Did American movies help propel Trump back to the White House?

Movies and TV shows have a huge influence on our values and views of the world, and they mostly show inept or evil government.

Zong Dawei was a long-time career Chinese diplomat when a terrorist group took over the Middle Eastern country where he was posted. Working with a younger embassy staffer, Cheng Lang, Zong repeatedly risked his life to evacuate a thousand stranded Chinese citizens, negotiating passage with rebel factions and personally leading the civilians across many miles of war-torn urban and desert territory to safety.

If you think this sounds like the plot line of a Hollywood action film, you’re partly right. Zong and Cheng were fictional characters—but in the blockbuster adventure Home Coming, which won awards in China in 2022. It featured modern production values, complex heroes, and believable performances. But it also had one quality rarely seen in American movies. Without being overtly political, it showed government officials as decent and competent people—with the junior ones deployed at their embassy in sync with senior leaders coordinating the rescue mission from Beijing.

China’s communist government expects artists to burnish the legitimacy of the state and forbids criticism of authorities, so it’s no surprise Chinese movies make their public servants look good (in fact, several recent ones feature this same theme of the state protecting its citizens abroad). America’s motion picture artists thankfully have no such obligation. But the makers of our movies and TV shows have huge influence on our values and views of the world, and most would acknowledge some responsibility to use that influence for good. I think they’ve failed that test in a rarely discussed but consequential way: the stories they’ve told us have accelerated the loss of faith in our government and institutions that Donald Trump exploited in his rise and return to power.

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One of America’s surprise box office a couple of years ago was a movie called The Sound of Freedom. It featured a former Homeland Security agent on a rogue mission to save children trafficked by Latin American drug cartels that the U.S. government (or so the film implied) was not doing enough to protect. Breitbart News praised it for trolling a left-wing “political movement made up of child groomers and child groomer-enablers.” Though the film itself never suggested that governments or global elites are kidnapping children, it’s fair to say that mainstream critics viewed it as QAnon-lite.

No one accused Stranger Things, the highest-grossing Netflix drama of all time, of peddling right-wing conspiracy theories. But if you, like me, are a Stranger Things fan, you’ll know that the show revolves around a child—one of many—who literally is snatched from her parents by a secret U.S. government agency that subjects her to cruel experiments to hone and exploit her psychic powers. First of many spoiler alerts: the experiments open portals to a parallel universe through which demons can enter our reality. The girl escapes and teams up with a group of ordinary American teenagers and their flawed but decent parents to save the world again and again.

Stranger Things presents a pure example of one of the most common themes in American popular entertainment. It shows the U.S. government as at best incompetent, and at worst complicit, in a problem that threatens humanity—be it alien invasions, monsters, or, yes, global cabals of power-hungry elites ruling behind a democratic facade. And only a plucky group of neighborhood kids or a lone hero operating outside official channels can save the day.

Stephen Spielberg, the author of so many of our modern movie tropes, is among the fathers of this one, too. Think of his E.T., in which faceless government agents wrongly view an alien that a young boy tries to save as a threat and almost cause his death, or Indiana Jones, in which the government is clueless about the true power of the Biblical relic that it hires our archeologist hero to steal from the Nazis and then deposits it in a drab storage warehouse alongside countless boxes of forgotten things.

Think of pandemic movies like Outbreak, Contagion, and World War Z, which show the U.S. government as overwhelmed, slow, cold-hearted, and secretive; the heroes are whistleblowers who expose its failures and scientists with the compassion and courage to act. Think of spy stories like the Mission Impossible and Jason Bourne franchises and Alias. Their heroes work for Uncle Sam (or think they do) but discover that some secret element of our government is working with the bad guys or conducting immoral black ops. At first no one believes them, so they go rogue, disobey orders, and work alone to defeat the enemy within.

Plenty of movies and TV shows have featured likable American presidents. But the “big reveal” in those dramas is often a conspiracy led by other players inside the government — an evil vice president trying to kill the president played by Morgan Freeman in Angel has Fallen, a national security adviser making deals with drug cartels in Clear and Present Danger, a homeland security adviser helping to orchestrate the bombing of a State of the Union speech in Designated Survivor.

These stories aren’t overtly political; they’re trying to entertain us, not convince us of anything. Filmmakers choose the tropes I’m critiquing because they work and most of us love them. I confess that my all-time favorite TV show is Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which features (like Stranger Things) suburban teenagers saving the world from supernatural creatures and struggling with the responsibility they bear; the U.S. government appears only in the form of a secret agency known as the “Initiative” that’s more interested in using the creatures as military weapons than in protecting humanity.

It could be argued that nothing is more American—and more consistent with our government-of-and-by-the-people ethos—than stories in which ordinary people defeat evil without having to rely on a powerful leader or in opposition to one, stories that celebrate resourceful individuals over faceless bureaucracies, and stories that cheer rebels who question authority over the elites who embody it.

But consider the Americans who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. They clearly saw themselves as heroes in a story much like the one Hollywood had told them so many times. They thought they had discovered a hidden truth that elite institutions were refusing to believe about a conspiracy in the heart of our government to seize power from the people. So they took it on themselves to reveal that “truth” and save the day. Surely there would be a happy ending.

