In John Frankenheimer’s confounding The Manchurian Candidate (1962), “little … is as it seems,” explains Ivan Coates. “A hero is not a hero. A superpatriot is not a superpatriot. A hospital is not a hospital. A garden-club meeting is not a garden-club meeting. A friend is not a friend.”Footnote ¹ Ambiguity also marks the movie’s title. Who, exactly, is the Manchurian candidate? The film and its literary source, Richard Condon’s 1959 novel of the same name, never make this clear.

Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), a crack shot since boyhood who becomes a political assassin, is perhaps the character most often referred to by critics and historians as the eponymous lead. In 1952, while on patrol in South Korea, Raymond and several army mates are abducted and transported to China’s northeastern region, Manchuria, where Communist handlers subject them to brainwashing. Raymond in particular is programmed to kill on command, and, two years later, back in the States, it is arranged for him to assassinate a presidential contender named Benjamin K. Arthur (Robert Riordan) from the eaves of Madison Square Garden, a killing that will boost the profile of Arthur’s running mate, faux anticommunist US Senator John Yerkes Iselin (James Gregory), who is also Raymond’s stepfather. Raymond’s mother, Senator Iselin’s wife, Eleanor (Angela Lansbury), is her son’s American handler. “You are to shoot the presidential nominee through the head,” she explains before dispatching Raymond to Manhattan:

The plan fails as Raymond, freed for the moment from his conditioning by his friend, Ben Marco (Frank Sinatra), redirects his aim from Ben Arthur to his stepfather and mother, killing them before lethally shooting himself.

The pervasiveness of the opinion that Raymond is the Manchurian candidate is such that Roger Ebert contends that the film “has entered everyday speech as shorthand for a brainwashed sleeper, a subject who has been hypnotized and instructed to act when his controllers pull the psychological trigger.” Kennedy’s assassination on 22 November 1963 cemented the association between the fictional film and real political violence, Ebert adds, “by forever coloring speculation about Lee Harvey Oswald. Would the speculation about Oswald’s background and motives have been as fevered without the film as a template?”Footnote ² The likenesses between the motion picture and subsequent history are undeniable. Oswald shot Kennedy from a high place, the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, like Raymond in the spotlight booth at Madison Square Garden. And like Raymond, Oswald used a bolt-action rifle. Such were the parallels that Frankenheimer himself told his biography Gerald Pratley, “it has certainly been – unfortunately – a horribly prophetic film.”Footnote ³

Yet no one, not even John Loken in his Oswald’s Trigger Films: The Manchurian Candidate, We Were Strangers, Suddenly?,Footnote ⁴ has been able to prove that Oswald saw the Frankenheimer film or let it influence his fantasy life prior to the shooting. And even if he did catch the movie, the New Yorker’s Louis Menand contends, it mattered little in terms of what occurred at Dealy Plaza:

Gerald Posner, in his exhaustive Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK, convincingly dismisses the notion that Oswald was sophisticated enough to even have Communist masters. Far from being a secret agent, he was merely a “sociopathic twenty-four-year-old loser in life, armed with a $12 rifle and consumed by his own warped motivation.Footnote ⁶ Kennedy’s killer, this is all to say, was not himself a Manchurian candidate. A strong case can be made that Raymond is not one, either.

By turns a soldier, a journalist, a newlywed and a murderer in the movie, Raymond never functions much like or acts as a “candidate” – in other words, a contender for a professional, academic, cultural, athletic, political, religious, or military distinction, or, as the Oxford English Dictionary offers, “One who seeks or aspires to be elected or appointed to an office, privilege, or position of honour, or who is put forward or selected by others as an aspirant.” While he may be his handlers’ choice for a presidential assassin, their “candidate” in that regard, Raymond is a person nearly totally bereft of agency, prohibited by his brainwashing from authentically aspiring to anything. Raymond’s stepfather, the vain and alcoholic Johnny Iselin, on the other hand, is a professional politician and most certainly an example of a “candidate.” Frankenheimer introduces the Senator at an airfield in 1954, for example, where military brass and members of the press have convened to honor Sergeant Raymond Shaw, just back from Korea and now a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor. The Senator and Mrs. Iselin exploit the occasion for a photo-op to improve Iselin’s standing in the public eye, prompting Raymond to snarl, “Who’s kidding whom, Mother? Johnny’s up for reelection in November. You’ve got it all figured out, haven’t you? Johnny Iselin’s boy, Medal of Honor winner. That should get you another fifty-thousand votes.”

Despite his cultivated persona as a flag-waving McCarthyite figure – throwing out false claims that he possesses, for example, “a list of the names of two-hundred-and-seven persons who are known by the Secretary of Defense as being members of the Communist Party!” – Johnny Iselin is a willing conspirator in the Communists’ plot to vanquish American democracy. His complicity reveals itself at the convention when Mrs. Iselin whispers to him during Ben Arthur’s acceptance speech for the presidential nomination, “Stop twitching. Raymond never missed with a rifle in his life.” Iselin complies dutifully. “Whatever else one can say about James Gregory’s McCarthy manqué ‘Big’ Johnny Iselin – the title character of John Frankenheimer’s masterpiece – he’s good at taking direction from his handlers,” finds Adam Nayman.Footnote ⁷

The interpretation of a Manchurian candidate as a compromised government official has also entered everyday speech, often employed in public discourse to cast doubt on a politician’s or public official’s loyalty to his or her country. Donald Trump has been particularly fond of using the sobriquet in this sense since well before winning the 2016 presidential race. Michael Cohen, Trump’s one-time attorney, for instance, recalls his boss describing Barack Obama, who was President at the time, as” a fucking phony. He’s a Manchurian candidate. He’s not even fucking American.”Footnote ⁸ Trump has insulted Joe Biden similarly on several occasions, too, in the summer 2024 presidential debate, for instance, claiming falsely that Biden “gets paid by China. He’s a Manchurian candidate. He gets money from China.”Footnote ⁹

Trump has also been frequently referred to as a Manchurian candidate, in the non-assassin sense of the term, since his first run for national office in June 2015. Two months later, a guest on Real Time with Bill Maher, novelist Salman Rushdie, aired his beliefs that the new candidate’s often baffling and clownish conduct, which troubled establishment conservatives at the time, could only be explained by what he called “The Manchurian Candidate theory.” Rushdie speculated that “there’s some secret deal between Trump, who’s secretly a Democrat, and the Democrats so that he can infiltrate the Republican party and destroy it from within.”Footnote ¹⁰ Buzzfeed’s publication of the notorious Steele dossier memos ten days before Trump’s inauguration in January 2017 would also precipitate conjecture that the real-estate developer from Queens was under the control of Vladmir Putin, who reputedly possessed compromising photographic evidence of Trump with prostitutes and records of underhanded activity by his company, the Trump Organization, to get a skyscraper built in Moscow.Footnote ¹¹

These suspicions were coupled with a spate of pronouncements made by the President to defund NATO and his holding a closed-door meeting in the Oval Office with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov in May 2017, during which classified information was shared. These events prompted the Financial Times’s Roula Khalaf to opine,

A two-year investigation during Trump’s first term by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, though, yielded nothing in terms of charges or indictments, and conjecture about an alignment between the Trump White House and the Kremlin ultimately receded.

Now that American voters have given Trump a second opportunity to return to Washington, should the world again worry that the term-limited lame-duck President will court Putin’s favor at the US’s potential expense? A new term certainly gives him a fresh chance to transform the White House into what Charles Blow fears could be a Kremlin annex.Footnote ¹³ But as the Mueller report established, Putin does not seem to actually have enough dirt on Trump to extort and control him. Years of stalemate with Ukraine have diminished the former KGB official’s stature on the world stage as Trump returns to it ascendant, in part due to his securing of the popular vote in the November 2024 national election and, perhaps, a lingering admiration for a guy who experienced two encounters with would-be assassins in the final months of his campaign. What could Trump, a man who lives for adulation, actually hope to gain in his second term by betraying a country where to such an extent he is valorized?

