First as farce, then as tragedy — mirrors of Trumpism in
The Oath and Civil War
In The Philosophy of History (1837), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel proposes that watershed political episodes only solidify themselves in people’s minds as world-historical events once they have been repeated.
“By repetition, that which at first appeared merely a matter of chance and contingency becomes a real and ratified existence” (332).
He offers this theory to explain Caesarism, which rose during the latter years of the Roman Republic only to fall and then rise again. Had Caesarism not been revived, it may have appeared as a historical fluke. By returning after its defeat, this populist-autocratic ideology, which brought about the Roman Republic’s collapse and the Empire’s establishment, proved itself to be a “Necessity” of human history (Hegel 330, italics in original).
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| The Oath depicts the miniature civil war that erupts over a Thanksgiving holiday when members of an extended family discuss the controversial new pledge of allegiance the president has asked citizens to make. | Civil War imagines the full-blown rebellion that breaks out when a third-term president refuses to relinquish power. |
Donald Trump’s re-election in 2024 provides a fine twenty-first-century example of this phenomenon. During his first term in office (2017–21), President Trump openly demonized immigrants, disparaged people of color, vilified liberals, attacked women’s and LGBTQ+ rights, dismantled environmental protections, deregulated the economy, and passed a massive tax cut for the rich while presenting himself as the working man’s champion. Joe Biden’s electoral victory in 2020 seemed to signal a return to more centrist politics after this lunge to the far right. Had Biden’s Vice-President, Kamala Harris, won the 2024 election, Trump’s four-year reign of extreme-right populism would have looked like an aberration. The 2024 election gave the lie to this comforting narrative, confirming a posteriori that the counter-revolution Trump inaugurated in 2017 was a major historical event.
Karl Marx famously alludes to this theory of historical repetition in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852):
“Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history appear, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce” (Marx 15).
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| Reversing the order of events outlined by Marx, Trump’s second coming promises to be a cataclysmic re-enactment of his shambolic first term (left: Trump’s 2017 official portrait, Shealah Craighead/White House via Associated Press; right: Trump’s 2025 official portrait, Daniel Torok/public domain). | Elon Musk, who spent nearly $300 million to get Trump re-elected, salutes the crowd at a rally celebrating Trump’s second inauguration (Eric Lee/New York Times). |
Trumpism, however, reverses the events’ order. Based on the 47th President’s first few months in office, the second coming of Trump promises to be a cataclysmic re-enactment of the shambolic first term. Emboldened by winning the popular vote as well as the electoral college, with Republican majorities in both the House and the Senate, a conservative supermajority in the Supreme Court, and Project 2025’s blueprint for a self-coup in his back pocket, Trump is set to reprise the role of right-wing dictator.
Two recent films brilliantly refract these stages in the Trumpian counter-revolution. Fittingly, one is a farce while the other is a tragedy. The Oath (2018), a dark comedy written and directed by Ike Barinholtz, depicts the infighting that erupts over a Thanksgiving holiday when members of an extended family discuss the controversial new pledge of allegiance the President has asked citizens to make. Civil War (2024), by contrast, a dystopian thriller written and directed by Alex Garland, imagines the full-blown rebellion that breaks out when a third-term President refuses to relinquish power. Together, these two films form a fascinating diptych on the Trump era.
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| The Oath opens with a televised address from the White House. | Like in The Oath, Civil War’s opening sequence depicts a televised address from the White House. |
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| Chris (Ike Barinholtz) watches a report on clashes between government forces and protestors in The Oath. | A soldier drags a protestor along the pavement in Civil War’s opening montage. |
From democracy to dictatorship
The “tragic” event to which Marx alludes is Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état on Brumaire 18, Year VIII (November 9, 1799). Having toppled the government and outmaneuvered his political rivals, Napoleon ruled for five years as an authoritarian dictator before declaring the end of the French Republic and crowning himself Emperor in perpetuity.
