Trump’s Megalomaniac Ambitions for the World

New PBS Documentary The War Cabinet Reveals How the So-Called “Peace President” Became a War Leader

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

“The powerful do what they can, and the weak do what they must.” That’s how David Sanger of The New York Times summed up Donald Trump’s philosophy of the world and humanity’s role in it in an interview for a recent episode of PBS’s long-running TV documentary series Frontline, “The War Cabinet,” aired Tuesday, May 26. Directed and co-written by Michael Kirk, with the familiar dulcet tones of Will Lyman as narrator, “The War Cabinet” was an attempt to show how a man who sold himself during all three of his Presidential campaigns as a “peacemaker” morphed into an all-out war leader after he regained the White House in 2024.

Another reporter interviewed for the program, Eric Cortellessa of Time, said, “Part of the appeal with President Trump is that he is going to reshape the world in a way that outlasts him. That there will be a pre- and post-Trump world. Part of what he wants his legacy to be is to be able to say, ‘I did what nobody else could.’” I’d long suspected that Trump wants to be so profoundly transformative a U.S. President – more so than George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, or Ronald Reagan – that the history of America will be divided into B.T. and A.T.: “Before Trump” and “After Trump.” Now Cortellessa, who’s done at least two major interview features with Trump for Time, suggests that that ambition extends to the entire world.

“When I talk about [Trump’s] foreign policy doctrine, it’s the ‘me, me, me’ foreign policy doctrine,” said The New Yorker reporter and essayist Susan Glasser. “For Donald Trump there’s another factor, and that is the glory of Donald Trump. It seems so incredible that a great nation of 350 million people could actually be acting in the world because of the whims and interests of one guy who wants to pursue his self-aggrandizement.” Not that it hasn’t happened before. Do the names “Alexander the Great,” “Napoleon Bonaparte,” “Joseph Stalin,” “Mao Zedong,” and “Adolf Hitler” mean anything to you?

The idea that a President of the United States is comporting himself under the philosophy that “the powerful do what they can, and the weak do what they must” is chilling enough, especially in this 250th anniversary year of America’s declaration of independence from Great Britain. It’s exactly the opposite of the belief that “all men are created equal.” Even though when Thomas Jefferson wrote those words he effectively meant, “All white male landowners are created equal,” it was still a philosophy that definitively rejected the idea that a handful of people are destined to rule, and everybody else is supposed to accept, meekly, humbly, and gratefully, whatever crumbs their overlords are willing to dole out to them.

The Frontline documentary began with a montage of clips from Trump’s three Presidential campaigns in which he repeatedly declared himself an anti-war candidate. That was the claim he made in his second-term inaugural address on January 20, 2025, in which he said, “We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end, and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into. My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier. That’s what I want to be, a peacemaker and a unifier.”

That got a lot of horselaughs from people all too aware that Trump’s whole strategy as a politician has been to seize on the divisions within the American people and exploit them for votes. Trump’s rhetoric began to change with a bizarre series of demands to acquire territory held by other countries. He insisted that Canada become “the 51st state.” He threatened to attack Panama in order to retake the Panama Canal, which had been U.S. territory until it was returned to Panama by a treaty negotiated by the Carter administration in 1978. Trump also threatened to attack a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ally, Denmark, to seize control of Greenland.

And though thus far he hasn’t attacked Canada (except for starting a massive trade war with them), Panama, or Greenland, Trump has ordered bombing raids in Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Iran, and Venezuela. The Frontline show actually began with an account of Trump’s White House meeting with Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky on February 28, which went off the rails when Vice-President J. D. Vance upbraided Zelensky for not wearing a suit and tie to the meeting.

“Mr. President, Mr. President, with respect, I think it’s disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office and try to litigate this in front of the American media,” Vance said. “You should be thanking the president for trying to bring an end to this conflict. Have you said ‘thank you’ once in this entire meeting? No, in this entire meeting, have you said, ‘Thank you’? Offer some words of appreciation for the United States of America and the president who’s trying to save your country – and let’s go litigate those disagreements rather than trying to fight it out in the American media when you’re wrong. We know that you’re wrong.”