Yet there is no evidence currently that the friendship between the reelected US President and the former KBG officer since Trump left the White House in January 2021 has withered. The same cannot be said, apparently, for Trump’s mental acuity, however, which became a topic of concern on the 2024 campaign trail, with Trump delivering progressively stranger remarks from the podium at his rallies and succumbing to impulses to act oddly, turning one of these events into a dance party and swaying and smiling for forty minutes to pop songs like “Memory” and “Y.M.C.A.”Footnote ¹⁴ An outburst at a rally in Philadelphia in June 2024 likewise generated extensive worry in Trump watchers. The focus of his rant was a nonexistent problem with the American water supply:

So strange were these remarks and many others that Ben Michaelis, a clinical psychologist, told the Daily Beast, “There’s reasonable evidence suggestive of forms of dementia. The reduction in complexity of sentences and vocabulary does lead you to a certain picture of cognitive decline.”Footnote ¹⁶ This is all to say that Trump is as likely to be a Manchurian candidate for the Russians in 2025 as Oswald was in 1963.

“BLAM!” At the final moment in Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s musical Assassins (in both the 1990 off-Broadway and the 2004 Broadway productions) the historical characters fire their guns up into the air and the orchestra plays a stinger octave. What are the nine assassins, four of whom have successfully killed a US President during the show, aiming at? What are we to hear in that final sonic punctuation? What have we come to learn about assassinations, America, and ourselves by the end of this discomfiting and shocking show?

Sondheim and Weidman aimed to “challenge and subvert” the comforting belief that people who attempt political assassinations are aberrations in American society, deranged individuals who have nothing in common with the rest of us. In fact, the empty promise of the American Dream itself is identified as the inspiration for their violent acts and source for their intense feelings of frustration and entitlement.Footnote ¹ To the extent that audience members feel that they too have failed to achieve fame, success, and a sense of belonging in their own lives, the show leads them to empathize with these frightening figures who, though separated historically and by their idiosyncrasies, nevertheless emerge as a bonded group by the end.Footnote ²

Assassins repeatedly jolts us from complacency, starting with the shock of the Proprietor’s opening dissonant invitation to “C’mere and kill a President,” to John Wilkes Booth’s onstage suicide fourteen minutes into the show (following his 1865 assassination of Lincoln), to Charles Guiteau (who assassinated Garfield in 1881) breaking the fourth wall and slowly taking aim at the audience, to the show’s climactic arrival in Dallas at the Texas Book Depository in 1963 with Lee Harvey Oswald coerced by Booth and the other assassins to commit the assassination most keenly felt by the show’s creators and initial audiences. By presenting these historical assassins within the frame of a limbo-like carnival setting and employing what Sondheim referred to as “a dreamlike vaudeville” structure, the musical prompts us to review the motivations for their actions and to conclude that easy access to guns and their murderous resentment are peculiarly American.Footnote ³

It is never quite clear whom we are to trust in Assassins, who might be serving as our reliable narrator guiding us through this historical pageant. The Proprietor of the shooting gallery is clearly a tempter as he extends his invitation to the assassins and, rather like the emcee in Cabaret (1966), to us as well in the opening number “Everybody’s Got the Right (to Be Happy).” This upbeat song of clichéd optimism sounds forced, perhaps signaling cynicism as, for example, when the word “seems” is delayed by a rest and is tinged with a dissonant chord (including a tritone sonority) in the line “Life’s not as bad / As it seems.” Such details might subliminally suggest we should not fall for the empty promises of the American Dream.Footnote ⁴ In the original version of the show, the Proprietor, after the opening scene, relinquished his role as tempter to Booth, who is framed as the seductive “pioneer” of presidential assassinations. However, in the 2004 Broadway version and in the published score, the Proprietor reenters dramatically in scene xv to start the song “Another National Anthem.”Footnote ⁵

Pitted against the Proprietor and Booth is the Balladeer, a folksinger who initially appears to be our reliable narrator. However, Sondheim explained that the Balladeer delivers the optimistic “received wisdom of America” that the show aims to debunk.Footnote ⁶ Weidman has revealed that the Balladeer character was not even part of the show’s original concept but was added to serve as “the complacent ‘someone’ who would help tell the story.”Footnote ⁷ The Balladeer repeatedly mocks each assassin, either directly through his lyrics or at least through his musical style. At his entrance in the second scene, his melody includes blue notes, according him a folk authenticity, but then when he sings the line “doesn’t change the song” he slides down from a G-flat to F on the word “song,” thereby undercutting his own statement. He mocks Booth but then empathetically delivers his lines for him before returning to the critical mode, ending the ballad with “Damn you, Booth!” The Balladeer proves most unreliable in the crucial fifteenth scene when he attempts to quell the assassins and their moves against him with some cheerful major-mode optimism about America and with promises that neither we nor the assassins can any longer believe in. The assassins drive him off and, in a coup de théâtre commonly employed since the 2004 Broadway production, the Balladeer slightly changes his costume to assume the role of Oswald, as though to suggest that even this optimistic everyman could assume the role of an assassin. This double casting, as well as the fact that Oswald’s scene remains almost entirely spoken rather than sung, serves to emphasize that the Kennedy assassination is the show’s climax, toward which everything has led.

In his opening lines, the Balladeer encourages us to “Hear it in the songs” – “it” being the message that assassinations are empty violent gestures that accomplish nothing. In the confrontational scene xv in which the Proprietor and Assassins overcome the Balladeer, the Proprietor calls on us to listen to “Another National Anthem” – an ominous music of anger and frustration, the sound of an angry mob coming to threaten the establishment – and he declares, “They hear the music.” As we listen to Assassins, should we attend to the Balladeer and hear the message of his ballads relating the pointless failures of the angry men who each killed a President and achieved nothing? Or do we heed the Proprietor’s call to listen to the threatening anti-anthem music of protest and complaint that expresses the failure of the American Dream to deliver on its promises?

Sondheim’s music complicates our understanding of Assassins and can even be heard as working against the show’s stated aims. As in several of Sondheim’s other scores, most obviously in Follies (1971), Assassins presents an impressive pastiche of multiple styles of American music spanning over a century. Less commonly for Sondheim, this score also includes twisted quotations of preexistent American music. For example, “Hail to the Chief” appears in several scenes and the melody opens the show in the form of a calliope-style waltz, thereby undermining its accustomed patriotic gravitas.Footnote ⁸ Sondheim’s historically appropriate stylistic pastiche for each assassin – as well as each historically informed detail of their costumes, dialect, vocabulary, gun types, and methods of communication (from Booth’s dictated handwritten statement to Byck’s tape-recorded diatribes) – actually works to keep these characters at a safe distance from the audience, making it less likely that we will identify with these historically placed figures. In addition, each assassin is mocked to varying degrees through musical style. The Balladeer begins the “Ballad of Booth” with a Stephen Foster-style banjo tune in the “Oh! Susanna” minstrel vein, but then switches to a more sentimental Foster parlor song style to match Booth’s melodramatic death scene. Sondheim’s clever rhyming throughout this number (boy–destroy–joy–Illinois and jealous–tell us) seems also to poke fun at Booth. The Balladeer immediately undercuts Booth’s suicide by switching back to the banjo tune and, in the 2004 Broadway production, Booth then reluctantly rose to his feet, signaling that we have just observed a scene that the historical Booth, a stage actor, might have performed and thereby erasing any sympathy that his impassioned acting may have provoked in us.

