Enabling a demagogue: a new film traces Republicans’ capitulation to Donald Trump

Michael Kirk's documentary Lies, Politics and Democracy is a chilling study in how Trump subdued the Republican party

Michael Kirk has been making documentary films for more than half a century. He has chronicled the peaks and troughs of US politics, winning every significant broadcast journalism award along the way. But nothing prepared him for the scale of the threat now facing American democracy.

There's never been a film I made where I was more anxious, unhappy to make it, unwilling to discover the things we were discovering," Kirk, 74, says of his latest project for PBS's investigative series Frontline. Worried' is not a strong enough word for how I feel about where we are as a country and I don't think I'm alone."