“Vance brought that righteous indignation to that meeting,” Curt Mills, editor of The American Conservative and one of a number of true Trump believers who agreed to participate in the Frontline telecast, said. “For a lot of the people on the so-called New Right, who are the national populist or the hard-core MAGA base or people who really want to see change in American foreign policy, and I’m one of them, it was the coup de grâce of a new generation of approach. In some ways it was the high-water mark of Vance’s political career to that point.”

The program also discussed U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who ran for President against Trump in 2016. The Frontline documentary included some of the bizarre posturing between Rubio and Trump over the relative size of their “hands” (presumably a metaphor for a body part just below the waist) as well as a clip from a campaign debate in which Rubio endorsed George W. Bush’s war against Iraq – and Trump said, “Obviously the war in Iraq was a big fat mistake, all right? We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East.” Trump overwhelmingly defeated Rubio in the 2016 primaries, including in Rubio’s home state of Florida.

“I think Marco Rubio spent a couple years after that defeat wavering over what course to take,” said Susan Glasser of The New Yorker. “He believed Donald Trump was a dangerous force in the world. He believed what he was doing was antithetical to American interests. But then he looked at what happened to those Republicans who spoke out against Donald Trump and essentially ended their own political careers, and Marco Rubio’s political career – he didn’t want it to be over.”

So Rubio wrote a book, Decades of Decadence, in which he basically reinvented himself as a Trump-style phony “populist,” and by the 2024 Republican National Convention he was giving full-throated endorsements of Trump’s re-election as “the only way to make America wealthy and safe and strong again.” Rubio’s conversion was so complete that long-term Trump ally Steve Bannon appeared on the Frontline show and said that when he read Decades of Decadence, he had a hard time believing Rubio wrote it.

A number of interviewees for the Frontline program made the point that Trump, during his first term, had had a number of Cabinet members and other high officials who tried to talk him out of some of his nastier initiatives. Trump had wanted to bomb Mexico to deal with the drug cartels, and to send U.S. military troops into the streets of American cities to shoot Black Lives Matter protesters. In his second term, as Cortellessa of Time explained, his goal was “to remove people who saw themselves as guardrails, to eradicate any possibility of having people who were going to act as brakes on his desires.”

One of Trump’s key appointees in that campaign was Pete Hegseth, Iraq combat veteran and co-host of a weekend program on Fox News, whom Trump chose as his Secretary of Defense – or, as Trump and Hegseth have unilaterally renamed him, “Secretary of War.” The Frontline depiction of Hegseth began with a speech from one of Trump’s televised Cabinet meetings in which he demands fulsome praise from all his appointees. It’s a ritual Trump started in his first term and has continued in this one. “From the troops directly, which they ask me to say all the time, thank you for your leadership, for your boldness, for your clarity, for providing a shield for the rest of us to put America first and to apply peace through strength,” Hegseth told Trump. “We’re in the strength business, that’s our job.”

Among Hegseth’s priorities was a housecleaning of America’s top military leadership, targeting anyone who’d been promoted by the Biden administration, anyone who wasn’t a white male, and, as Hegseth himself put it, “any general, admiral, whatever, that was involved in any of the DEI [Diversity, Equity, Inclusion] woke shit.” Hegseth particularly targeted the Judge Advocates General (JAG’s). Among their responsibilities are to warn commanders whether the orders they are about to give are illegal.

In his book The War on Warriors, Hegseth recalled one JAG officer told his company it was illegal to shoot somebody just because they were carrying a weapon. Once the lawyer walked away, Hegseth told his troops, “I will not allow this nonsense to filter into your brains. Men, if you see an enemy who you believe is a threat, you engage and destroy the threat. That’s a bullshit rule that’s going to get people killed.” As Secretary of Defense, Hegseth called the entire U.S. officer corps to an in-person meeting at Quantico, Virginia and laid down the message: either get with the program of “maximum lethality, not tepid legality,” or leave.