Sondheim’s mocking musical pastiche returns throughout the show, undercutting each assassin in comic fashion. The “Ballad of Czolgosz” (Czolgosz assassinated McKinley in 1901) in scene viii is presented in hoedown style and the song is modeled on the form of cumulative folk songs such as “Rattlin Bog” that tend to climax in a patter-style delivery. Guiteau’s execution scene is played as a comedy by juxtaposing cakewalk music with the spiritual. Sondheim even claimed that the brief rests breaking up the opening of Hinckley’s love song “Unworthy of Your Love” mark him as an amateur songwriter.Footnote ⁹ Furthermore, at least in the context of a Sondheim score, the song’s resemblance to the music of the Carpenters or Marvin Hamlisch’s 1977 “Nobody Does It Better” is inherently comic. (Hinckley attempted to assassinate Reagan in 1981.) Even when an assassin is given serious music and lyrics, musical style tends to undermine them. This is most true in scene vii’s multi-sectioned “Gun Song,” which is led by Czolgosz in a style not far removed from Sweeney Todd’s bitter lament “Barber and His Wife.” The gravity is, however, repeatedly released by sections of barbershop-style singing and by Guiteau’s operetta waltz expressing love for his gun.

In the crucial, confrontational scene xv, pitting the assassins (and the Proprietor) against the Balladeer, Sondheim’s music again complicates our interpretive efforts. We hear prerecorded mournful “ah” dissonant vocal clusters as the assassins speak their justifications for assassination. Byck (who attempted to assassinate Nixon in 1974) relentlessly and aggressively asks, “Where’s my prize?” with a strong downbeat dissonance on “prize.” The Balladeer interrupts their complaints offering a rather dispassionate criticism of their efforts until it becomes clear to him that the assassins are unifying in a potentially riotous way. He then switches desperately to musical optimism with “I just heard / On the news / Where the mailman won the lottery,” repeating the promises of the American Dream. The repeated, propulsive short–short–long rhythm and ascending major-chord arpeggiation in his vocal melody derive directly from a song that Sondheim cut from the show, the “Flag Song.” This phantom song was to have appeared early in the show to represent the voice of the common people, the bystanders, who, despite cynical tendencies and self-doubt, inescapably feel pride and hope at the sight of the American flag. Thus this song would have presented early on in the show an honest and realistic perspective, likely true to our own experience. It is rather jarring to discover the Balladeer harnessing this music dishonestly here in an attempt to quell the assassins with false promises.Footnote ¹⁰

Throughout this scene the Balladeer, predominately in flat keys, musically contends with the Proprietor and the Assassins, who sing mainly in sharp keys. As noted above, the Balladeer loses. The music is overwhelmed by the Proprietor’s “Another National Anthem,” which seems to invert the opening melodic gesture of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and morphs into a dissonant, aggressive march “for those who never win,” complete with an angry stomp/kickline as in Cabaret’s “Wilkommen.” Music ends the scene with biting satire as Byck gets the last word, singing “Sure, the mailman won the lottery …” as he outlines a minor chord on the last three syllables, thereby bitterly exposing the Balladeer’s lie.

We may find music’s role in both telling and exposing lies in Assassins disturbing, but the darkest feature of the show lies in its structure. As Stephen Banfield concludes, the flexible revue-like format and sense of incompleteness of Assassins stand “as a warning and a reminder that history will probably afford new opportunities for its scope to be broadened, its episodes to be increased, its cast of characters to be extended.”Footnote ¹¹ Each new assassin in American history will eventually assume a fixed historical slot, representing a stylistic temporal moment, and the unsatisfiable desires and expectations provoked by the American dream will continue to fuel resentment and rage. The question remains: how will future productions aim to shape the audience’s perception of these violent historical figures? For the 1992 first London production, Sondheim and Weidman added a number to the show in order to give voice to average Americans and their emotional response to presidential assassinations. “Something Just Broke” might be viewed as placing the audience safely in the category of victims who are entirely separate from the assassins and who are not marked musically in this number by any stylistic period. The “Flag Song” had been cut to avoid this move and average American bystanders are treated satirically through musical pastiche in scene iv with “How I Saved Roosevelt,” in which Sondheim deftly quotes Sousa marches and pushes the bystanders toward patter style with virtuosic and conspicuous rhyming. “Something Just Broke” invites the audience to see and hear itself represented onstage in the state of shocked mourning.

Raymond Knapp has stated that “there has never been a more fiercely pro-American show on Broadway” than Assassins, and that its ending makes clear that these historic figures are “our enemies.”Footnote ¹² However, such a clear-cut conclusion is simply not typical in a Sondheim show. In the final reprise of “Everybody’s Got the Right” we are left alone with the assassins; the Proprietor and the Balladeer are gone, and no clear moral of the story has been stated. Booth starts the number and is eventually joined by the eight others. The show ends with the assassins once again delivering the American Dream lyrics of empty promise that, as we have been taught throughout the show, inspired their fruitless and violent acts. As they hold the final word – “dreams” – we hear a thrice-repeated vamp that bears a striking resemblance to the mechanical vamp heard at the bitter end of A Chorus Line (1975), another show about the individual’s struggle to be seen and failure to have sufficient attention paid. As the assassins fire their guns one last time – not at any political figure, or at us, or even at themselves – perhaps they are, at last, taking aim at their own hopeless dreams, sonically contradicting the lyrics they have just sung. As Sondheim insisted, the show should end on a “note of extreme sadness.”Footnote ¹³

On 13 July 2024, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was the target of an assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania carried out by Thomas Crooks, a twenty-year-old recent graduate who worked in a nearby nursing home. Crooks came within inches of killing Trump with one bullet grazing his right ear. Only a week after the shooting, the FBI director, Christopher Wray, testified to the House Judiciary Committee that investigations of Crooks’s personal computer had found that he had searched the Internet looking for information on the Kennedy assassination. Specifically, Crooks asked how far away the gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, was from President Kennedy when he began firing at the motorcade moving through Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas on 22 November 1963. Oswald was 260 feet away from Kennedy; Crooks positioned himself 430 feet from Trump on an adjacent warehouse roof.

The attempt on Trump’s life – as well as a later botched effort at Trump’s West Palm Beach golf club two months later – provided contemporary additions to an assassination culture that has permeated political life throughout America’s history. Arguably none is more indelibly etched in people’s minds than the slaying of John F. Kennedy on that bright Texas day more than sixty years ago. Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that Kennedy’s death should be so swiftly linked with Trump’s near-miss experience in Pennsylvania. The Trump shooting produced conspiracy theories about what happened, or was meant to happen, within hours. Many of those theories echoed the questions raised by Kennedy’s killing (why, how, and in whose name?) and the suspicions that arose from the events in November 1963 which have continued to the present day.

In the six decades that have passed, the literature on the assassination and on Kennedy more generally has been prodigious. On the fiftieth anniversary of the shooting, in 2013, the New York Times estimated that there had been more than 40,000 books published about JFK, with countless tomes dedicated to the shooting specifically.Footnote ¹ Two of those books formed the primary basis of the screenplay that Zackary Sklar and writer–director Oliver Stone put together for Stone’s most famous and provocative film of his career, JFK (1991).

On the Trail of the Assassins was New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison’s 1988 book about his efforts to indict businessman Clay Shaw, the only trial ever conducted on the assassination. By contrast Jim Marrs was an investigative reporter who had already written several conspiracy theory books. His Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy was published in 1989 (screenwriter Sklar, it should be noted, was Marrs’s editor) and became a huge success and a New York Times best seller. Both books drew attention to themselves because they were principally locked into an alleged evidentiary determination that Lee Harvey Oswald could not have killed and did not kill Kennedy from his position on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Therefore there had to be at least one more shooter in Dealey Plaza that day and, by implication, a greater conspiracy at work in the murder of John F. Kennedy.

