Ken Burns Cut Lines From His American Revolution Doc Because They Sounded Too Much Like Trump
Ken Burns told the Edinburgh International Film Festival on Friday that he removed passages from his new The American Revolution documentary because their echoes of present-day politics were so strong that viewers would assume he planted them deliberately.
Appearing at Central Hall in a session hosted by Dave Calhoun, Burns said the original cut included a line from Thomas Jefferson about a constitutional convention: "What if someone should lose an election but pretend false votes?" Alexander Hamilton, in the same passage, was concerned that someone might "use their popularity and create chaos," adding: "No man is above the law." Burns said he pulled the lines after Donald Trump was re-elected, because "people are gonna say I put that in" (The Hollywood Reporter).
The six-part series, co-directed with Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt, is Burns's most recent project in a career that stretches from Brooklyn Bridge (1981) through The Civil War (1990), Jazz (2001) and The Vietnam War (2017). He has said he wants to strip away "the barnacles of sentimentality" around the founding of the United States (New York Post), and has previously rejected the idea that the series functions as a commentary on the Trump era (Variety).
At the festival, Burns also referenced President Trump's unfounded claim, made during a 2024 presidential debate, that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating their pets (The Hollywood Reporter).
A separate Obama documentary is in the works. Burns said he has filmed eight two-hour interviews with Barack Obama, the most recent in 2024, but is "waiting for the dust to settle" on the Obama presidency before releasing the film. He also said he would "very much" like to make a documentary about Donald Trump (The Times).
Burns spoke candidly about the economics of long-form documentary-making. The Vietnam War, he said, took ten-and-a-half years to finish because fundraising was "so frustrating." A premium cable or streaming service, he noted, would have handed him $30 million in a single pitch — but without creative control. He chose the slower, public-television route instead.
Burns lives in rural Walpole, New Hampshire, and said the only thing he sacrificed by staying with PBS and living off-grid was "the society of his colleagues." The trade-off, in his telling, was keeping final cut.
For documentary audiences, the Edinburgh session offered a rare look at how a film-maker who insists on historical distance wrestles with material that keeps bumping into the present. The lines Burns cut were written in the eighteenth century. The reason he cut them is 2026.