The new Trump doctrine would face its first test in dealing with the Houthis, Iran-backed rebels in Yemen. The Houthis were attacking civilian vessels in the Red Sea, and Trump’s war Cabinet called a remote meeting to discuss what to do about it. Amazingly, they not only used a commercial messaging app, Signal, they inadvertently invited a journalist, Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, to join the chat. At first, Goldberg told Frontline, “I thought it was a disinformation operation or some elaborate spoof. … The senior-most officials of the United States government were using Signal to talk about upcoming bombing campaigns, and inadvertently invited a journalist. I’ve never been involved in anything this absurd or surreal.”

As a result, Goldberg ¬– and, ultimately, the entire world – got a rare behind-the-scenes look at how the current U.S. government decides issues of life and death. Vance was reticent about ordering a bomb strike against the Houthis, calling it a bailout of Europe since almost all the ships the Houthis had targeted were European. Hegseth was gung-ho to do it. Then Stephen Miller, Trump’s most controversial aide and one who’s been a continuous part of both Trump Presidencies, entered the chat with the message, “The President was clear: green-light.” At that moment, all debate ceased and the conversation turned to planning the details of when and where the attacks would take place, itself a serious breach of security protocol.

After the attack, Trump, as is his wont, declared it a complete and total victory. “It’s not even close to true,” said Jamie McIntyre, reporter for the conservative Washington Examiner. “That war went on for 52 days. Achieved almost nothing, except the expenditure of billions of dollars. The Houthis are still there.” Meanwhile, Trump and his administration needed a scapegoat for the security breach of allowing a journalist onto a top-secret chat planning military actions, and they found him in National Security Advisor Michael Waltz. Trump fired him and gave the post to Rubio, the first person since Henry Kissinger to be both National Security Advisor and Secretary of State at the same time.

“Donald Trump treats even the most senior officials of the U.S. government as courtiers,” Susan Glasser told Frontline. “It’s the sort of Trump 2.0 version of the adults in the room. People like [White House chief of staff] Susie Wiles and Marco Rubio essentially have a sort of shoulder-shrugged, you know, ‘what-can-you-do’ kind of version of playing the adults in the room. Maybe they have different opinions than the president, but in the end they’re not going to really do anything to stop him from doing whatever he wants.”

Trump’s next attack on a foreign country came about in June 2025, two months after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to the White House to discuss a coordinated U.S./Israel attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Both Netanyahu and Secretary of State Rubio made statements to the effect that the U.S. would never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. Vance, who like Hegseth served in the Iraq war, said an attack on Iran “would be a huge distraction of resources. It would be massively expensive to our country.” But Trump went ahead and ordered the strikes anyway, then claimed they had “completely obliterated” Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Right-wing activists like podcaster Steve Bannon and The American Conservative editor Curt Mills saw the parallels between Trump’s attack on Iran and George W. Bush’s attack on Iraq – and they didn’t like them. Bannon said, “This is exactly the same pitch as the Iraq War – weapons of mass destruction – you have to get it. So they understand one thing: They think the playbook works. This could suck us into a war that make Iraq and Afghanistan look like a Sunday afternoon picnic. You’re talking about a major country, an ancient civilization, 90 million people, the Persians. These are the same folks the Romans fought, and the Greeks.”

Another person within the Trump administration who argued against the attack on Iran was Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who insisted based on the intelligence agencies that reported to her that Iran was nowhere near developing either a nuclear weapon or the capability of delivering one. But after Israel launched the attack on Iran, and Trump joined in with American forces, he bluntly told a reporter who asked about Gabbard’s comment, “She’s wrong.” As a result, Gabbard became persona non grata in the Trump administration. Members of Trump’s staff joked that the initials of her title, “DNI,” now stood for “Do Not Invite,” as she was frozen out of key meetings. More recently, she has resigned, ostensibly to take care of her husband, diagnosed with advanced cancer.