The film was controversial even before it arrived in theatres, and not only because of its source material. Throughout 1991, as more information about JFK’s content surfaced in the press via a leaked early script – in an age before the Internet, we should remember – the subject matter and tone of Stone’s film were attacked in many areas of the media. The film was considered not as historical revelation but as an amalgamation of rumour, half-baked facts, and outright lies. Columnists Tom Wicker and George Will called it, respectively, “paranoid” and “execrable history.”Footnote ² Jack Valenti of the Motion Picture Association of America suggested that it was propaganda the like of which hadn’t been seen since Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1936).Footnote ³

Stone himself quite contentedly called the movie a “counter-myth” to the “official” story of the assassination detailed in the Warren report, the commission set up in the aftermath of the shooting and chaired by Surpreme Court chief justice Earl Warren. And in this conceit he had his defenders, notably Norman Mailer, who agreed that the film “should not be seen as history but as myth.”Footnote ⁴ The commission’s findings were published in September 1964, and they became the official repository of events that Stone was attempting to counter, and to which the long, climactic Clay Shaw trial scene in JFK provides much of the riposte. For Stone, though, as he told me, that prolonged scene wasn’t his primary concern within the picture. “For me the centre of the movie is not in the trial but the fore-stories, Oswald, Dealey Plaza, and X.”Footnote ⁵

Gary Oldman’s uncanny portrayal of Lee Harvey Oswald, and Dealey Plaza as a mystical site for the death of the American Dream, both reaffirm JFK’s magical thinking and Stone’s focus as quoted. His other insistence from the outset was the film’s title. JFK, without the accompanying points, was for him a codeword; a secretive, all-enveloping protocol working in much the same way as it did for Constantin Costa-Gavras’s assassination movie Z (1969). Together with Akira Kurosawa’s iconic Rashomon (1950), Stone deliberately leant into cinematic touchstones as a rationale and inspiration for exploring the Kennedy assassination as a pure piece of cinema.

That purity is no better displayed than in the bravura meeting scene on the Mall in Washington, DC between Kevin Costner playing Garrison and Donald Sutherland as the mysterious Colonel X. The discourse and interlocking imagery of the scene arrange the jigsaw pieces in place for the audience prior to the film’s climax in a way previous cinematic iterations of or allusions to the Kennedy shooting – The Greek Tycoon, The Parallax View and Executive Action, to name only a few – either never felt obliged to, or simply couldn’t, pull off in as dramatic a manner.

The film’s aesthetic ubiquity is epitomized by these seventeen minutes between Garrison and X, then, and even JFK’s harshest critics had to acknowledge the scene’s and the film’s visual bravado. Stone’s long-time cinematographer Bob Richardson won an Oscar for his work on the picture, but even so his contribution to this and Stone’s other major films has rarely received sufficient acclaim. When their working relationship broke up around the time of U Turn (1997), Stone admitted that it hit him hard. “His departure had a tremendous impact on me. I miss him.”Footnote ⁶ Richardson shot many thousands of feet of extra film – on 35, 16 and Super 8 mm – before it was edited down to create an overwhelming, disorienting effect. Transferring between colour, black-and-white, re-created scenes, stock footage and still photographs, Richardson’s approach never lets the visual dynamism slacken over more than three hours. It was that rapidity of image and distillation of history that made the movie arresting for some and outrageous for others. Was it exposing a complex conspiracy that had never been untangled to that point, or was it colluding with the conspiracists in presenting rumour and illusion as fact, asserting claims that had no basis in evidence? Even Stone and Sklar’s publication of a weighty six-hundred-page accompanying book of assassination material, interviews, essays and a shooting script did little to allay claims in some quarters that the film was cinematic wizardry but historical bunk. The debate section of the book has an opening essay by Frank Mankiewicz, who observed that it wasn’t the movie itself as much as the very idea of the movie that provided such contention and handwringing.Footnote ⁷

Richardson and Stone’s cinematic techniques and historical assemblage became commonplace on film and television subsequently. Stone’s later films, Natural Born Killers (1994) and Nixon (1995), honed the craft to visual perfection. Yet, as Frank Beaver remarked only a few years after the release of the picture, JFK’s aestheticism and assertions instigated even further debate about the nature of journalism and reportage in the modern age. The film was, suggested Beaver, the real birthplace of “infotainment.”Footnote ⁸ Coined at the time as “New News,” and promoted in publications like Rolling Stone, Stone’s film was prophetically charged with undermining the traditional journalistic methods in favour of that which was “dazzling, adolescent, irresponsible, frightening, and powerful.”Footnote ⁹ In other words, JFK conceivably anticipated an online social-media world that loosened the ties to facts while at the same time promoting the power of speculation and disinformation, especially in those with a platform to speak.

JFK has proven even more prophetic than this, however, more than many would have dared believe back in the last decade of the twentieth century. For all its flaws and failings, myths and misnomers, in lining up a series of misfit characters whom Stone charged as instrumental in the plot to kill Kennedy, Stone was, as Albert Auster describes, taking Jim Garrison on a voyage into the “dark side of American life.”Footnote ¹⁰ It was an underbelly Stone knew well. His own journey from frontline service in Vietnam to a place in the Hollywood firmament via sojourns in Mexico and dabbles with the financial high society of New York had equipped him to spot figures like Clay Shaw, David Ferrie and Willie O’Keefe, who populate the hinterland of JFK. The predictive quality of the film’s mismatched outliers was that their later equivalents would rear their heads in other guises, some of them becoming the shock troops of the emerging age of Trump. They were Steve Bannon, Roger Stone and, perhaps most incendiary of all, Elon Musk. Stone’s cast hid out of sight, but the latter ensemble have no qualms about being in the spotlight and even taking all the opprobrium that could be spat their way while using it as fuel for their cause. It’s a tactic that has become the modus operandi of Trump himself and is complemented by a second feature that JFK’s reputational effect caused.

Less than a year after the film’s release, Stone set in motion a tidal wave of classified and archival material that was released out into the world. Testifying before Congress, he helped to shape moves towards the passage of the Assassination Records Act (or J.F.K. Records Act) in 1992. In the later director’s cut of JFK, Stone included an end intertitle that drew attention to the film’s achievement in this regard. The Act set up a review board that recommended in its final report that all “assassination records” by the broadest definition be released into the public domain by no later than 26 October 2017, exactly twenty-five years after the passage of the bill. President Donald Trump did indeed abide by that date, though he allowed several agencies the right to appeal against release, and redacted sections of many documents that were still not uncovered and remain subject to further review under Trump’s order.

Trump and his supporters – one of whom later turned out to be Robert Kennedy Jr., JFK’s nephew, who joined Trump’s cabinet in his second administration – had often evoked the Kennedy shooting as a principal foundation of the “deep-state” nexus at work in the US. Indeed, Kennedy Jr. had long been of the opinion that there was more than one shooter in Dealey Plaza. Whether in response or not, three days into his second administration, on 23 January 2025, Trump set out to close the loop on the 2017 release by signing an executive order declaring that all remaining assassination files be made public. The irony of Trump presiding over potentially the final answers in the Kennedy case was that he was happy to indulge the conspiracy culture only when it suited his needs. He acquired a messianic status among his base in the aftermath of the Butler shooting precisely because he invoked “them” – the “deep state” – as having been involved. “I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things that they say about me,” Trump reasoned during his televised presidential debate with Kamala Harris in September 2024, reimagining the grazed right ear to be something akin to the fatal shot in Dealey Plaza.Footnote ¹¹ But ultimately he was less interested in the minutiae of what the events in Dallas unleashed and more in what conspiracy could do for him.

