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FRONTLINE Premiere: Lies, Politics and Democracy

The film examines Trump’s hold on the Republican Party and mounting threats to American democracy

  • Christina Zeiders
Security fencing surrounds the Capitol ahead of President Joe Biden's address to a joint session of Congress in Washington on Wednesday, April 28, 2021.

 Erin Schaff / The New York Times

Security fencing surrounds the Capitol ahead of President Joe Biden's address to a joint session of Congress in Washington on Wednesday, April 28, 2021.

Ahead of the 2022 midterm elections and amid persistent false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump, FRONTLINE opens its new season with a two-hour special premiere, Lies, Politics and Democracy.

The documentary examines the profound and mounting threats to American democracy by tracking major political decisions made over the past seven years and exposes the deep fissures that resulted.

Watch Lies, Politics and Democracy on WITF TV Tuesday, September 6 at 9pm, or stream it any time after its premiere through the PBS Video App.

“The film documents how Republican leaders made decisions over years that culminated in the January 6 attack on Congress,” says Michael Kirk, veteran FRONTLINE filmmaker and director of Lies, Politics and Democracy. “But we have also discovered that the decisions made by those same leaders after the attack were even more consequential in the ongoing threat to our democracy.”

The documentary offers startling new details from GOP insiders on how the indulgence of Trump’s authoritarian impulses and embrace of his rhetoric strengthened his grip on the American political system and led the nation to this perilous moment. You’ll hear first-person accounts from people who sounded the alarm and whose warnings were minimized or silenced.

Lies, Politics and Democracy draws on more than 30 new and revealing interviews with former government officials, political journalists and experts including Kristol, Mona Charen former members of Congress Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), former federal Judge J. Michael Luttig and former White House Director of Strategic Communications Alyssa Farah.

The film also draws on the insights of two renowned journalists, Tim Alberta and Jelani Cobb, who worked with the film’s producers and spent years documenting an unprecedented moment in U.S. history.

Watch Lies, Politics and Democracy on WITF TV Tuesday, September 6 at 9pm, or stream it on-demand through the PBS Video App.

Dozens of interviews with sources from the making of Lies, Politics and Democracy will be published on FRONTLINE’s website as part of FRONTLINE’s ongoing Transparency Project.

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