In fact, the whole MAGA fantasy of a “deep state” manipulating our democracy from the shadows and trying to thwart any honest leader in its way is a Hollywood archetype—the basic plot device driving countless modern dramas in which government plays a role. We can dismiss this as all in good fun and trust that most people can distinguish movie fiction from reality. But repeated exposure to a stereotype shapes our perception of reality in meaningful ways.

Hollywood has recognized this. For example, it has cast minority actors more frequently as as presidents, judges, scientists, superheroes, and the like—not to make an overt political point, but because if kids of all backgrounds see themselves represented as role models on screen, they’ll feel it’s normal to aspire to such roles in real life. By the same token, if Americans grow up seeing mostly negative, conspiratorial representations of government and of public servants in popular culture, does that not eventually normalize Elon Musk and his chainsaw, too?

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Have our movies always shown the government in such a cynical light?

I can’t claim to have done an empirical study, and there are exceptions to every rule. But the Hollywood Motion Picture Code of the 1930s explicitly forbade negative portrayals of courts and law enforcement officers; the general ethos then was that you could portray injustice in America, but the system itself should be shown as virtuous and capable of correcting wrongs. So, when Mr. Smith went to Washington, he found corruption and complacency but also that a lone senator fighting for lost causes could use the rules of his institution to make things right.

During World War II, patriotic fervor and direct government involvement led to movies and newsreels that supported the war effort. Filmmakers didn’t just give audiences propaganda valorizing our troops and their victories. Movies like Casablanca advanced the idea that America had larger responsibilities and could be a force for good in the world. All this reflected a widespread understanding that popular entertainment could change hearts and minds and the course of history itself.

In at least some 1950s films, including the sci-fi classics Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Day the Earth Stood Still, audiences began to see the government as well-meaning but failing to meet existential challenges, forcing ordinary Americans to act alone. By the 1960s, a Hollywood recovering from McCarthy persecutions started portraying malevolent conspiracies within the government itself. But in that genre’s quintessential example—the great 1964 film Seven Days in May, in which a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff plots a military coup—the heroes are the president, his staff, a member of Congress, and a patriotic military officer. In the end, the system is redeemed.

It was probably the combined effect of the Vietnam War and Watergate—real world events that raised fundamental questions about the competence and honesty of our institutions—that turned popular entertainment toward paranoia about government. Since then, our culture has reflected and reinforced our politics. How many waves of politicians since the 1970s—Democrats as well as Republicans—have tried to get to the nation’s capital by running against it, by claiming that Washington was “broken” and that only they could fix it? Notice how few politicians today speak of career service in government as a noble calling.

Five decades of anti-government culture and politics have brought us to a logical end point. Americans chose an entertainer president who promised to smash government to pieces who is, in his second term, keeping that promise.

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Our film and TV directors, writers, and performers would likely recoil at the thought that they’ve played any role in legitimizing conspiracy theories and mistrust of government. They donate to Democrats. Their works extol progressive virtues — human rights, holding greedy corporations to account, love across racial and cultural divides. MAGA disdains them as “woke.”

They might point to all the stories they’ve told lionizing people fighting authoritarians like Trump—Hunger Games, The Matrix, Harry Potter, Star Wars (including the brilliant Andor series). And they’d be right. The problem is that our popular culture romanticizes the struggle for democracy while disparaging or showing little interest in the actual functioning of democracy. Ever notice how the rebellion wins in the Return of the Jedi, but when Leia, Han, and Luke return years later, they are the Resistance again, with little sign of the Republic they restored?

Screenwriters don’t need to ditch the old tropes or stop addressing the real failings of our leaders. But in popular entertainment, must the “dark side” so often reside inside corridors of power, with the scrappy good guys forced to fight from outside? When the good guys win power, can’t we see what they do with it, against the challenges that will inevitably arise? West Wing and Madam Secretary (exceptions that prove the rule) demonstrated there is tension and fun to be found in the imagined adventures of conscientious people trying to solve problems within a democracy. Hamilton showed that audiences embrace intelligent idealism, not just cynicism.

Stories in which government plays an incidental role are at least as influential as those that treat it as their main subject. So, the next time aliens attack Earth, can the scientists and kids who defeat them at least have a supportive ally in an assistant secretary of Defense? Can our spies fight terrorists without being betrayed by an evil presidential aide? Can we see civilians at an American embassy or public health workers back home saving lives—instead of just Captain America or the Delta Force? Musk fired many of our public servants in real life. Let them shine as heroes on the screen.

America isn’t and must never be like China—no one can or should try to force our film and TV artists to change their scripts or to choose different heroes. But we are free to ask the magicians who entertain us to meet the moment better.

May they eventually merit the praise Claude Raines gives Humphrey Bogart’s character at the very end of Casablanca: “Rick, you’re not only a sentimentalist, you’ve become a patriot.” And may they reply, as Bogart did, “it seemed like a good time to start.”

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