It would be all too easy to conclude that JFK’s alleged pop culture posturing and imposing visual pyrotechnics helped create the Trumpian world that we all find ourselves living in. But JFK gave deeper clues that really warned of the tectonic shifts happening in political culture and information news gathering that anticipated Trump’s rise. Stone’s nonconformist characters hinted at a “silent majority” already on the case and starting to use the assassination as a more potent far-right argument for reaction against a self-serving, out-of-touch liberal establishment that had duped the public for far too long. That became the Trump way: the weight of material concealed away was the conspiracy, not what it contained and told us about the event itself.

More than thirty years after its release, JFK’s critics have always had a point about the film’s deflections and evasions, its startling imagery making up for what its discursive rhetoric couldn’t convince of. But it’s a criticism of history that didn’t spot what the film might have been saying about the future. In the “New, New News” age, all events, all history, are up for grabs and afflicted by conspiracy from every angle imaginable. The events in Butler, Pennsylvania in July 2024 speak less of a nation mired in violence and intolerance and more of an opportunity for those who control the levers of information to mould the history they want to tell. It was startling how many Trump opponents as well as die-hard supporters thought that the assassination was staged for the benefit or to the detriment of Trump.Footnote ¹² JFK made conspiracy vital and resonant for a society in the late twentieth century that had begun to doubt what leaders and institutions might be doing in their name. Its continued relevance lies in a clique it foresaw that might use the tools of the contemporary media age for their own propagandistic ends.

During the 1990s, Wolfgang Petersen directed two films involving transitional periods in American politics. Through the prism of political violence specifically directed at the office of the US President, In the Line of Fire (1993) and Air Force One (1997) explored contested issues facing American visions of the past, present, and future, proximally impacted by the dissolution of the Soviet Union (26 December 1991) and the 1992 US presidential election. Both explored the violence of politics, with tensions ranging from aggressive rhetoric to assassination. Linked specifically to campaigning during an election cycle, In the Line of Fire contemplates the increased risk that attends a political candidate’s public appearances that prove difficult to control, culminating in an assassination attempt. At the time, the film resonated not only with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but also with the Vietnam War and shooting of Ronald Reagan. Today, two failed attempts on the life of Donald J. Trump provide additional context. Focussed on a Russian separatist plot to kidnap the US President, Air Force One investigates post-Cold War American foreign policy. The film resonates with, and even anticipates, how Russian concerns would once again occupy a place of prominence in American electoral politics. Today, Russia’s revanchist designs and the invasion of Ukraine provide additional context. Both films explore aspects of personal growth and heroism through the prism of political violence.

Unsurprisingly, much critical attention on Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012) has focussed on the question of historical accuracy. While questions of this sort are not unimportant, they have the tendency to draw attention away from the historical arguments a film advances. Part of what this film does, I suggest, is to move democracy and the legislative process – both the principles at work and the mechanisms by which they are achieved – into the spotlight, turning democracy itself into the film’s central drama (a word I use intentionally here). Focussed on a brief period of time, from early January until the fateful evening of 15 April 1865, the film centers neither on the drama of the Civil War – though there are two battlefield scenes – nor on the evening of Lincoln’s assassination, but rather on his effort to secure Congressional approval for the 13th Amendment, permanently abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude in the US, before the Confederate Army’s surrender. So, while the specter of Lincoln’s assassination hovers over the narrative, the important stage in the film is not that of the infamous Ford’s Theater, but rather the floor of the House of Representatives; the spectacle on which all eyes are riveted is not Lincoln’s assassination, but the political maneuvering and strategizing by Lincoln and Congressional Republicans. The film’s focus is on the power of words and ideas, like equality, to literally change the course of history.

Given its subject matter and the fact that the screenplay, by Tony Kushner, was based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s highly regarded monograph Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,Footnote ¹ it is not surprising that historians have taken a keen interest in the film, weighing in on what they understand to be its greatest historical strengths and weaknesses. In a piece in Cinéaste in 2012, “What Historians Think about Spielberg’s Lincoln,” Harold Bush compiled commentaries from “veteran historians,” and “found that much of the film rang true” for them.Footnote ² However, the most biting critique, voiced by several in the piece and in articles by historian Kate Masur and others,Footnote ³ is that the film radically underrepresents the active role of African Americans in fighting for their freedom and equality: in Allen Guelzo’s words, “Above all, Lincoln will be criticized for putting a white man on the pedestal as the sole agent of black freedom.”Footnote ⁴ Elsewhere, I have acknowledged this important critique, but I have stressed that the film nevertheless does depict “African American demands for equality and the stakes of those demands.”Footnote ⁵ I pick up on that point here, albeit obliquely, by focussing on how the film registers the lived stakes of politics. Here politics is never only abstract ideas and principles, but always appears in relation to, and with material and affective ramifications for, “the people.” The film foregrounds the work of politics, rendering it not as fixed, but as dynamic, changeable – unexpected outcomes are possible. And it calls attention to the material ramifications of politics: the guaranteed freedom of African Americans in perpetuity, but also the assassination of Abraham Lincoln as punishment for pushing for the passage of the amendment.

As I’ve suggested above, the main drama of the film, first signaled a mere thirteen minutes into a film that runs nearly two and a half hours, is the race against time to pass the 13th Amendment before the Civil War ends, when peace would presumably remove the urgency of its passage. A seemingly impossible task, Secretary of State William Seward (David Strathairn) says dubiously to Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis) in this first conversation, “Even if every Republican votes for it we’d still be twenty votes short.” To this, Lincoln replies, “We can find twenty votes,” and, indeed, what unfolds is a dramatization of the work of political argumentation and deal making. We see history as a story of people grappling with morality, power, and their own economic standing; some have strong beliefs and convictions; some have public and others private reasons for taking a stand in favor of the amendment; we see people change their minds for noble and ignoble reasons. And when I say we “see,” I mean that Spielberg has chosen to set much of the film’s drama in the House of Representatives, as if the house floor is a stage, encircled as it is by a balcony for the audience – both the film’s spectators and those characters who observe the proceedings from above. The filmic audience observes both the debating Congressmen and the balcony audience – many of whom will be deeply affected by the outcome. While it is most certainly the case that African Americans were active agents in their fight for freedom and equality, the film reminds us that there would not be a constitutional amendment outlawing slavery without the democratic process from which they were excluded. Indeed, Lincoln expresses in words why it is imperative that the 13th Amendment be passed:

The film’s argument – one with which many historians would agree – is that a constitutionally guaranteed freedom required political action in Congress.

Part of what I am suggesting here is that the film stages and spatializes the distinction between those with the power to legislate on the floor and those without. Yet in this case, it is precisely those who are not empowered to legislate – women and African Americans personified in the film by Mary Todd Lincoln (Sally Field) and African American housekeeper (and former slave), Elizabeth Keckley (Gloria Reuben) – for whom the stakes of these debates about equality could not be higher. There are four scenes in the House of Representatives, including the film’s climax, in which the 13th Amendment is brought to the floor for a vote, and in each there is a relay of looks between floor and balcony; most often we, the film’s spectators, observe what transpires on the House floor from the balcony. But we observe as well those others in the balcony as they respond to what is being debated below. In all four scenes, Mary Todd and Elizabeth Keckley register an affective, embodied response to what is being said, making visible the material and lived implications of what might otherwise seem like mere politicking.

This dynamic of the House floor as stage, and the balcony as audience, is established early on: in the first mooting of the vote for the amendment, Representative Fernando Wood (Lee Pace), from New York, accuses Lincoln of ruling like a tyrant, declaring, “we shall oppose this amendment and any legislation that so affronts natural law insulting to God as to man. Congress must never declare equal those whom God created unequal!” A cut to Todd and Keckley both reminds us of the stakes of these debates for the people considered unequal and reveals their dismay at being understood as such. Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) interjects, “Slavery is the only insult to natural law … You Pendleton, you insult God.”

