I was disappointed James Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg, a 2025 film I’ve been looking forward to seeing, has earned middling reviews. Rami Malek stars as a United States military psychiatrist assessing Nazi leader Hermann Göring, played by Russell Crowe, in the lead up to the Nuremberg trials, which held the German elite accountable for their crimes during the Second World War. Whatever the film’s artistic merits or lack thereof, it’s hard to think of more timely subject matter.

 

President Donald Trump’s administration has not yet metastasized into the danger represented by the Nazi regime. However, the Make America Great Again movement clearly belongs to the same fascist lineage. It’s a far-right, authoritarian movement, which blames racial and sexual minorities for the nation’s problems. The White House has built a massive secret police force tasked with ethnic cleansing. Increasingly, the force is used to crush different forms of internal dissent.

 

Far from being the ‘peace candidate’ as he was sometimes touted, Trump has taken military action and threatened the same against a variety of countries, including Venezuela and Greenland. While the United States previously attempted to mask its imperial ambitions in the language of human rights and democracy, Trump has behaved like a straightforward mafioso on the world stage, operating a protection racket. He has dramatically increased the risk of a disastrous, global conflict.

 

Trump has shown small countries the only thing which will keep them safe from great-power bullies is developing nuclear weapons. Any world leader, democratically elected or not, who doesn’t want to end up like Venezuela’s Nicholas Maduro, who was kidnapped by the United States in an illegal covert operation, will prioritize establishing a nuclear deterrent. The spread of such weapons will make global affairs infinitely more perilous for obvious reasons. This affects Americans.

 

Republicans have learned, perhaps since the pardoning of President Richard Nixon, that Democrats, as currently constituted, will never hold them accountable for their crimes and extremism. As a result, they’ve grown more and more lawless and radical. It’s reached the point where the up-and-coming generation of conservatives, represented by figures like Nick Fuentes, are open admirers of the Nazis. Democrats must beat back the authoritarian threat in decisive fashion.

 

The anti-fascist coalition has a wide variety of policy goals. For instance, as an animal activist, I’d like to see a massive infusion of federal funding into cultivated-meat research. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, cultivated meat is grown from livestock cells, without slaughter. I view the technology as the most promising means of reducing nonhuman suffering and premature death. But none of our goals can be achieved under the right-wing dictatorship Trump is constructing.

 

When the Make America Great Again movement is eventually removed from power, we must hold its leadership accountable in trials akin to those depicted in Vanderbilt’s film. God willing this legal reckoning will come before Republicans descend into barbarism on the scale of their ideological forebears. Sadly, I have no faith the current stewards of the Democratic Party have the stomach for such bold, necessary action. We must replace them with those who do.