According to Marx, this tragic historical sequence then repeats itself in the farcical mode when, in 1851, President Louis Bonaparte (Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew) was unable to garner the three-quarters majority that would allow him to run for a second term. Rather than vacating the Presidential palace, Bonaparte dissolved the National Assembly, arrested his political opponents, put Paris in a state of siege, and organized after the fact a legally dubious referendum authorizing his power grab. Within a year, this “little Napoleon” (as Victor Hugo acerbically called him) proclaimed the end of the Second Republic and, following in his uncle’s footsteps, declared himself Emperor for life of the Second Empire.
The historical sequence that Marx analyzes in The Eighteenth Brumaire has eerie echoes in the present-day United States. Marx writes, for instance:
“Every demand of the simplest bourgeois financial reform, of the most ordinary liberalism, of the most formal republicanism, of the most shallow democracy, is simultaneously castigated as ‘an attempt on society’ and stigmatized as ‘Socialism’” (Marx 25).
It is almost as if Marx were talking about Trumpism 170 years before the fact.
Otherwise, Marx asserts:
“[Louis Bonaparte] constitutes himself chief of the lumpenproletariat […], who recognizes in this scum, offal, refuse of all classes the only class upon which he can base himself unconditionally” (Marx 75, italics in original).
We can regret Marx’s language here without failing to recognize a prefiguration of the fanatical alt-right MAGA supporters that Hillary Clinton pejoratively dubbed a “basket of deplorables” in 2016.
Most obviously, the political sequences that Hegel and Marx analyze in their writings on Caesarism and Bonapartism move from republican-democratic forms of government via authoritarian autocracy to bona fide imperialism. It is too soon to know whether this will be the USA’s fate, but there is little doubt that the Trump administration has been moving in that direction. Dismantling the State bureaucracy with alarming speed, threatening his political opponents with imprisonment, deporting perceived enemies of the state with little due process, and openly contemplating unprovoked invasions of US-friendly countries, Trump has shown himself to be an aspiring dictator with expansionist ambitions. Meanwhile, Trump is publicly musing about running for a third Presidential term, even though the Constitution specifies that “no person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice” (22nd Amendment). Michael Moore was wrong in the short term when he predicted that Trump would be “the last President of the United States” if he got elected in 2016. It is too early to know whether Moore’s prediction will be proven right in the long term.
A house divided: The Oath
This recent and near-future history forms the socio-political backdrop for The Oath and Civil War. The first film’s premise is presented in an opening title card: “I pledge my loyalty to my President and my country and vow to defend them from enemies, both foreign and domestic.” The cacophony of a street-level news report on people protesting this so-called “Patriot’s Oath” then erupts on the soundtrack. The din abruptly stops when the image of a mixed-race couple shaking their heads in disbelief appears on the screen. A counter-shot shows White House spokeswoman Kerry Nance (Beth Dover) on television, assuring viewers that no one is going to be forced to sign the oath, but the couple remains unconvinced. “Are they serious?” Chris Powell (Barinholtz) rhetorically asks his wife, Kai (Tiffany Haddish). “This is crazy,” she replies in concert with him. Even as Nance explains that citizens have until Black Friday – the day after Thanksgiving – to sign the oath, Kai and Chris agree on the spot that they will not endorse this violation of their civil rights.
Despite spokeswoman Nance’s reassurance that nobody will be compelled to sign this new pledge of allegiance, we learn as the film progresses that among the domestic enemies mentioned in the oath are people who do not sign it. A de facto enemy of the State is someone who does not vow to support it unequivocally. The oath thereby creates the social division it names. By its logic, one is either a staunch patriot or a national menace. Because this loyalty oath asks people not only to pledge their allegiance to President and Country but also to “defend them from enemies,” it has the effect of dividing the country into two camps: self-appointed vigilantes and those subject to persecution.
Through four principal couples, the film shows how different people might react to an injunction of this sort. At one pole of the social division are Kai and Chris, who immediately perceive the oath to be an assault on their basic freedoms. At the opposite end of the political spectrum are Chris’s brother, Pat (Jon Barinholtz), and his girlfriend, Abbie (Meredith Hanger). These two couples form the film’s central axis of antagonism. Whereas one couple represents twenty-first-century progressives, the other personifies white-collar Republicans in the Trump age.