Indeed, at issue in these debates is a tension between a commitment to abstract principles and the practice or pragmatics of politics. In an important scene, Lincoln discusses the principle of equality with two young telegraph operators. He asks them if they know Euclid, and proceeds to explain,

In this way, Lincoln tries to make the notion of equality a mathematical truth, scientific, incontrovertible. If it is a mathematical principle, the context should not matter. Pro-slavery Democrats like Wood and Pendleton (Peter McRobbie) oppose this kind of reasoning, because they resist the claim of equality between the races. In the second important scene on the floor of the House, these Democrats focus directly on the question of race. Indeed, the plan is to bait antislavery Republican Stevens into saying that the races are equal. They ask Stevens pointedly if all men are created equal. He pauses. Keckley and Todd look on anxiously from the balcony. He begins, “The true purpose of the amendment [he looks up at the audience in the balcony] – I don’t hold with equality in all things, only with equality before the law. Nothing more.” As Stevens tries to avoid the issue for pragmatic reasons, the Democrats challenge him, trying to provoke him into saying what they know he believes – that African Americans are equal to white men – but he refuses to take the bait, insisting, “This amendment’s not to do with race equality.” A cut to the balcony reveals how Stevens’s performance is landing. Todd is impressed, uttering, “Who’d have ever guessed that old nightmare capable of such control? He might make a politician someday.” Keckley, by contrast, stands and leaves. Stevens’s performance, his political pragmatism, is too much for her to bear. This impoverished account of equality, which we know doesn’t accord with what he actually believes, is nevertheless a denial of her humanity.

The dramatic climax of the film is not the assassination, but the vote on 31 January 1851. The stage is set, and the scene begins with an empty chamber. Representative Stevens is the first one in. There is a cut to the balcony, and we see the audience file in, a somber crowd of African Americans. There is a cut to the lawmakers, who have now filled the house, their gazes directed upwards to the balcony. Representative Wood addresses the audience: “We welcome you ladies and gentlemen, first in the history of this people’s chamber, to your house.” Symphonic, nondiegetic music heightens the emotions and the drama of the moment. There is applause and a cut to Todd and Keckley. Even though we know how this vote will go, Spielberg carefully maintains the dramatic tension throughout the roll call. Mary Todd is keeping a tally. As the speaker calls each name, and a vote is given, each aye receives a raucous cheer. Astonishingly, this scene runs for over fifteen minutes, and viewers, both the film’s spectators and those in the balcony, are riveted. When the amendment receives enough votes to pass, there is yet another cut to the amazed and triumphant Todd and Keckley in the balcony, joining others in a standing ovation – papers flying through the air. We see the impact of this political work in the response it elicits in the balcony.

When Lincoln’s assassination does happen, it comes as something of an anti-climax, the real drama having already unfolded. The scene is afforded a mere one minute, and we neither see nor hear Lincoln or Booth. In this way, the film insists that the great drama is not this spectacle, but the one that just happened, the passage of the 13th Amendment. Nevertheless, in a sense the assassination scene mirrors the stage–balcony dynamic established earlier on. As in those scenes, we assess the impact of what has transpired by its effect on observers, in this instance Lincoln’s small son, Tad (Gulliver McGrath). Here, too, we see the effect of the drama on the people who will be most affected by it. When the stage curtains are swept shut, someone declares, “The president has been shot! The president has been shot at Ford’s Theater!” The camera finds Tad in the balcony, his face contorts, and a silent wail breaks out; adults nearby put their arms around him to restrain him. And yet, the effect here is to make the drama of the assassination a private, familial one, in stark contrast to the very public, national drama of the debates over the 13th Amendment. Unlike the audience for the central drama – Mary Todd and Elizabeth Keckley – who represent all of those whose equality is at stake, the audience here is merely a boy who has lost his father. In this way, Spielberg decenters Lincoln’s assassination, turning the messy but necessary workings of the nation’s democratic process into the real drama of the film.

Commentators were quick to draw comparisons between Evan Vucci's photograph of an injured Donald J. Trump in front of an American flag after an attempt on his life at a rally on 13 July 2024, and the strong-man iconography of fascist dictators such as Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler.Footnote ¹ Almost as fast as Trump himself, who, moments after being clipped on the ear by a bullet, saw fit to seize the assassination attempt as a photo opportunity to burnish his reputation as a beleaguered yet indomitable political force and bolster his campaign for a second presidency. The events that unfolded in Butler, Pennsylvania saw one spectator killed and two others injured. Such was the power of the image, Trump’s acumen for publicity, and, it might also be noted, ample media coverage of the ailing health of his then challenger, Joe Biden, that the seventy-eight-year-old Trump’s red-blooded masculinity even – or perhaps especially – when wounded, commanded the global stage.

This essay considers moments in US history when US Presidents were compared to fascist dictators, focussing on the late 1960s, the 1970s, and the present. Using posters, placards and artwork primarily from activist spaces, it seeks to unpack the visual grammar of such comparisons to better understand what might be specific to the proto-fascist visuality of Trump.

Evan Vucci’s images for the American Associated Press went viral. As commentators observed, this was not only because of the political significance of the events they captured, but their composition and visual coherence. Against a vivid and uniformly blue sky, a sunlit Trump assumes centre position, his right arm raised in a fist, and his mouth shouting “Fight!” He is flanked by suited bodyguards who are hurriedly ushering him off the stage. The streaks of blood across the right side of his face resonate with the red stripes of the US flag which flies behind him.

The mainstream press picked up on the photograph’s formal similarities with Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830), the famed depiction of the July Revolution in France, or Joe Rosenthal’s iconic photo of US Marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima in 1945; all three are images which share triangular shapes in the centre and in which patriotism is focalized through a flag. Moreover, they are images which sear the demonstration of an invincible strength of body and mind in the face of adversity in the popular consciousness.Footnote ²

Yet, formal similarities notwithstanding, the photograph of Trump in the seconds immediately after the assassination attempt does not carry quite the same symbolism as these comparator images of taking arms against a monarch or axis of powers in the name of “liberty.” Rather, it depicts a particular form of appeal for a particular kind of power from a particular political leader with decidedly fascistic tendencies. “Fascist movements are secular religions. Like all religions, they offer martyrs as their proof of truth,” wrote David Frumm in The Atlantic the day after the shooting, noting that the photograph of Trump eclipsed the monuments to the dead erected in totalitarian Europe, for in this instance “[t]he leader himself will be the martyr in chief, his own blood the basis for his bid for power and vengeance.”Footnote ³ Hitler survived scores of assassination attempts, Mussolini lived through four attempts on his life, and Trump was fired at again on 15 September 2024; all made political currency of their temporary vulnerability as the price they had to pay for the apparent necessity of their political programme and their fitness to deliver it. “I was saved by God,” Trump proclaimed in his inauguration address on 20 January 2025, “to make America great again.”

