Premieres Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2025 at 10 p.m. on KPBS TV / PBS app + YouTube
On Jan. 20, Donald Trump is set to be sworn in as America’s 47th president. The following night, FRONTLINE will trace the path that led to Trump’s historic comeback and his return to the nation’s highest office — four years after he was counted out by many, following efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss.
“You think back to after January 6. The thought of him coming back to the presidency was not even remotely a possibility. A total impossibility to everyone but Trump,” former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, host of The Megyn Kelly Show, says in "Trump’s Comeback."
But as the documentary explores, Trump had spent a lifetime learning how to engineer comebacks — and this one would be his most significant.
“We will never see anything like this in the lifespan of this country, I think, ever again,” Hogan Gidley, a White House deputy press secretary during the first Trump administration, says in the film. “It wasn’t just the most historic, most improbable, impossible comeback — it was a roar-back."
“In the scope of American history, it’s almost unbelievable. In the scope of Donald Trump’s life, it’s kind of routine,” Trump biographer Marc Fisher says in the film. “The story of his life is massive swings between utter failure and glorious victory.”
The documentary is drawn from FRONTLINE’s vast archive of incisive reporting on Trump across nearly a decade — including The Choice 2024, FRONTLINE’s dual biography of Trump and his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris — as well as new interviews with White House insiders and journalists conducted after Trump’s 2024 election victory. It is the latest documentary from award winning filmmaker Michael Kirk, who with his team has made six installments of The Choice and more than 30 documentaries about the Obama, Trump and Biden eras.
Coming after an unprecedented campaign season that saw Trump’s felony conviction in a “hush money” case, multiple assassination attempts against him, and President Joe Biden’s exit from the race just four months before the election, Trump’s Comeback tells the story of Trump’s return to the presidency, overcoming obstacles and opposition.
“The defeated president recapturing the White House four years after a pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands on his watch, after an election that he tried to overturn, after two impeachments, four indictments, 34 felony crimes,” says Peter Baker of The New York Times. “Whether you like Donald Trump or don’t like Donald Trump, you have to be struck by his ability to come back from this. For those who thought he might just be an aberration in American history, a fluke who won in 2016, he’s proved them wrong.”
The film investigates how Trump’s comeback had roots dating back decades, probes defining moments in his career, and offers a valuable primer on his approach to life and politics as his second term begins.
Extended interviews from the making of the documentary with sources including Gidley, Kelly, Baker, Fisher and Trump’s agriculture secretary pick Brooke Rollins will be published in tandem with the premiere of "Trump’s Comeback" through FRONTLINE’s Transparency Project, which makes the series’ source material available to the public.
Watch On Your Schedule: The documentary will be available to watch in full at pbs.org/frontline and in the PBS app starting Jan. 21, 2025, at 7/6c. It will will be available on FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel that night at 10/9c and will also be available on the PBS Documentaries Prime Video Channel.
Credits: A FRONTLINE Production with Kirk Documentary Group, Ltd. The director is Michael Kirk. The producers are Michael Kirk, Mike Wiser and Vanessa Fica. The writers are Michael Kirk and Mike Wiser. The reporters are Vanessa Fica and Brooke Nelson Alexander. The editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE is Raney Aronson-Rath.
