The title of Matt Frei’s latest documentary is Trump: Should We Be Scared? You probably know the short answer. This is the longer one. Frei, a journalist and presenter for Channel 4 and its former Washington correspondent, roams through Miami, Florida and Washington DC talking mostly to the Donald’s fans in the former and to people still blinking in shock at their exposure to him during his presidency in the latter.
The fans include rightwing Christians prepared to overlook the multiple marriages, being found liable for sexual abuse and assorted other events not in keeping with biblical recommendations because, as Frank López, a pastor, businessman and founder of the evangelical Iglesia Doral Jesus Worship Center in the Sunshine State, says: “He has a vision of America I like.” “I feel God is with him,” says another fervent Christian. “He fears the Lord.” A video made by some of the 45th president’s supporters assures viewers: “God made Trump.”
Presumably what they mean is that he serves their vision of a country without reproductive rights for women. Following his first term, Roe v Wade was overturned by a US supreme court to which he had appointed three justices, ending the constitutional right to terminate unwanted pregnancies and allowing states to enact laws that made the procedure almost impossible to access. A second term would pave the way for a national abortion ban. López hopes all federal funding will be blocked. “They call it ‘healthcare’,” says López. “But there is no sickness in pregnancy.”
The Latin American community he speaks to, which includes 36 million voters across the US, approve of Trump’s hardline approach to immigration. The host of a popular Hispanic radio show in Miami explains to Frei that many members come from countries ruined by dictators and they don’t want to see the same thing happen in the US and – although it’s not quite made clear how – they evidently consider that a Democrat win would increase the chances. Callers to the show cite their own contributions to society after coming here legally and are not welcoming to people who arrive illegally and whom they think will deplete the resources of their new home.
Yareliz Méndez-Zamora, who works for the Florida Immigrant Coalition supporting recent arrivals to the US, says this is the result of Trump’s highly effective fear-based narratives (“‘Sending their worst …’, ‘Poisoning the blood of this country’,” she quotes. “There’s a lot of white nationalism”). Méndez-Zamora fears that a second term would see the beginnings of mass deportation, raids and further, deeper division between races and communities being sown by the president and his government.
Over in Washington, Fiona Hill, an adviser on Russia to George W Bush, Barack Obama and Trump, calls Trump a canny politician who knows how to tap into people’s grievances and appeal to their worst instincts “instead of their better angels”, who “presided over an insurrection”, polarised the political system and is “an incredibly flawed candidate”. She believes a second pro-Putin term would be a disaster for Ukraine in particular and western security generally, in terms of an increased nuclear threat and the encouragement of Putin’s disregard for European borders.
What else, what else? Perhaps the fact that Trump has already made all election results questionable and answerable with violence? Or that this time around his entourage seems to have a slight clue what they are doing and Trump’s populist instinct married to some(one else’s) tactical and strategic intelligence would make him even more dangerously effective? Or that his former national security adviser John Bolton says he was there when the president came within “a hair’s breadth” of withdrawing from Nato in 2018 and is doubtless champing at the bit to finish the job? Or the fact that Trump is a vehement climate crisis denier? Or that he would go into a second term protected by the ruling his conservative-stuffed supreme court handed down during the first, that the president of the United States has immunity from criminal prosecution?
In covering so much ground, Frei sacrifices the ability to dig deeper into any of it. You long for him to push back on the radio host’s dictator comment. How does Trump not look like one? How does Joe Biden – or Kamala Harris – look like the greater threat? The programme also feels slightly out of date, as the Harris/Walz team continues, on the face of it at least, to gain momentum. And it would be good to have been given a better sense of which of Trump’s second term actions are possible, probable and merely technically feasible, plus a more detailed take on how likely a second term is.
But as a reminder that the US is essentially 50 different countries masquerading as one – like children in an adult trenchcoat and about as unstable – that could easily prefer to be led by a man just as unpredictable, it works almost too well. I find myself Googling “apocalypse-proof bunkers” after it ends. Most of the good ones are in the US. I don’t know where we go next.
• Trump: Should We Be Scared? is on Channel 4 now
• This article was amended on 10 September 2024. Roe v Wade was overturned following Trump’s first term, not during it as an earlier version said.
