you're on the right theory.

There's a question you're not asking about what was really complicated in the film to do, and I'm not even sure the film was successful in doing it, but talking about the ways in which disinformation and authoritarianism go together, and conspiracism as an outgrowth of both of those. That was a complicated, multi-faceted point to make, that the miasma of disinformation and distrust of the government and a profit-driven news media that benefits from making us angry, isn't really held at all to account for its own truthfulness.

And that is the sort of dark cloud that's hanging over this political moment in human history: people have really lost their bearings about what is true, what is right and wrong.

The culture is complicated to understand, and so we're going to trust people who are brands. And Trump is a brand. There are other news brands, and we're going to trust whatever comes from those sources because it's too hard to figure this out on our own. That’s fine if those sources are good, but in general, we’re in a really polluted information space that is full of a lot of bad information.

And people are just tired. They're tired of having it be their responsibility to figure out what's true, and so they start to just go with an emotional connection to an idea, to think, “That must be the true one.”

Do you feel like a film like this could help to break the MAGA spell by helping people identify and understand the root causes that led to its rise?

I certainly hope so. But I think we should be realistic about how many people are truly reachable. But I think that is what these films can do, is they can put a lot of pieces together in a cogent and concentrated way that can be very impactful, and kind of connect some dots for people.

That can work for people who are just looking for insight into the phenomenon of Trumpism, but it can also work for people in its thrall if you can get them to really watch it on the level. But I think there's so much defensiveness there that’s very, very hard to break through. So I think we should be realistic.

Prior to the movie’s release you, along with the rest of of us, got the surprising news of the change at the top of the Democratic ticket, which shifted everything about this presidential race. What was that like for you as a filmmaker knowing this movie was going to be coming out?

The film was fully delivered, mastered, and at the platforms before Joe Biden dropped out of the race, just to be clear. But we had always approached it that this was not going to advocate for any particular candidate and that it was going to be a broader message that would work pretty much no matter who ended up in the presidential race.

That included, by the way, when we started making #Untruth. What was clear was that Trumpism was still going to be active and an important factor in our politics. It wasn't clear that Trump was going to get the nomination.

At a certain point, we did say, “You know what? It is pretty clear that it's going to be Trump and Biden, and maybe we can use more clips that give that context to the film.” And then, even before the debate, we started to wonder if Biden was going to make it all the way. And we changed exactly just one line in the film.

Which line is that?

Well, the majority of the line is still there. There’s a part where Joe Walsh says, “You know, we're not going to get out of this thing tomorrow. We're not going to get out of this thing in 2024 and so until we're out of it, my message is simple: I'm voting for the one candidate who can stop Donald Trump from being reelected. The piece that we dropped was he said, “Until then, I'm on Team Biden.” That was too partisan anyway. So the substance, the intention of what he's saying is the same either way.

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I think people might be . . . is the word fascinated? . . . to see this after a Democratic convention where Michael Steele and other prominent voices from establishment Republican circles came out and spoke on behalf of Kamala Harris.

There should have been more. Part of the phenomenon of Trumpism is it's just so, so hard for people to break with their political alliances. That's not even a Trumpist thing. It's part of the shape of American society that these teams are left and right, Democrat and Republican. Progressives, liberals and conservatives — whatever you want to call them — these teams have become so, so important to our identity. Liz Cheney just endorsed Kamala, Harris, but why didn't she speak at the convention?

I don't have the exact figure, but much of Trump's former cabinet and former top White House staff said they would not endorse him. Why weren't they speaking at the DNC and amplifying their message? Most of them wrote books. Some of them have given interviews. Some of them stayed surprisingly quiet. But I think that the way American politics is right now, it's so dangerous for a conservative to speak out against Trump. And that really is the fascistic flavor of this movement. The cruelty is the point: “We are going to make it so miserable for people to dissent.”

If there's an action item that anybody can take away after watching this movie, what would it be?

There are a couple of things, I would say. I think it's important to understand and take seriously the frustrations, the grievance, and the anxiety that has, in my opinion, led to Trump's rise. The world has always been a scary place, but we live in an age of uncommon anxiety: the financial instabilities, impending climate apocalypse, and for a period with Kim Jong Un, the threat of nuclear catastrophe.

Authoritarians are salve to that. It can feel very reassuring to choose a guy who feels like he understands all those things that frustrate us and has simple authoritative fixes to it. I think it's important to understand all that and not judge it.

That doesn't mean we should fall into a moral equivalency. There isn’t a “both sides” thing there. There's no question that the MAGA movement is fundamentally failing the moral test of a pluralistic democracy, and January 6 is the ultimate manifestation of that. They absolutely understood that they did not win the election, but they didn't care because they wanted to take power, even if it was not the choice, not the will of their countrymen. So I think we shouldn't beg off the responsibility to understand it. We have to find a way to do that without creating a false equivalency that everybody has a good point.

And I think we shouldn't give up on the people in our lives who have fallen into the thrall of this kind of thinking. I think we have to be persistent. It does the world no good to write them off or isolate them, but continue to meet them with compassion in the hopes of bringing them back in.

"#Untruth: The Psychology of Trumpism" is available to buy or rent from Apple TV and other on-demand platforms.