Rosenberg is executive director of Open the Government, a nonpartisan group advocating for government transparency and accountability.
It is hard to ignore whistleblowers these days. A whistleblower complaint about a controversial exchange between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky triggered the impeachment inquiry and subsequent trial that dominated the news for months. Even while it was focused on the impeachment trial, the Senate was also looking into reports from another whistleblower alleging that a Trump political appointee interfered with an audit of either the president or Vice President Mike Pence.
Even Hollywood cannot seem to get enough of whistleblowers. While movies and television shows about whistleblowers are not new, the theatrical and Netflix releases of several movies last year suggest a growing appetite for more insight into who they are and how their commitment to creating an accountable society benefits the greater good.
The protagonists' motivation in "The Report," "The Laundromat" and "The Great Hack" were the same: A desire to use access to information and free speech to expose abuse of power. They understand on a deep level, even in the face of formidable resistance, that transparency is the first step toward ensuring the accountability that can address societal ills. By exposing corporate or government wrongdoing, whistleblowers often face tremendous personal and professional risks.
In "The Report," Adam Driver plays Senate staffer Dan Jones, who doggedly dedicates several years to investigate the CIA's enhanced detention and interrogation program after the Sept. 11 attacks. Jones uncovers that detainees were severely tortured — one killed — using waterboarding and other CIA interrogation techniques. The resulting 6,000-page torture report concluded that the program did not yield any significant intelligence breakthroughs. To date, despite years of litigation and advocacy by transparency and accountability organizations, only the executive summary has been released. More than 5,000 pages remain hidden from view, and those complicit in torture crimes have not been held accountable.
In "The Laundromat," Ellen Martin (Meryl Streep) gets the runaround after her husband dies in a tragic tour boat accident. She and the other victims of the accident never get the insurance payment they are entitled to because the company's liability coverage came from a shell company in the Caribbean being investigated by the FBI for fraud — a fact she uncovers while investigating the company's deceptive practices.
The fictional account follows the byzantine true story of the Panama Papers, the release of which uncovered a complex, massive tax evasion scheme. The 11 million documents a whistleblower provided to a German newspaper detailed the ways in which some of the wealthiest individuals in the world used offshore banks and shell companies to exploit the global financial system for personal gain.
The Netflix documentary "The Great Hack" explores how a London-based data company, Cambridge Analytica, scraped the personal information of millions of Facebook users and, unbeknownst to them, used the data to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the United Kingdom's Brexit movement and other elections around the globe.
The film's central figure, David Carroll, sued Cambridge Analytica demanding full disclosure of his data set profile (one of the millions the company created) and for details on how the company obtained it. The movie follows Carroll's attempt to reclaim his personal information by taking up the fight in Britain, where privacy laws are stronger than here. The movie also features interviews with Christopher Wylie, a former Cambridge Analytica employee who blew the whistle on the company, exposing the way it harvested and then weaponized data to influence elections and grassroots movements.
The fallout from the scandal and the lawsuit pressured Facebook into taking more responsibility for how it shares user data with third-party entities and has prompted Congress to consider strengthening federal privacy laws.
These three movies underscore whistleblowing as a right, not a crime, and debunk the misconception that whistleblowers act out of self-interest. Instead, audiences can see how all the characters are motivated to expose and correct unethical and illegal activity.
But to do so effectively, whistleblowers need the protection of stronger, streamlined whistleblower protection laws and a cross-section of experts in their corner — lawyers, freedom of information advocates, journalists and even members of Congress — to provide guidance on how to safely disclose wrongdoing.
The need for resources that encourage and protect whistleblowers is vital. As governments and corporations become less open, the role of whistleblowers as agents of accountability is increasingly important.
Hollywood's championing of whistleblowers as critical sources of information about wrongdoing and as pillars of an accountable and transparent society is a positive trend that must continue.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.