Trump’s next aggressive campaign against another country’s leadership targeted Venezuela, which Secretary of State Marco Rubio – the Florida-born son of Cuban expatriates – heartily supported. “He has very strongly held beliefs, from a very young age, about left-leaning dictatorships in Latin America,” said Ashley Parker of The Atlantic. “And there is also a sense that if Venezuela can fall, and there can be regime change in Venezuela, then Cuba might be next.”

Knowing that Trump couldn’t care less about free and fair elections, either in Venezuela or in the U.S., in order to get Trump to authorize an attack on Venezuela he needed an ally. He found one in Stephen Miller, and the two decided to use drugs as the issue to persuade Trump to attack Venezuela, “They changed the argument to drugs – that was a big deal,” said American Conservative editor Curt Mills. “The president is undoubtedly prudish about drugs. He is a teetotaler himself. I think it’s a very underexplored element of his psyche. His older brother died of alcoholism. That was a richer vein to persuade the president.”

Trump began the campaign against Venezuela by ordering air strikes against small boats in the open seas off the Venezuelan coast. The claim was that the boats were being used to smuggle cocaine and fentanyl into the U.S., even though Venezuela does not produce fentanyl at all. Not only did they target the boats and destroy them, Trump posted on his Truth Social Web site, “Please let this serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America. Beware!” Eventually the boat strikes killed 110 civilians, including two sailors who were the victims of a so-called “second tap” attack, illegal under international law because once you have rendered your enemies helpless, you’re supposed to take them alive.

When Venezuelan President Maduro continued to defy Trump – even mocking him by dancing at a rally the way Trump does – Trump ordered a U.S. ground invasion of Venezuela to capture Maduro and bring him to the U.S. for a so-called “trial” on drug charges. Rubio was hoping that the successful capture of Maduro would restore democracy to Venezuela. Trump wanted no such thing; instead he allowed Delci Rodriguez, Maduro’s vice-president, to take formal control of the country on condition that she sign over Venezuela’s vast oil resources to U.S. companies. “We’re going to be running it with a group,” Trump said of Venezuela’s oil industry, “and we’re going to make sure it’s run properly. We’re going to rebuild the oil infrastructure, which will cost billions of dollars. It will be paid for by the oil companies directly.”

“If I were Marco Rubio, I would be deeply pained and distressed by the course of events in Venezuela,” said Jonathan Blitzer of The New Yorker. “You have to wonder what rationalizations he’s telling himself to justify what’s just happened. He’s finally now gotten the results he wants in removing Maduro from power, but none of the reasons why he believes Maduro should be removed from power are actually being respected on the merits. The Maduro regime persists. There’s this explicit claim made about the value of extracting oil from the country. You basically have now the [same] Chavista regime in power in Venezuela, but answering to the Americans. I mean, it’s a pretty tangled situation for somebody like Rubio, on the ideological merits, to defend.”

New Yorker and former New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins believes that the quick and easy success in Venezuela emboldened Trump to do another all-out assault on Iran, either at Netanyahu’s behest or with his help. “Trump is on a roll, and I think he knows he’s on a roll. He believes he’s on a roll,” Filkins told Frontline. “I think the Venezuela operation emboldened Trump to believe that he could do these very effective one-shot missions. Go in, do what you need to do, destroy what you need to destroy, get out, done. No consequences.”

“One factor that people don’t talk about enough is luck,” Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic told Frontline. “So far Donald Trump is one of the luckiest people in the history of the planet. He sends American troops into the middle of Venezuela. Pulls it off. He practically destroys the Iranian nuclear program without losing a plane or a pilot. Luck is a factor, and momentum is a factor in all this. It’s luck, it’s roll of the dice, it’s the pure expression of power.”

In February 2026 Netanyahu came to the White House for another visit with Trump. This time there was no official ceremony, no joint press conference, no fanfare. This was when Netanyahu allegedly talked Trump into an all-out air campaign against Iran involving killing the long-time Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. According to American Conservative editor Curt Mills, “Netanyahu is pretty canny at saying, ‘You’ll be one of the great presidents. You’ll be like Reagan or Lincoln or Roosevelt if you do something substantial. No other president has been able to handle the Iran portfolio – Carter, Reagan, H.W., Clinton, Obama, W., Biden. And you can just solve it.’”