“Ours is the age of the strongman,” writes political historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “of heads of state like Berlusconi and Putin who damage or destroy democracy and use masculinity as a tool of political legitimacy.”Footnote ⁴ In Ben-Ghiat’s analysis, the current cast of global strongmen exploit the exigencies of globalization through their authoritarian populism, grounded in recourse to the visual and verbal iconography of past (fascist) dictators. Parading virility and desirability is their stock-in-trade. According to Federico Finchelstein, Trump and other “wannabe fascists” offer a partially realized, “aspirational” version of fascism that prioritizes personal gain without necessarily subscribing to fascist ideology tout court, even as their ethnonationalism, leadership cults, violence and propaganda echo those of Mussolini or Hitler.Footnote ⁵

Addressing the specificity of the post-Second World War context in the US, commentator Jackson Katz argues that presidential elections function as a site of struggle over definitions of masculinity that intersect with constructions of class and race: “voters are literally participating in a kind of referendum on the meaning of American manhood.”Footnote ⁶ Presidential masculinity, or lack thereof, is conveyed through comportment, character and politics, in performances that have become increasingly media-driven. The reelection of Richard Nixon in 1972 is often cited as catalytic in postwar attempts to shore up conservative iterations of masculinity among the electorate and mobilize them as part of the presidential ticket. Nixon sought to entice formerly Democrat-voting, white working-class Americans to his candidacy less through promises of economic advancement than by restoring a shared set of normative cultural values. Drawing on the rhetoric of “Law and Order,” Nixon positioned himself as a strong, uncompromising leader, primed to avenge the threats to the American body politic posed by Lyndon B. Johnson’s Civil Rights Acts (1964, 1968), and the war in Vietnam and its opposition, which had imperilled (white) American masculinity and made the so-called “silent majority” less secure.

The presidency of Hollywood star and veteran of the New Right Ronald Reagan in 1981 galvanized the vote-winning appeal of virile, boiler-plate masculinity, encapsulated in the figure of the cowboy: tough, fearless, unyielding. Reagan vanquished the “emasculated” Democratic Party under Jimmy Carter’s leadership, presenting himself as a hard-line Cold Warrior, ready to face off against Soviet Russia. Feminist historians of the 1980s such as Susan Jeffords and Linda Boose note the acceleration of cultural aspirations towards “techno-muscularity” manifest in Hollywood icons such as Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The technologically enhanced impervious male body garnered currency as a riposte to the “soft-bodied” politics pursued by Carter, whose presidency oversaw the cultural and political reckoning with the US’s military loss in Vietnam and the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979, when sixty-six Americans were taken hostage at the US Embassy in Tehran.Footnote ⁷ Racial resentment and antifeminism were mobilized within this cultural imaginary to cauterize the damage to US patriotism caused by the social and political upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s from which a replenished version of white American masculinity might emerge.

With the affordances of media spectacle at his disposal, Trump’s indomitable strongman persona reaches greater audiences than Reagan, whose presidency coincided with Trump establishing his celebrity status and brand. Both were veterans of the entertainment industry and inveterate straight-talking tough guys. As Douglas Kellner observes, Trump exploits the news cycles and social media in particular that circulate his intemperate railings against elites, international law, immigrants, and DEI initiatives.Footnote ⁸ Trump’s use of X offers audiences an “unmediated” glimpse of the presidential mind, uncensored by propriety and convention.Footnote ⁹ Trump’s precursors, according to Kellner, are as much former US Presidents as they are European despots, such as Hitler, who, like Trump, manipulated the means of communication to mobilize a base of supporters that works outside, and partly against, traditional party politics.

In the days following the shooting in Butler, critics of Trump exaggerated the similarities of Vucci’s image to Nazi propaganda by manipulating historic photographs of Hitler to make them look as though they were templates for the mise en scène of Vucci’s image, implying that Trump had staged his assassination attempt in the direct style of the Third Reich. These were swiftly debunked online but they attested to the manifest compatibility between Trump’s post-assassination comportment and (European) fascism’s cult of personality and its drive for omnipotence.Footnote ¹⁰

Comparisons to Hitler intensified in the final months of Trump’s campaign to become the forty-seventh President of the United States, many of them largely scripted by him: two weeks before election day, Trump was widely reported to have said, “Adolf Hitler did some good things” to John Kelly, a chief of staff in the White House, and, “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had … People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.”Footnote ¹¹ Such comparisons were given greater visibility and legitimacy when his Democrat opponent for the Presidency, Kamala Harris, responded that Trump would be “a president who admires dictators and is a fascist.”Footnote ¹²

Debates about the extent to which Trump might accurately or sensibly be compared to fascism did not, of course, begin with his strongman posturing captured in Vucci’s image, or even after rumours from former chiefs of staff were made public. Such examples only intensified – in conviction and urgency – concerns that had stalked his political career.Footnote ¹³

His first tenure in office prompted a flurry of popular and scholarly comparisons to fascism, seeking to contextualize his unapologetic recourse to right-wing populism within longer histories of fascism’s incarnations and celebrations in the US. Sarah Churchwell’s Behold America: A History of America First and the American Dream is paradigmatic of approaches that undermine exceptionalist readings of the first Trump presidency and challenge this generation’s ostensible surprise at an incipient fascism in US political discourse.Footnote ¹⁴ She traces the genealogy of Trump’s electioneering slogan “America First,” which was printed, uttered and shouted by figures ranging from Nazi-sympathizer and press tycoon William Randolph Hearst, to Charles Lindbergh, to the Ku Klux Klan, for whom it variously acted as fig leaves or place markers for isolationism, small government, racism, nativism, patriotism, and protectionism.

Other publications since 2017 emphasize continuities with fascism in the US across a longer sweep of time, focalized less through slogans, administrations and individuals, than through settler colonialism and racial slavery. In such accounts, fascism is not so much an external threat as a constitutive presence within the histories and geographies of the US. Fascism has been a feature and not a bug, the ointment rather than the fly, to the extent that some scholars contend that a need for a fascist ruling party in the US has been obviated by centuries of state and judicial support for an “us-and-them” mentality, and its attendant racial, ethnic and religious hierarchies, which Jason Stanley suggests are the common denominators of fascism.Footnote ¹⁵

Indeed, Matthew C. MacWilliams’s On Fascism: 12 Lessons from American History traces points of compatibility between the US democratic state and fascistic tendencies in a series of pivotal court cases that reveal, he argues, “when authoritarian fascism and its concomitant pathologies were ascendent – instances when too many Americans either obeyed or looked the other way.”Footnote ¹⁶ Devin Zane Shaw’s analysis in The Philosophy of Antifascism: Punching Nazis and Fighting White Supremacy of the violent dispossession of indigenous populations, enacted and often defended by vigilante, paramilitary action on the frontier, concludes that “white supremacy is codified into law in settler-colonial societies” and that “fascism … is premised on the re-entrenchment of the settler-colonial project itself.”Footnote ¹⁷

The U.S. Antifascism Reader, edited by Bill V. Mullen and Christopher Vials, mines a rich seam of primary material from the US that attests to both the “ghosts of its own fascist and fascist-like traditions, as well as an unrecognized culture of antifascist resistance.”Footnote ¹⁸ Like Shaw and MacWilliams, they argue that the history of white supremacy in the US, as well as the entrenched two-party system and relative weakness of the organized left, is such that fascism has “not required the instigation of a fascist dictator” for its codification and enactment.Footnote ¹⁹ While their observation that the conditions of possibility for (proto-)fascism in the US dispense with the need for a dictator is echoed across this ever-expanding body of scholarship, nonetheless the dictator figure is a common visual and verbal reference point through which transnational fascist formations might be analysed and compared.

Cultures of antifascist resistance might describe some of the opposition to the first Trump presidency, in which comparisons to Hitler or fascism became a mainstay, as seen in the photograph in Figure 1, taken from a demonstration in London to coincide with his visit to the UK in July 2018. The placard depicts a composite figure; Hitler comprising the left-hand side, complete with moustache and swastika, and Trump on the right, identifiable by his orange hue, red tie and ill-fitting suit. The features of each half-face align, as though there were an interchangeability or mirror symmetry between the two political leaders. The slogan – “Stop HIStory from repeating” – isolates an indivisible and transhistorical patriarchal core to fascism; the red text picks out the red in the swastika arm band and red tie, as though the latter is merely the latest professional garb for the contemporary fascist dictator.

