Quartile rating: 4/10 · 1 rating
Parallels are drawn between Abraham Lincoln's presidency and the presidency of Donald Trump. Not since 1860 have the Democrats so fanatically refused to accept the result of a free election. That year, their target was Lincoln. They smeared him. They went to war to defeat him. In the end, they assassinated him.
Death of a Nation is a partisan political documentary by Dinesh D'Souza that draws historically dubious parallels between Lincoln and Trump while reframing Democratic Party history in tendentious ways. The plot is built on selective and misleading historical arguments rather than rigorous analysis, earning a 1 for narrative integrity. Acting is largely irrelevant but the dramatic reenactments and D'Souza's own on-screen presence are amateurish at best. Cinematography is serviceable but unremarkable for the genre. Novelty scores modestly because the Lincoln-Trump parallel framing is at least a distinct rhetorical conceit, though the underlying methodology of D'Souza's films is formulaic across his catalog. The ending is purely polemical with no meaningful resolution or intellectual payoff, earning a 1.