Truth Behind the Fiction

“My fellow Americans. Not long ago, this country was attacked—not by bombs or planes, but by computer code. A new kind of war, destructive and terrifying… Those are the facts, but not the truth.”

— Robert De Niro, as former President in Netflix's “Zero Day”

That was fiction. But how eerily real it felt when Tulsi Gabbard—former Congresswoman and now Director of National Intelligence—flanked by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rick Crawford, addressed the press with a bombshell: a declassified oversight report from 2020 revealing that senior officials in the Obama administration had orchestrated a false intelligence narrative. The claim? That Russia interfered in the 2016 election to support Donald Trump.

According to the report, the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) was built on weak or manipulated sources, while credible counter-evidence was actively suppressed. Established intelligence protocols were bypassed. The intent, Gabbard suggested, was not to protect national security—but to control a narrative and delegitimise Trump’s presidency from day one. The media, knowingly or not, became the echo chamber for this "contrived narrative."

As stunning as these revelations were, what made them even more compelling was their uncanny resemblance to the plot of Zero Day—a political thriller series that had launched on Netflix around the same period. In the show, Robert De Niro plays a former US President called back to head a special commission investigating a false-flag cyberattack on New York. The culprits? Not a foreign enemy, but a domestic cabal of political elites and defence lobbyists who manipulated intelligence and media to spark war with Russia.

In the series, the De Niro-led commission is granted sweeping authority to investigate, arrest, and reveal the truth. As the narrative unfolds, it turns from a geopolitical thriller into a grim indictment of a democracy under siege from within. In a dramatic finale, the former president’s report spares no one—not even his own daughter, a sitting senator complicit in the cover-up.

For viewers, Zero Day was a powerful drama. For political observers, Gabbard’s press conference felt like its real-world sequel.

In an age of information warfare and algorithmic manipulation, the boundary between fiction and reality is no longer a line—it’s a revolving door.

More than coincidence, this overlap suggests something deeper: a collapse of public trust in democratic institutions, and the rise of storytelling as a weapon of statecraft.

Truth itself becomes a tool—shaped, edited, and deployed like a political dossier.

Tulsi Gabbard’s claims may never achieve the cultural ubiquity of Zero Day, but they offer a chilling window into how the "deep state" is no longer a fringe conspiracy theory—it is an operational framework with significant consequences. If these revelations are accurate, then elections, intelligence, and media are no longer functioning as checks and balances in a democracy—but as interconnected levers in a system designed to manufacture consent.

And this brings us to the question that both Zero Day and Gabbard’s revelation force us to ask:

In a world of curated truths and pre-scripted outrage, do people believe what really happened—or what they were told happened?

Zero Day may be fiction, but it is heavily inspired by fact. And that’s no anomaly. Cinema—especially in politically vibrant societies—has often drawn from real-life events, framing them not just as drama but as philosophical confrontation.

Across the world, filmmakers have used the medium to peel back layers of statecraft, ideology, and betrayal. From All the President’s Men to Zero Dark Thirty, from Wag the Dog to The Post, the role of cinema has never been merely to entertain. It has been to witness, to record, and—at times—to revolt.

In recent years, Indian cinema too has entered this space, albeit with a different tone. Films like The Kashmir Files, The Kerala Story, and Tanhaji have sought to retell historical or under-represented national events.

The challenge isn’t just budget or technology—it’s narrative permission. In the fog of ideological warfare, in a nation brimming with binaries and fault lines, telling the truth can itself become an act of rebellion.

As Tulsi Gabbard’s press conference showed, the public may not always know the real truth, especially when it is buried beneath layers of state-sanctioned “fact,” partisan propaganda, or media manipulation. But perhaps it is the storyteller—armed with fiction, nuance, and courage—who can cut through the noise. Who can wipe the fog from the battlefield.

Because in a time of disinformation and deliberate distortion, truth sometimes survives not in documents, but in stories.

This is not merely a story about Trump or Obama, or Russia or Netflix. It is about the anatomy of modern power—how democracies are not just governed by laws and elections, but by narratives, often forged in secrecy, echoed in media, and later dramatised on screen.

And ultimately, it is a warning: That the greatest threat to freedom may not be foreign invaders or digital viruses—but the stories we choose to believe… and those we choose to silence.

The writer is a TV journalist who writes on culture and diplomacy. Views expressed are personal