{"id":581189,"date":"2026-04-13T07:15:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-13T07:15:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/581189\/"},"modified":"2026-04-13T07:15:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-13T07:15:09","slug":"a-chronicle-of-trumps-first-term","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/581189\/","title":{"rendered":"A Chronicle of Trump’s First Term"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tBeginning with mass protests on one end of the political spectrum and ending with riots on the other, the four years of Donald Trump\u2019s first presidential term added up to a substantial chapter of U.S. history, with or without the possibility of a reprise. At the halfway mark of his tumultuous second term, few would look back on that time with any sense of nostalgia, though they might marvel at just how drastically the tone and tenor of American political life have shifted in the last decade. A sprawling, disquieting reflection both on things we didn\u2019t know then, and what we\u2019ve since forgotten, Stephen Maing<\/a> and Eric Daniel Metzgar<\/a>\u2018s archival documentary \u201cThe Great Experiment<\/a>\u201d looks back with pensive distance on how Americans lived those years, capturing a country in uncertain, ongoing transition.<\/p>\n

\n\tShot in pristine, v\u00e9rit\u00e9-style monochrome that grants these relatively recent images a grave sense of history already made, \u201cThe Great Experiment\u201d is a wholly observational feat of docmaking, forgoing talking heads or guiding voiceover for neutrally captured vignettes from everyday life \u2014 sometimes banal, sometimes chaotic \u2014 for Americans of various political persuasions between 2017 and 2020, assembled as a teeming mosaic that reaches no tidy rhetorical conclusion. A standout premiere at last month\u2019s True\/False festival before its international debut at CPH: DOX, the film will next play the Full Frame docfest. Festival travel across the U.S. in particular will be aptly widespread, though the film\u2019s commercial prospects hinge on audiences\u2019 willingness to pick at an unhealed wound.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe film\u2019s own commentary is limited to the starkly loaded, irony-laced, all-lowercase headings it assigns to each of its four sections \u2014 \u201ci\u2019m sorry, my love,\u201d \u201cthis is my home,\u201d \u201chow will we look back\u201d and \u201cwelcome and thank you\u201d \u2014 as well as its own title, a reference to George Washington\u2019s description of U.S. government as \u201cthe last great experiment for promoting human happiness.\u201d It\u2019s for the viewer to gauge the status of said experiment under Trump, though evidence of human happiness is patchy. For every snapshot of Americans at leisure \u2014 riding snowmobiles, hanging in barbershops, attending local football matches \u2014 there are multiple scenes of conflict and ire, sometimes in unexpected formations.<\/p>\n

\n\tAn early, nervy passage captures fraught exchanges between participants and protestors at a Gays For Trump rally, where one proud supporter shrugs off a woman\u2019s contemptuous citing of his male privilege. \u201cThanks, I love it,\u201d is his blandly smiling reply \u2014 a neat distillation of the intractable, stubbornly non-intersectional left-right impasse that has largely marked the Trump era. That carries through the film\u2019s depiction of gun rights rallies, Civil War reenactments and \u201cStatue Lives Matter\u201d demonstrations, where conservative ideological fervor feeds on any show of opposition: A Black man who tears down a Confederate flag is met with near-gleeful calls for his arrest, fielded in turn by a Black police officer. <\/p>\n

\n\tElsewhere, depictions of Black Lives Matter gatherings further illustrate the defining dissonance of a population whose variously fragmented, bitterly opposed factions are unwittingly united only by a mutual sense of feeling unheard. As we shift into the sudden impositions of COVID lockdowns \u2014 the camera taking in the eerie sight of New York\u2019s wholly empty sidewalks \u2014 the silence is a startling contrast to the strident noise of the film\u2019s other sections, but not a serene one, as even the film\u2019s unpopulated frames bristle with an air of discord. Even scenes of relaxed social or domestic activity, including one of a wedding where guests join in a collective rifle salute, are a reminder that few facets of American life are free from political influence and implication.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe Great Experiment\u201d climaxes, as it must, with remarkably immediate footage from the storming of the Capitol that, as it turned out, cued only the interval in the continuing theater of Trump\u2019s presidency. Maing and Metzgar\u2019s camerawork, so immaculate throughout, briefly succumbs to the disorder of the events, but the film\u2019s measured, stepped-back gaze is consistent, as the filmmakers scrutinize this grayscale kaleidoscope of American unrest for meaning \u2014 wondering not so much what we\u2019ve learned from all this, but what we haven\u2019t, and why.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Beginning with mass protests on one end of the political spectrum and ending with riots on the other,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":581190,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,254846,206,254847,254848],"class_list":["post-581189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-eric-daniel-metzgar","tag-movies","tag-stephen-maing","tag-the-great-experiment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=581189"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581189\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/581190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=581189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=581189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=581189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}