Chernobyl is a HBO miniseries with a lot to say about truth in these Trumpian times

On the advice of a friend, I just finished watched Chernobyl, a five-episode HBO miniseries about the 1986 nuclear plant disaster in what is now Ukraine, but at that time was part of the Soviet Union. This historical drama aired in 2019 during the first Trump administration.

Which is fitting, because a central theme in Chernobyl is how far Soviet authorities were willing to go to keep the truth about the disaster from becoming known. To the people who lived near the nuclear plant. To the workers charged with dealing with the meltdown. To the world at large.

Authoritarian regimes detest truth-telling. That was evident in the Soviet Union in 1986. And it is evident now in the second Trump administration in 2026. Authoritarianism demands loyalty to a person or cause. Donald Trump. Communism. Whether it be the MAGA movement or a supposed worker’s paradise, truth-telling is feared because it threatens a lie: that the authoritarian person or cause knows best and must not be questioned.

The Chernobyl nuclear plant exploded because of operator errors and design flaws. This became known through the diligent work of nuclear scientists who had been given the task of learning the cause of the disaster by a — shock! — competent Soviet official.

Soviet authorities were fine with blaming the people in charge of operating the nuclear plant. But they did all they could to hide the fact of a serious design flaw in the Chernobyl nuclear reactor that led to a manageable problem turning into a major disaster. Admitting the existence of the flaw would undermine confidence in the supposedly infallible Soviet system.

In the HBO miniseries, Valery Legasov, a nuclear scientist brought in to aid clean-up efforts, ends up caring more about the truth than preserving his career as the director of the Kurchatov Institute, Russia’s leader in the research and development of nuclear energy. Near the end of Chernobyl, inspiring words from Legasov appear in a voiceover.

I just wish incessant liar Donald Trump and his Republican cronies would take them to heart.

To be a scientist is to be naive. We are so focused in our search for truth, we fail to consider how few actually want us to find it. But it is always there, whether we see it or not, whether we choose to or not. The truth doesn’t care about our needs or wants, it doesn’t care about our governments, our ideologies, our religions. It will lie in wait for all time. And this, at last, is the gift of Chernobyl. Where I once would fear the cost of truth, now I only ask: What is the cost of lies?