The fascists have been beating their chests for more than a month now. Not that they ever really stopped. Some men would rather go to battle than go to therapy. But the violent proclamations have been turned up another tick since February 28th when the US joined partner-in-genocide Israel to begin their senseless, useless, avarice-driven war against Iran, daily headlines filled with white supremacists touting superiority, control, and dominance even as friendly-fire incidents and crashed multi-million fighter jets make government officials look so foolish that the bluster just gets louder. Social media posts and press conferences pound the point as Trump leaves no doubt that this is very much a blood for oil war. Our vile president sees the world as his for the taking, the threat of destruction behind every wish and every ask.

The Dinosaurs is the perfect dinosaur film for the Trump era.

Dinosaurs have been a foil for our worries, fears, and frustrations for a long time. A 1855 cartoon in Punch jokes that dinosaurs are ruined by being turned into icons of education and social betterment rather than being left as monsters. In 1916, the pacifist Anti-Preparedness Committee adopted “Jingo” the Stegosaurus as their mascot, an embodiment of “all armor plate and no brains!” that was meant to embarrass people out of getting involved in WWI. “Going the way of the dinosaur” was a 20th century aphorism that had less to do with the reality of extinction than the idea that dinosaurs were too slow and dim-witted to adapt - just like businesses that had grown too large to shift with market fluctuations. And of course, war was always there. As Zoë Lescaze documents in her epic and lavish Paleoart, at the time English naturalists and scholars were just beginning to develop a science of paleontology and name ancient creatures such as Pleiosaurus and Megalosaurus in the early 19th century, “paleoart held a mirror to an expanding empire, reflecting its shining ideals or progress and well-ordered sovereignty, as well as the relentless violence that secured imperial control.”

Lescaze may as well have been writing about The Dinosaurs. In America, a nation built on stolen land, stolen people, and stolen labor, we’ve seen a 21st century intensification of the same imperialist, colonialist, and fascist drives. For years we’ve heard Trump’s bluster and threats over annexing Canada and stealing Greenland, which now seem like nothing compared to the kidnapping of Venezuela’s president and his wife and Trump’s ongoing threats to send Iran to “the Stone Age.” Day by day and hour by hour, there is more shouting and posturing over superiority and control - more than a decade of hateful white supremacist vitriol centered on one man’s distorted view of the world. The Dinosaurs shares the same concern, the show’s narration making every scene about power, ferocity, and world domination.

It’d be a relief if the show wasn’t so deeply in love with its violent rhetoric and I could instead focus on scientific matters like how the show’s starring Spinosaurus probably didn’t use fish to bait sharks - the behavior is entirely borrowed from modern herons. But even then, there’s very little science here to discuss at all and the program makes no effort to show its work. The show has no scientific appendix, no online reference, no supplemental documentary like The Science of Walking With Beasts, nor the explanatory science bites created for Prehistoric Planet. The Dinosaurs is all vibes, whether it’s Yutyrannus hunting sauropods in an early snowfall or “the green revolution” of angiosperms that are falsely presented as being so difficult to eat that they drove stegosaurs to extinction. And the vibe? Dominance.

The first episode of The Dinosaurs focused on dinosaurs fighting against their nemeses, the “ancient reptiles.” The second narrowed in on sexual dominance, the binary gender expectations of big and strong males versus females meant to tend their bloodlines or get out of the way. In the third, titled “Reign,” The Dinosaurs envisions a global takeover so complete that Spinosaurus is presented as a dinosaur colonizing the seas in the name of the terrible lizards, even pterosaurs presented as “one of the dinosaurs’ oldest rivals” through Freeman’s simplistic, nonsense narration.

Dominance is emphasized over and over again only to set us up for the fall we know is coming in the fourth and final episode. The tragedy of the dinosaurs is honed by emphasizing how great they must have been right up to the second before impact. But as the viewers of the show get emotional over dinosaurs, feeling as if the Earth was made for the dinosaurs only for the reptiles to face decimation by an asteroid, I have to wonder whether the empathy is partly from the show’s colonialist core.

“Through it all, the dinosaurs will expand their empire and advance relentlessly to seize Earth’s final frontiers,” Morgan intones early in the third episode. Replace “the dinosaurs” with “the United States” and you have a 2026 White House press release. The show is adamant that dinosaurs fought for their place on our planet in a war of all against all, nature red in tooth and claw, stomping and roaring and invading and fighting until the planet was finally, undoubtedly theirs. The only reason the dinosaurs did not maintain control was a cosmic tragedy. It is too painfully close to the way modern colonialist powers present themselves.

I’ve argued against the narrative of “dinosaur dominance” for years now. I hated hearing “dinosaurs ruled the Earth” coming from my own mouth. So I tried to change it. When the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology asked me to give a keynote at their 2023 annual meeting, I challenged the fable that dinosaurs were supreme - both in popular culture and in actual ancient ecosystems - and repeated myself in Aeon and Popular Science. But why would anyone listen to me? This is a time when toxic masculinity and fascism aren’t just corrosive social phenomena, they’re big business, and so dinosaurs must be hyped as the biggest, meanest, most adaptive, relentless animals of all time. The Dinosaurs perfectly captures this rotten moment, every interaction between living things boiled down to a crusty rime of who’s holding power over whom.

Of course we miss the dinosaurs. For many of us, the reptiles are friends we’ve held for longer than people in our lives. But I worry about the sense that the Earth rightfully belonged to the dinosaurs, or that indifferent nature treated them unfairly. The dinosaurs were part of our planet. Not lords of it.

You wouldn’t know from watching The Dinosaurs. There is no sense of community in the program, no sense of basic ecology that would demonstrate how an animal like T. rex could only exist because of many, many other lives that created the ecosystem the carnivore inhabited and, in turn, shaped. There is no sense of reciprocity or any relationship other than one centered around conquest. The focus of the show is on dinosaurian control only, as if each and every sauropod and spinosaur was doing their part in claiming the Earth for themselves. The Dinosaurs’ view of nature is “the powerful rule and the weak drool,” casting geopolitical ideas of ownership over ancient times when there were no borders - there was just life gardening itself through innumerable, stunning relationships.

We’ve come to learn so much about dinosaurs. But if we remain obsessed over the reign, the supremacy, and the dominance of the dinosaurs? Then we don’t know them at all.