Two related things happened on Wednesday: Donald Trump announced that the US would resume testing nuclear weapons, and we watched A House of Dynamite, the hottest movie on Netflix, which features an ensemble cast and a plot that revolves around the government’s reaction to a lone intercontinental ballistic missile heading for the continental United States.

Before we get into how those two things are connected, we want to point out that this article may contain spoilers, so continue at your own peril.

We watch a lot of movies, and, having covered Congress and the White House for years in Washington, DC, political thrillers are one of our favorite genres.

That being said, until last night, we have always been able to distinguish reality from entertainment… even if the fictional president was clearly modeled after a real commander-in-chief.

In other words, when watching Air Force One, an action-packed flick in which Harrison Ford as President James Marshall fights off terrorists who hijack his plane, we never once wondered whether Bill Clinton, who was the president at the time, would be able to defeat a few Kazakh separatists in hand-to-hand combat.

Or, when a president and his team were faced with an impossible choice, we didn’t speculate as to what George W. Bush or Barack Obama would have done in that situation. The same held true for Donald Trump, who was always ill-equipped for the presidency, and Joe Biden, who was equally ill-suited as commander-in-chief toward the end of his term.

For example, when re-watching Olympus Has Fallen recently, we didn’t once ponder that it would have been easier for the North Korean antagonists of the film to just pay off Trump in exchange for whatever it is they wanted, or when watching White House Down last year, we didn’t pause to think whether Biden would have been able to crawl through an elevator shaft (or run up a flight of stairs for that matter).

That all changed last night.

On its face, A House of Dynamite features a fairly cookie-cutter Hollywood plot: Out of the blue, an unknown actor fires a single (presumably nuclear-tipped) missile toward the United States, and the president and his team now have to deal with this emergency and formulate a response.

Ordinarily, this would make for an entertaining couple of hours.

Instead, it was frightening.

For the first time ever when watching a political thriller, we were wondering whether the president was sane or whether his Secretary of Defense was a former morning show host.

What we are trying to say is that, usually, there is a presumption of some level of competence on the part of the characters in this type of movie.

That’s because, in our experience, most people in government are competent on some level. Or, at least, they used to be.

But not now.

Led by a severely mentally ill president, the US government is now run by a bunch of partisan amateurs, and what made A House of Dynamite so chilling is that we kept wondering what would happen if this, or any, emergency would befall the United States with the current group of buffoons in charge.

It made for a harrowing viewing experience.

Because, let’s be honest, who in this cabinet could be trusted to make good decisions in a real crisis? Perhaps Marco Rubio, but only if a spine isn’t required.

But what about Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, or Tulsi Gabbard?

Do you really think they could provide sound counsel in an emergency?

Obviously, Trump poses an existential crisis to American democracy. But let’s not forget that he can also do incalculable harm to the rest of the world, and we just have to keep our fingers crossed that no situation arises that allows him to do so.

Which brings us to the president’s announcement on Wednesday that the US would resume nuclear weapons tests.

While Trump justified this decision by saying he merely wants to match the testing programs of countries like Russia and China, no country other than North Korea has carried out an explosive test of a nuclear weapon this millennium.

If anything, the other nuclear powers will now have a reason to resume tests of their own, which could lead to a new arms race.

But, hey, with Trump at the helm and a team of crackerjack experts like Pete Hegseth in place, what could go wrong?