Death of a Nation
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 The only thing that America needs saving from is propaganda movies like this one.
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Death of a Nation (or stylized as Death of a Nation: Can We Save America a Second Time?) is a 2018 "documentary" film directed by and starring Dinesh D'Souza, and a loose follow-up to his 2016 film Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party.
Plot
After hailing the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016 as one of the greatest days in American history, and taking a moment to personally thank Trump for giving him a presidential pardon for his past criminal conviction, Dinesh D'Souza claims Trump's presidency to be just as important as that of Abraham Lincoln, who he says was elected as president of a country in similar risk of being torn apart. Except that whereas slavery was the main issue faced by Lincoln, D'Souza claims that liberal attempts to suppress freedom of speech are the current danger to America.
D'Souza also addresses liberal comparisons of the Trump presidency to Nazi Germany by claiming that, if anything, Hitler's policies had far more in common with those of modern-day liberals than Trump or any other American conservative politician throughout history.
Why It Can't Save America
- It hardly even improves from its predecessor, Hillary's America, and thus shares numerous problems with it, such as:
- Arguments about the Democratic Party's past support for slavery and white supremacists, which are repeated from its predecessor. This can make the film feel repetitive to anyone who has seen its predecessor.
- High amounts of bias against the Democratic Party. Here, they are portrayed as racists and bigots.
- The badly-made historical re-enactments, featuring actors playing historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Adolf Hitler. The actors give poor performances and look almost nothing like their historical counterparts.
- The release date being in an election year in a blatant attempt to try and influence the election's outcome, as with Hillary's America, and 2016: Obama's America. However, this movie was released in a midterm election year.
- The movie attempts to compare Donald Trump to Abraham Lincoln, even though Trump had only been in power for around 12-18 months when the film was being made; nowhere near enough time to justify making such a comparison. What's more, D'Souza's rationale for making this comparison is just that Democrats refused to accept the elections of both Lincoln and Trump, even though this logic would also make George W. Bush the equal of Lincoln, since the Democrats challenged his victory over Al Gore in the Supreme Court after the 2000 presidential election.
- D'Souza opens the film by enthusing about how wonderful President Trump is, because he pardoned D'Souza for the conviction he picked up for illegal political donations back in the Obama presidency. This immediately destroys any notion that the documentary is going to be unbiased, whether or not you believe D'Souza's conviction was fair.
- Gets numerous details about the American Civil War and Lincoln's presidency (especially his assassination) wrong.
- Tries comparing the Democratic Party to the Nazi Party using very thin logic such as both supporting the existence of a welfare state. It also tries to smear Franklin D. Roosevelt (who was president for all but the last couple of months of World War II) as a secret Nazi sympathizer, despite the fact that he fought against the Nazis throughout the entirety of the conflict.
- Much of the film claiming left-wingers are the real racists and fascists is completely illogical since the ideology of both groups are in complete opposition to left-wing principles such as equality and democracy.
- Features interviews with several prominent white supremacists, but the interviews are cut up to the point of near-incoherence.
- It's never really apparent what point D'Souza is trying to argue, other than that he doesn't like the Democrats, which his previous films already made extremely clear. Somehow, the trailer makes D'Souza's overall argument about freedom of speech clearer than the actual film does.
The Only Redeeming Quality
- The bad re-enactments of Nazi Germany can be unintentionally hilarious at times.
Reception
Death of a Nation was heavily panned by critics and the moviegoers and was received even worse than Hillary's America did, with a Metacritic score of 1/100, while it is tied with few other movies, it is ranked by Metacritic as the worst reviewed movie of all time. The film is currently one of the lowest rated movies on Metacritic, alongside Bio-Dome, 10 Rules for Sleeping Around, Chaos, inAPPropriate Comedy, Not Cool, The Singing Forest, The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, Hardbodies, Mother's Day and United Passions. It currently holds a 0% score on the Tomatometer on Rotten Tomatoes, but somehow has a 88% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It has a lower score of 4.6 on IMDb. It also proved less successful at the box-office than Hillary's America, having only barely managed to recoup its $6 million budget.