Nearly everything about these two couples sets them apart. Although both are clearly bourgeois, plot details and elements of costume design code one couple as countercultural lefties and the other as yuppies in the mainstream. While Chris and Kai have a Toyota Prius (the self-respecting lefty-liberal’s stereotypical car par excellence), for instance, Pat and Abbie drive a Porsche 911. The former brother drinks red wine from a long-stemmed glass while the latter opts for beer and Southern Comfort with Cokes. In a nice visual encoding of their cultural affiliations, Chris’s burgundy corduroys and red patterned shirt contrast with his brother’s pastel plaids and mint-green polo shirt. Similarly, while Kai dresses in earth tones and natural fibers, Abbie sports preppy outfits fresh out of a Ralph Lauren catalogue.
The strongest opposition established between these two sets of characters is undoubtedly the one between Abbie and Chris. Both of these politically engaged social activists spend much of the film following media updates on the national crisis as the deadline for signing the oath approaches. However, while he is up in arms about the government crackdown on people protesting the oath, she “mixes it up” online, as she says, with “haters and losers.”
The “haters” to whom Abbie refers here are presumably people protesting the oath, who, according to a right-wing newspeak the film does not need to spell out for us, are deemed “haters” of their country. The other category, “losers,” borrows one of Trump’s favorite insults for his detractors. Together, these two designations capture both the tone and the tenor of the Trumpian culture war. It goes without saying that this catch-all group of haters and losers would include Chris. He and Abbie are opposites, each offering a negative mirror image of the other.
Between these two extremes fall the more moderate conservatives and liberals in the family. Chris’s parents, Eleanor (Nora Dunn) and Hank (Chris Ellis), are social conservatives who have signed the oath but do not want to talk about it. Alice (Carrie Brownstein) and Clark (Jay Duplass), Chris’s sister and brother-in-law, are left-leaning liberals opposed to the tyranny the oath represents. When Alice divulges to Chris that she and Clark have signed the Presidential pledge of allegiance, not out of conviction but for fear of retribution, Chris is crestfallen. When Kai later confesses during one of Chris’s outbursts that she, too, has signed the oath, the crusading liberal is forced to confront the fact that he is a minority of one within the family circle.
One of the film’s strengths is that it does not lionize or romanticize Chris. Although the movie promotes his political point of view, it does not endorse him as a person. Rather than taking the easy, predictable, and potentially cloying approach of presenting the viewer with a slate of good progressives on one side and bad reactionaries on the other, the film pokes fun at virtually all the characters, including its most obvious mouthpiece. The Oath is a political satire, not a morality tale. It depicts the pernicious effects of a toxic social climate rather than acts of heroic or villainous people. The movie beckons us to embrace Chris’s politics even as it portrays him as a neurotic, overbearing, and at times insufferable curmudgeon.
The film accomplishes this feat by contrasting the extended family as a whole with people they encounter in two short scenes set outside the Powells’ home and especially during the long final sequence. The first scene takes place during a car trip Chris makes with his mother and daughter on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. Travelling behind an erratically maneuvered SUV, the trio observes the vehicle speed up and swerve to cut off the sedan in front of it. A man with a shaved head and a military jacket then gets out of the SUV and starts yelling at the woman in the car whose passage he blocked. When the man punches the sedan roof and orders the woman out of the car, Chris decides to say something. In response, the enraged hooligan fetches a hunting knife from his vehicle, slashes the woman’s tires, and menacingly approaches Chris. “Fuck you!” he yells at Chris before turning and walking away. “Get the fuck out of my country!”
The last sentence here clarifies that this scene depicts not simply a road-rage incident, but the behavior of a newly energized social strata flexing its proverbial muscles. One recognizes in this exchange the threats and taunts that segments of the U.S. population felt increasingly comfortable making while a bigoted bully was in the White House. An incarnation of the infamous “deplorables” castigated by Clinton, this man, who threatens a terrified woman because he does not like the way she drives and who tells the recognizably liberal Chris to get out of “his” country, embodies the alt-right trolls that appeared on the scene almost as blindingly as Trump did in the mid-2010s.
