Dan Partland ended our recent conversation by referencing the paradox of tolerance: To maintain a tolerant society, it holds, tolerant citizens must retain the right to not tolerate intolerance.

“So how does that work?” he mused. “It's a puzzle. I definitely think it doesn't help to shut people out. I also think it doesn't help to not acknowledge the moral failing. It’s tough.”

Nevertheless, the director of "#Untruth: The Psychology of Trumpism" believes Trumpism only ends when people who stand against it figure out some way to grant those under its spell some grace and forgiveness. This, more than other maladies hanging over from whatever happens in November, might be one of the most arduous undertakings of a generation.

Even now Donald Trump is promising retribution on his perceived enemies if he’s re-elected, assuring his followers assembled in Wisconsin on Saturday that getting undocumented immigrants out of Colorado “will be a bloody story.”

Such frightening statements and the behavior accompanying them moved Partland to make “#Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump,” allowing progressives to trauma bond in August of 2020. “#Untruth” takes on the harder puzzle of explaining why his followers continue to be drawn to him despite his penchant for spewing dangerous xenophobic, sexist and bigoted rhetoric. People are clearly invested in getting some answers. A week after its release, it is the #1 ranked documentary on Apple TV.

As Election Day 2024 draws nearer, many have been moved to reference anew Adam Serwer’s 2018 essay in The Atlantic — the title of which matches its conclusion: “The cruelty is the point.”

“It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another,” Serwer wrote. “Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.”

Through “#Untruth,” Partland endeavors to explain the reasons such malice has taken hold of America’s body politic through interviews with psychologists, historians and sociologists — along with politicians and other government figures who either witnessed its manufacture firsthand or were immersed in it.

Former Trump White House aide Anthony Scaramucci recurs here, only now joined by former RNC chairman Michael Steele and former Republican congressman and Tea Party activist Joe Walsh.

Partland credits Walsh for being uncommonly clear in articulating the grievance driving the MAGA movement. “That's a really essential thing to include,” the director says, “because every single family has been touched by this. Everyone is affected by it. And dismissing it as an anomaly isn't a very valuable stance. I think that we have to really engage and understand and have some compassion for these emotions and offer better solutions than what Trump is offering.”

In our conversation, we discussed why Partland believed “#Untruth” is a necessary follow-up to "#Unfit" and the value documentaries like this one may have in helping Americans to someday dismantle the apparatus that keeps Trumpism alive.

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The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Let's go back to #Unfit for a moment. There was a lot of noise around its release in 2020, and justifiably so. Did you suspect you would be making . . . I don’t know, would you call #Untruth a sequel? Did you think that you would be making this afterward?

It is certainly kind of a sequel. And no, of course not. We could only see as far as the 2020 election, that Trump would either be reelected or he would be defeated, and if he were defeated, then that would be the end of that. We didn't give sufficient weight to the fact that even in the four-year period since, he really was able to remake American politics — really able to remake the Republican Party — in his own image, and in a way that has proved really enduring. There's really no analog to someone who has led the party to so many successive electoral defeats — from the 2018 midterms to the last presidential, to the next midterm and a myriad of special elections in........

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