Instead Trump’s war against Iran – launched without any Congressional approval, in defiance of the U.S. Constitution, which states only Congress can start a war – has lasted four months so far and produced exactly the sort of quagmire Trump used to criticize George W. Bush for getting us into in Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s also upended the global economy and raised U.S. gasoline prices by 50 percent. And it has sent Trump’s already negative poll numbers into dismal territory, with just 33 to 37 percent of Americans surveyed saying they approve of the job Trump is doing.

Not that Trump really cares about all that. It’s become clear that Trump has no intention of allowing himself or the Republican Congress ever to be voted out of power. His total dominance of the Republican primary electorate has enabled him to destroy the political careers of Senators Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) as well as Congressmember Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky). These, along with the other metaphorical trophy heads on Trump’s wall – Mitt Romney, Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and many others – successfully intimidate any Republicans in either house of Congress who might otherwise stand up to him.

Trump has also launched an aggressive campaign to redraw Congressional districts to make sure Republicans keep their House majority in 2026 despite the growing unpopularity of their policies. He was aided in this by the Right-wing revolutionary (often mistakenly called “conservative”) majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, which in May hammered the final nails into the coffin of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Trump is on a roll to make sure not only that he transforms the American Republic into the American Empire, but that he does so without any chance of being reversed, either in the 2026 midterms or the 2028 Presidential election. Either he will declare an “emergency” that allegedly requires him to suspend the 2028 election and remain in power indefinitely, or he will run what the Latin Americans call an imposición candidate: a totally loyal stooge who will allow him to maintain effective control of the U.S. government even though he won’t technically hold the title, “President of the United States of America.”

New PBS Documentary Showcases W. E. B. Du Bois, a Major Voice in the Historic Struggle for Civil Rights and Racial Equality

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, May 19) PBS presented a stunning documentary called W. E. B. Du Bois: Rebel With a Cause as part of their American Masters series. (I’ve often wondered how they decide who’s an “American Experience” and who’s an “American Master.”) William Edward Burghardt Du Bois has long been a particular hero of mine. He was born in 1868, three years after the South at least technically lost the U.S. Civil War, in the relatively emancipated town of Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Du Bois’s father was descended from a French Huguenot (Protestants who fled France during the religious wars of the Middle Ages and Renaissance) slaveowner, and his dad bailed on the family when William was 10. He always insisted on pronouncing his last name “Doo-BOYS” in the English fashion rather than the French “Du-BWAH,” and that caused a bizarre controversy when in the early 1960’s, just after Du Bois’s death, Richard Nixon denounced the W. E. B. Du Bois Clubs, a movement set up by the Communist Party U.S.A. to attract young African-Americans to the cause, as a Communist front organization. This did collateral damage to the Boys Clubs of America, who’d seen their donations nosedive because a lot of people thought Nixon had meant them. Nixon’s reaction was to blame Du Bois himself for the confusion and demand that the clubs use the “Du-BWAH” pronunciation of his name, whereupon the people running the clubs on behalf of the Communist Party dug up an interview with Du Bois himself in which he explained, “I am an American. My name is Doo-BOYS.” Du Bois was born and raised in Great Barrington in a community that was otherwise almost all white. His teachers recognized his intellectual ability and insisted him to study hard; he graduated from high school with honors and set his sights on getting into Harvard University. Unfortunately, his family didn’t have the financial means even to consider sending him to Harvard, but the congregation of the Congregational Church of Great Barrington, which the family attended, raised enough money to send him to the historically Black Fisk University in Nashville. There Du Bois was hit with the realities of institutionalized racism and Jim Crow segregation for the first time in his life. Like most Fisk students, he had to work his way through school, which he did by becoming a schoolteacher after his sophomore year. After he graduated from Fisk, he finally got into Harvard, but Harvard wouldn’t accept his course credits from Fisk, so he had to repeat two years as an undergraduate before he was admitted to Harvard’s graduate school.