The second scene presents another chauvinistic patriot lashing out in public. Set in a chain restaurant, it shows an elderly white man slam his cane on the table of a mixed-race group of twenty-something-year-olds discussing the oath. “These punks are talking bullshit against our country,” the enraged man informs diners in the restaurant. “You should feel grateful that you live in this country,” he hollers back at the group when they protest. Here again, although this man is not in a physically superior position to his adversaries, he feels empowered to berate them in public. Together with the road-rage scene, this exchange depicts the oath’s predictable fallout, polarizing the nation into self-righteous nationalists and their perceived enemies.
It has become commonplace in recent years to claim that Trump values loyalty above all other attributes. John Bolton famously pushed this truism a degree further, arguing that Trump expects “fealty” rather than simple allegiance. This desire for unfaltering devotion has motivated the President’s cabinet picks, impelled him to pardon the rioters that stormed the U.S. Capitol Building in his name on January 6, 2021, and governed his decisions about whose political careers to promote or sabotage in down-ballot elections. The Oath depicts what happens at the micro-scale of the family when the President follows such base instincts.
The event that brings the clan together at the film’s end is the intrusion of two representatives from the Citizens’ Protection Unit (CPU) into the Powells’ home. Having received a tip that Chris was allegedly preventing someone from signing the oath, these armed militiamen (played by Billy Magnussen and John Cho) arrive to interrogate the armchair radical. We learn early in the film from a television report that the CPU “has been accused of being responsible for the disappearance of several dozen activists,” so the threat represented by these officers’ arrival is serious. In a silent but resonant allusion to current events of the late 2010s, these agents wear the informal uniform of white polo shirts and chinos that Trump’s neo-Nazi and white supremacist supporters sported at such events as the 2017 Unite the Right Rally, where clashes between protestors and counter-protestors left more than 30 people injured and one person dead.
During the initial stages of the Powells’ encounter with the CPU, Pat and especially Abbie are warm and welcoming to the agents. They switch allegiances only when Mason (Magnussen), the more aggressive of the CPU pair, physically assaults Chris and threatens his family. At that point, they join in the effort to suppress the intruder. However, the adversaries become locked in a stand-off. The family incapacitates the officers, but Mason vows to make it his life mission to hunt down Chris and his family if he gets out alive. The Powells do not have the stomach to murder him, but they see no other way out.
Just as Chris musters the courage to put a bullet in Mason’s head, Clark, who has spent most of the film sick in bed, emerges from the bedroom and tells people to turn on the news. The President has stepped down, a reporter informs the viewing audience, making the former Vice-President (played by Bruce Boxleitner) the current President. As the latter says when he takes the podium, all Reserve troops and National Guard units deployed to major cities have been recalled, registration for the Patriot’s Oath has been repealed, and all operations undertaken by the CPU have been suspended. “Now is not the time for division,” the acting President concludes. “We must come together.”
We know with post-2021 hindsight that this is not the way President Trump finished his first term. On the contrary, having lost the election with 232 electoral votes to Joe Biden’s 306, he called the election “rigged,” rejected the results, mounted a farcical legal challenge to overturn them, pressured the Georgia secretary of state to “find” him more votes, and when all else failed, called on his faithful supporters to rally in front of the Capitol Building and to “fight like hell” in order to “save America.” As fate would have it, among the most militant brigades that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was a group called the “Oath Keepers.”
In summary, The Oath extrapolates from current events of the late 2010s to imagine what might happen if a polarizing President formalized what Trump did informally. In contrast to what happened in the real world, the film ends when this statesman recognizes that the social turmoil he instigated has spiraled out of control. Civil War’s point of departure inverts this conclusion. Rather than showing a President backing down and leaving office in the face of mass protests, it envisions what might happen if a leader in this position refused to relinquish power.
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| “Now is not the time for division,” the acting president says toward the end of The Oath. “We must come together.” | In contrast to what happens at the end of The Oath, Trump instructed his followers to “fight like hell” in order to “save America” on January 6, 2021 (Jim Borgi/Reuters). |