Figure 1.

Protester holding Anti Donald Trump poster sign at the Women s March - London, UK. London, UK. 13th July 2018. Protester holding up campaign posters and placards, at the #BringTheNoise Women s March Anti Donald Trump protest demonstration through the streets of central London, UK.

Figure 1 Long description

A crowd of people is gathered in a protest. One person holds a sign with a blurred image and the text 'STOP HIS tory FROM REPEATING'. The sign includes a drawing of a person in a suit with a Nazi symbol on the lapel. Other signs are visible in the background, including one with the text 'No Trump' and another partially visible with 'Where there is no...'. The setting appears to be an urban area with buildings and traffic lights.

My current research project explores the visual languages of antifascist resistance germane to the 1960s and early 1970s, a context in which artists and radicals were regularly drawn to fascism to identify, structure, or articulate their intersectional and multidirectional opposition to (the Germanized noun) “Amerika.” References to fascism, Nazism and Hitler abound in countercultural, New Left, Black Power, Yippie and second-wave feminist cultures. As Vials and Mullen suggest, “in the late 1960s, antifascism became central to US left-wing politics for the second time in the twentieth century,” attributing this resurgence of 1930s Popular Front organizing and iconography to the widespread social and political protest that rocked the Cold War consensus that communism was the greatest threat to the US body politic.Footnote ²⁰ Vials and Mullen’s approaches, along with recent publications by Jeanelle K. Hope, Anna Duensing and Alberto Toscano, among others, argue that this second peak of antifascist thought and activism is in no small part a reanimation of the longer tradition of Black and people of colour’s focus on fascism’s ethnonationalism, as well as its imbrication in racial capitalism.Footnote ²¹ Founder of the Black Panther Party Bobby Seale put it more pithily: “racism plus capitalism breeds fascism.”Footnote ²² Within this intellectual tradition, fascism in the US precedes its European counterparts, perhaps by centuries.Footnote ²³

As an example of the saliency of antifascist iconography and its reflection on the complex temporalities of transnational fascism in this context, take the cover image of the weekly countercultural publication the Berkeley Barb (Figure 2). Edited by UC Berkeley alumnus Max Sherr, it published its first issue in August 1965 and by 1969 it was selling an estimated 100,000 copies a week.Footnote ²⁴ It ran for fifteen years, ending in 1980. By the end of the 1960s, references to fascism, Hitler or the Nazis were rarely off the front cover and were given ample column inches inside. This cover marks – and indeed mourns – Nixon’s defeat of George McGovern in the 1972 election and his second term in the White House, which he won on a law-and-order ticket by an even bigger majority than in 1968. From an article inside this 1972 issue of the Barb, the comparison was explained in terms of Nixon’s continuation of the war in Vietnam: “‘Of course,’ you say, ‘Nixon isn’t Hitler.’ Well, tell that to the peoples and children of Southeast Asia. Four more years and a lot more tears – the American people have spoken: ‘Gott Bless Amerika!’”Footnote ²⁵

Figure 2.

Cover, Berkeley Barb, Vol. 15, No. 19, (November 10–16, 1972), Berkeley Barb courtesy of Raquel Scherr. All Rights Reserved.

Figure 2 Long description

The front page of the Berkeley Barb newspaper features a bold headline 'Guess Who Won?' prominently displayed on the left side. The masthead is at the top, with the newspaper's name 'Berkeley Barb' in stylized font. Below the headline is a large, central photo showing two people standing, with their faces obscured. The photo dominates the page and the individuals are dressed in formal attire. The issue date and price are partially visible but not fully readable. The layout suggests a provocative or tabloid-style presentation, focusing on the visual impact of the headline and photo.

The Berkeley Barb cover features a black-and-white photographic collage; in the foreground appears a photograph of Hitler, and positioned on his left shoulder is a smaller photograph of Nixon. “Guess Who Won?” asks the caption, implying it might be difficult to determine which political figure was about to take up residence in the White House. As the accompanying article inside the publication noted, the answer may well depend upon who is asked.

The visual grammar of the comparison differs from Figure 1. There is an asymmetry to the composition insofar as a smaller image of Nixon is placed behind a larger image of Hitler. How to interpret this as an encoding of the sequence and priority of European and American fascisms? Does Nixon (or the US) represent some form of global fascist unconscious for which “Hitler” was only a proxy, or has Hitler snuck into the foreground of the image as the surprise victor behind his decoy, Nixon?

The alignment of the US President-elect with fascist dictators is not, as in the case of Vucci’s photograph, sponsored by their courting of strongman iconography; instead, two photographs were selected that ridicule their respective masculinities. The image of Hitler was taken by Heinrich Hoffman in his Munich studio around 1926. Hitler later came to loathe and sought to suppress his contrived depiction in Bavarian costume. Protruding from beneath a pair of lederhosen, Hitler’s knobbly knees are emphasized by the studio lighting, and, likewise, the glare of the lights on Nixon’s forehead and position of the camera mean that his receding hair line is impossible to ignore, and deep shadows pick out his unattractively pursed lips. For all the recalculation of gender identities among the countercultural left during the late 1960s and early 1970s, here Hitler and Nixon are scorned for not being masculine enough.

The following year, the Black Panther reproduced on the back page a photographic collage by the Black Panther’s minister for culture, Emory Douglas, which featured the same, faintly ridiculous, photograph of Nixon to draw another comparison with Hitler, this time in military uniform rather than lederhosen (Figure 3). In Douglas’s composition, Nixon rather than Hitler appears in the foreground, with a large red swastika on his forehead, as though it were a target. It was published in June, partway through the live broadcasts of the Senate hearings into the Watergate scandal which ran from May to August in 1973. The issue of the Black Panther dedicated several pages to alternative citizen investigations into Nixon’s wiretapping of the Democrat Party’s headquarters during the 1972 election, although other features of Nixon’s presidencies were historically more likely to prompt charges of fascism. As Roger Johnson wrote in the Black Panther in July 1969, “Fascism depends upon its storm troopers to crush all opposition or dissent. This is why this decadent fascist American government under the reins of trick Dick Nixon has escalated its harassment and destruction of all Black Panther Party officers and other political organizations.”Footnote ²⁶ The alignment of Nixon and Hitler in Douglas’s poster is focalized through the words “CLASS BROTHERS,” an allusion to the Black Panthers’ revival of Georgi Dimitrov’s formulation of fascism as a front for finance capital, an interpretation that had generally lost favour in US antifascist discourse of the 1930s.Footnote ²⁷

Figure 3.

Back page of The Black Panther, Vol. X, No. 3 (Saturday June 2, 1973), © 2025 Emory Douglas / Licensed by AFNYLAW.com.

The image of Nixon in Douglas’s version is cropped closer than the cover of the Berkeley Barb, as though identifying his fascistic tendencies that might be invisible on the surface requires a more psychological focus, or imaging technologies germane to photomontage or X-ray. The question of the legibility of (proto-)fascist politics and presidencies is contingent upon who is asked, but Trump’s conspicuous claim to a strongman persona in the blink of an eye on the stage in Butler indicates the normalization of authoritarian populism within the contemporary scopic regime.

“Of course,” you say, “US Presidents aren’t Hitler.” Even as the examples considered here might be said to partake in a certain bathetic mode, they nonetheless indicate historic and contemporary fears it that it has not, in fact, been liberty leading the US people all along but, at times, fascism. The visual analogies drawn between US Presidents and European dictators are variously underpinned by ethnonationalism, finance capitalism, imperialism, and, specific to Trump, strongman posturing; collectively, they caution us not to throw the referent of fascism away with the rhetorical bathwater.