He got a masters’ degree from Harvard and then sought a grant offered by former President Rutherford B. Hayes to study the new discipline of sociology at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Germany, where among other people he met pioneering sociologist Max Weber. Weber liked to cite Du Bois as a counter-example to people who insisted that Blacks were incapable of high intellectual achievement. Du Bois later recalled that in Germany “I found myself on the outside of the American world, looking in. With me were white folk – students, acquaintances, teachers – who viewed the scene with me. They did not always pause to regard me as a curiosity, or something sub-human; I was just a man of the somewhat privileged student rank, with whom they were glad to meet and talk over the world; particularly, the part of the world whence I came.” Du Bois had hoped to win his Ph.D. in Germany, but the university required that you live in the country for at least three years, and the stipend he’d received only lasted for two. He finally won his Ph.D. by returning to Harvard, and his was the first Ph.D. ever awarded by Harvard to a Black scholar. Du Bois got a teaching job at Wilberforce University in Ohio, where he met and married one of his students, Nina Gomer. After two years at Wilberforce, Du Bois received a grant to do a sociological study of the Black community of Philadelphia, particularly the Seventh Ward. He moved himself, Nina, and their young son Burkhardt into the roughest part of the Seventh Ward and conducted over 500 interviews for what became his first published book, The Philadelphia Negro (1899). Before the book was published, Du Bois had left Wilberforce and taken a teaching position at Atlanta University. There he coined the phrase “The Talented Tenth,” referring to the most intellectually gifted Black Americans whose demonstrated abilities would help lift the entire race out of bondage. In 1900 he went to London to attend the world’s first Pan-African Congress, despite the misgivings of the British government that the group was really intended to bring down the British Empire by encouraging its colonies in Africa to rebel and declare independence. He also went to Paris and organized an exhibit for the 1900 World’s Fair to commemorate the achievements of Black people worldwide. Du Bois returned to the U.S. at a time when the country’s most influential African-American was Booker T. Washington, who argued that Black Americans should accept segregation in exchange for vague promises of equality within it. Washington famously said, “In all purely social matters, we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hands in all things essential to mutual progress.”

During his years in Atlanta, Du Bois was hit hard by Jim Crow personally; his young son Burkhardt took ill and died at a time when all three Black doctors in Atlanta were out of town and no white doctor would care for him. He also was angered by the lynching of Sam Hose, a Black man who was hanged by a freelance mob in Atlanta in 1899. The lynchers not only took pride in what they’d done, they literally cut off pieces of Hose’s body and traded them amongst each other as souvenirs. Ironically, Du Bois spotted Hose’s knuckles on sale in a souvenir shop while walking through Atlanta with white journalist Joel Chandler Harris, then associate editor of the Atlanta Constitution and later internationally famous (and more recently reviled) as the author of the “Br’er Rabbit” stories based on folk tales he’d heard from Atlanta’s African-Americans. Du Bois’s growing activism led him to seek opportunities to write for the popular press, both white and Black. Despite difficulties in selling his pieces to Black outlets, most of which were sympathetic to Washington, Du Bois wrote a negative review of Washington’s memoir Up from Slavery in 1901 and published an entire book, The Souls of Black Folk, in 1903. The Souls of Black Folk was mostly a collection of essays, but it included one fictional story about “John,” a sympathetic African-American character who ends up the victim of a lynching. In 1905 Du Bois and others organized a meeting of Black activists at Niagara Falls, New York, and set up a group called the Niagara Movement. It didn’t last long, but in 1909 Du Bois was the only Black participant in a meeting to set up another organization for African-American civil rights, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which still exists. He was offered the presidency, which he turned down because he had decided that the real power of the organization lay in its ability to change public opinion of both whites and Blacks about racial issues. So he demanded and got the editorship of the NAACP’s publication, The Crisis, which he held for the next 14 years until the combination of the Great Depression and increasing encroachments on his editorial control by new NAACP leadership (notably its controversial new chair, Walter White, who got a lot of jokes made about his last name because he was so unusually light-skinned for an African-American a lot of people who saw him thought he was white) caused Du Bois to leave The Crisis in 1934.

