News coverage of Donald Trump’s second administration is relentless. Filmmakers Demid Sheronkin and Can Dündar stepped back from the daily flood of headlines to examine free speech and democracy in the US in their DW documentary Democracy Under Attack: Can Dündar and Trump’s America, which premiered on April 14 at the Human Rights Film Festival Berlin.
Dündar, a Turkish journalist in exile, said the filmmakers struggled to find an angle that could cut through Trump’s turbocharged news cycle. “We decided to focus on the situation of the academics, as a kind of microcosm reflecting the attacks on democracy,” he explained.
Mark Bray, a Rutgers University history professor and author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, is one of the most prominent academics featured. Bray was added to the far-right Professor Watchlist, created in 2016 by Turning Point USA. After Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk was assassinated in September 2025, Trump signed an executive order designating the antifa movement a “domestic terrorist organization,” and Bray began receiving intensified death threats. Students from Turning Point USA’s campus chapter denounced him for allegedly promoting political violence. When Bray’s home address circulated in harassers’ emails, he and his family relocated to Spain. The film shows the couple describing obstacles they faced leaving the US, including inexplicably canceled flight reservations.
The filmmakers shot intense scenes at AmericaFest 2025, Turning Point USA’s first convention after Kirk’s death, which drew about 30,000 attendees who treated Kirk like a martyr. Sheronkin described the event as feeling “like a blend of political rally and Christian service; a battleground and a festival.” Conservative speakers are shown rousing the MAGA crowd; former Trump adviser Steve Bannon declares, “We are at war. We are in a political and ideological war.”
Ava Kwan, the Rutgers student who petitioned for Bray’s removal and was celebrated onstage at AmericaFest, told the filmmakers her action aimed to keep students safe. She expressed sympathy for Bray’s threats but denied responsibility for them and said she also had her private information doxxed online.
Beyond the convention’s charged atmosphere, the film highlights the broader ideological divide in the US. While academics tend to be more liberal than the general public, the documentary acknowledges far-right voices within the academy, including University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax, who shares white supremacist views on camera. Wax was suspended at half pay and removed from teaching for the 2025–26 school year but kept her tenure.
Can Dündar anchors the film with perspectives shaped by his own repression in Turkey. An investigative journalist who survived imprisonment, an assassination attempt, and forced exile to Berlin in 2016, Dündar has become a global symbol of press freedom. He did not travel to the US for the project on legal advice, saying he did not want to become “a good gift of Trump to Erdogan.” Traveling to Canada for other interviews, Dündar was interrogated for hours at the border because of his “terrorist” label.
In Toronto he met Yale philosopher Jason Stanley, who also left the US. Stanley, whose parents were Holocaust survivors, is bleak about America’s trajectory: “The US is not in a temporary crisis. The US is over as a project.”
Dündar draws parallels between warning signs he witnessed in Turkey and what he sees in the US: erosion of the rule of law, attacks on media freedom, and other early indicators of authoritarianism. “I feel like a new wave of authoritarianism was tested in Turkey, and it’s now spreading all over the world; I can smell it, I can feel it,” he told DW. He urged Europeans to be alert as well, warning that “democracy shouldn’t be taken for granted.”
Edited by: Brenda Haas