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.