Trump: The Criminal Conspiracy Case review – outstanding but blood-chilling

This gripping documentary about the case of a former president challenging votes plays out like a wild legal drama. But if you’re anxious about the November election, it is also a pre-Halloween horror story

Towards the end of the outstanding, thriller-ish documentary Trump: The Criminal Conspiracy Case, I find myself transfixed by a courtroom exchange that seems ripped straight from the script of a legal drama. Ashleigh Merchant, currently representing one of Donald Trump’s co-defendants in the Georgia election interference case, is a former friend of Fulton County district attorney Fani T Willis. While Willis’s own lawyer argues that the DA should not have to testify about her romantic relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade, and whether it would constitute impropriety, Willis enters the courtroom dramatically. On the stand, she coolly tells Merchant that she has been “anxious to have this conversation with you today”, her tone steely and tough. As I say, gripping. It is like an episode of The Good Wife.

This is part of the problem, of course. The future of democracy in the United States has been reduced to a salacious spectacle and it is difficult to remain focused on the issue at hand. Thinking that it’s like a TV drama, likening it to entertainment, is buying into the culture of being unable to take even the most important issues seriously. Still, television as precise as Trump: The Criminal Conspiracy Case comes in handy. It retains focus throughout its 90 minutes, and proves a rare example of a programme that doesn’t seem long enough. It is a lean, effective and chilling summary of exactly what Trump and 18 others have been accused of in Georgia: attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 US presidential election. (This is just one of the four criminal cases against him.)