According to this show’s writer/director, Rita Coburn, The Crisis became so popular among Black Americans that many of them who hadn’t known how to read before learned to read so they could read The Crisis. In the premier issue in November 1910, Du Bois wrote the mission statement, which said the publication’s purpose would be to "set forth those facts and arguments which show the danger of race prejudice, particularly as manifested today toward colored people." He called The Crisis "a record of the darker races,” and added, "It will first and foremost be a newspaper: it will record important happenings and movements in the world which bear on the great problem of inter-racial relations, and especially those which affect the Negro-American. Secondly, it will be a review of opinion and literature, recording briefly books, articles, and important expressions of opinion in the white and colored press on the race problem. Thirdly, it will publish a few short articles. Finally, its editorial page will stand for the rights of men, irrespective of color or race, for the highest ideals of American democracy, and for reasonable but earnest and persistent attempts to gain these rights and realize these ideals. The magazine will be the organ of no clique or party and will avoid personal rancor of all sorts. In the absence of proof to the contrary it will assume honesty of purpose on the part of all men, North and South, white and Black." The Crisis was on the scene, and frequently was the first publication outlet, for many of the authors who made up what became known as the “Harlem Renaissance” of the 1920’s. Along the way DuBois and his wife Nina had a second child, daughter Yolandé, who in the 1930’s began dating Black bandleader Jimmie Lunceford. But Du Bois didn’t think a bandleader was an appropriate husband for his daughter, so he forced her to marry the Black poet Countee Cullen. Unfortunately, Cullen was Gay, and instead of going on a honeymoon with the new Mrs. Cullen after the ceremony he went off on a vacation with the best man at the wedding. (This anecdote startled me because, while I’ve known about Lunceford for years and have collected all his records, I knew absolutely nothing about his private life.)

One important Du Bois story that wasn’t mentioned in this film was a debate in Chicago in March 1929 between Du Bois and a white supremacist author and publicist named Lothrop Stoddard on the topic, “Shall the Negro Be Encouraged to Seek Cultural Equality?” The story of this fascinating event was told by Ian Frazier in the August 26, 2019 The New Yorker (available online at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/26/when-w-e-b-du-bois-made-a-laughingstock-of-a-white-supremacist). Du Bois went on first and said, that contrary to the claims made by racist pseudo-scientists like Madison Grant (whose own racist books had provided most of the material for Stoddard’s), “the proofs of essential human equality of gift are overwhelming.” Du Bois said that the “Nordics,” the people Stoddard held out as the epitome of the white race, “have overrun the earth and brought not simply modern civilization and technique, but with it exploitation, slavery and degradation to the majority of men. … They have been responsible for more intermixture of races than any other people, ancient and modern, and they have inflicted this miscegenation on helpless unwilling slaves by force, fraud and insult; and this is the folk that today has the impudence to turn on the darker races, when they demand a share of civilization, and cry: ‘You shall not marry our daughters!’ The blunt, crude reply is: Who in Hell asked to marry your daughters?” Stoddard in turn quoted Booker T. Washington’s fingers-and-hands metaphor and said, “The more enlightened men of southern white America … are doing their best to see that separation shall not mean discrimination; that if the Negroes have separate schools, they shall be good schools; that if they have separate train accommodations, they shall have good accommodations.” At this point the published record of the debate by its organizers, the local magazine The Forum, contains the bracketed word, “[Laughter.]” The report of the debate in the Baltimore Afro-American explained that the laughter came from the Black people in the audience who knew full well that the accommodations offered Blacks under Jim Crow segregation were far from “equal” to those offered whites. The Afro-American reporter went on to explain, “When the laughter had subsided, Mr. Stoddard, in a manner of mixed humility and courage, claimed that he could not see the joke. This brought more gales of laughter.” The Forum’s publishers thought they had a potential gold mine in further Du Bois/Stoddard debates, but as Du Bois grimly predicted, Stoddard turned down their offer.

In 1935 Du Bois published what was quite possibly his most important book since The Souls of Black Folk: Black Reconstruction in America, his attempt to use his considerable skills as an historian and a sociologist to demolish the myth that the Reconstruction period from 1865 to 1877 had brought to power a lot of corrupt Black officials who were manipulated by white “scalawags” for their own nefarious ends. It was the ruling history of the era and Du Bois, who’d lived through and worked on the NAACP’s campaign against D. W. Griffith’s racist 1915 masterpiece The Birth of a Nation – a film which had used Griffith’s considerable talents as a movie director to dramatize the racist view of Reconstruction – was determined to reverse it once and for all. Alas, his view of Reconstruction wasn’t taken seriously until the 1960’s, when white historians like Erle McKitrick and Eric Foner (the latter of whom was interviewed for this film) adopted it. Though Du Bois – much to the discontent of fellow NAACP officials, most of whom had been white Quakers – urged African-Americans to support and participate in the U.S.’s involvement in both world wars, after the end of World War II he became strongly pacifist. Part of his change had come from his growing disillusionment with capitalism and his belief that socialism offered humanity the way forward. Part of it was influenced by the new woman in his life, author, composer, and journalist Shirley Graham, whom he’d started dating when he and Nina were separated and whom he married after Nina’s death in 1950. Graham was an active Communist and encouraged Du Bois to join the party. Part of it was also due to a bizarre prosecution Du Bois was subjected to by the U.S. government, which indicted him for having signed the Stockholm Peace Appeal and chaired the Peace Information Center (PIC), which was formed to lobby for the document. The government charged that the PIC was an unregistered lobbying organization for the Soviet Union, but Du Bois and his attorney, Left-wing former Republican New York Congressmember Vito Marcantonio, got the judge to dismiss the case.

In 1945 Du Bois had gone to Manchester, England for the fifth and final Pan-African Congress, where he'd met Kwame Nkrumah, who would become the first President of Ghana after the country achieved independence from British colonial rule in 1957. With the American political climate growing more hostile to Du Bois’s views, Nkrumah essentially offered him asylum in Ghana, and Du Bois accepted. He renounced his American citizenship and became a Ghanaian national (ironically Ghana and the neighboring Gold Coast had been the principal sources for Black slaves kidnapped and sent to America during the African slave trade), where he lived until he died at age 95 on August 27, 1963: the day before the National March on Washington. When his death was announced from the stage at the March on Washington, there was an audible sigh of sorrow from the massive crowd. Du Bois made more than his fair share of political mistakes: he supported Woodrow Wilson for President in 1912 (alienating most Black voters of the time; not many Blacks voted at all, but the few that did were usually Republicans at a time when the Republican party still acted like the “party of Lincoln”), then was shocked when the Virginia-born Wilson instituted outright segregation in federal employment. It’s also creepy, to say the least, to see the photos in this documentary showing Du Bois hobnobbing with such vicious Communist dictators as Stalin, Khrushchev, and Mao. But in general he was an admirable figure and he remains one of my personal heroes. I give PBS a lot of credit for showing this documentary now instead of waiting for next February to time it during so-called “Black History Month.” It’s also a radical statement at a time when Southern states, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s final evisceration of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, are hastening to redraw their Congressional and state legislative maps to drive the few remaining African-American representatives in those states out of power once and for all. The Voting Rights Act was often referred to as “the Second Reconstruction,” and while it took the white Southern establishment 61 years to destroy the Second Reconstruction when it only took them 12 to end the first one, the likely result of the schemes by Southern legislatures and the U.S. and Virginia Supreme Courts will be to keep the House of Representatives safely in Republican hands after the 2026 midterm elections despite the growing unpopularity of their and President Trump’s policies. Activism like Du Bois’s has never been needed since his time as much as it is now.