Dinesh D’Souza, the documentary filmmaker President Donald Trump pardoned for violating the law on campaign contributions, recently unveiled the subject of his next film.

“The Death of a Nation” — in its dramatic cover art — features an image of President Trump morphed with one of former President Abraham Lincoln.

In light of potential public scrutiny that D’Souza might be “repaying” Trump for the pardon with a documentary film praising the president, the filmmaker commented to The Hollywood Reporter (THR) about the project.

“We’ve been working on the film for more than a year and commissioned the artwork two months ago. Trump had no inkling of the art or the theme of the movie when he pardoned me,” D’Souza said.

“The Left is screaming about my pardon more than all of Trump’s other pardons put together,” he added.

D’Souza’s 2012 hit film, “2016: Obama’s America,” became the second most-successful political documentary in history.

The conservative filmmaker ran afoul of election law when he gave $20,000 to Republican Wendy Long in 2012 using so-called straw donors. D’Souza pled guilty and spent eight months in a halfway house, paid a $30,000 fine, and spent five years on probation.

Before Trump pardoned D’Souza last month, Harvard Law School Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz said he believed the filmmaker’s case smacked of “selective prosecution.” Many agreed — and felt former President Barack Obama’s Justice Department unfairly targeted D’Souza for his critical feature film. This seemed especially so in light of the harsh sentencing for a crime typically punished with little more than a slap on the wrist.

“Will be giving a Full Pardon to Dinesh D’Souza today,” Trump said in a tweet on May 31. “He was treated very unfairly by our government!”

While Fox News host Laura Ingraham noted on “The Ingraham Angle” recently that D’Souza “shouldn’t have done it,” she argued he was singled out because “he was someone who was highly effective in a world dominated by the Left — namely, filmmaking.”

Who do you think would win the Presidency?

By completing the poll, you agree to receive emails from LifeZette, occasional offers from our partners and that you've read and agree to our privacy policy and legal statement.

“The Death of a Nation” is set for an August 3 release in 1,000 theaters. It will also be released on Blu-ray and DVD, through the production firm Quality Flix, with streaming services from Universal Pictures Entertainment.

“Through stunning historical recreations and a searching examination of fascism and white supremacy, ‘Death of a Nation’ cuts through progressive big lies to expose hidden history and explosive truths,” the movie teases.

In addition to “2016: Obama’s America,” D’Souza has two other successful documentaries to his credit: “America: Imagine the World Without Her” (which was also a New York Times best-selling book) and “Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party.”

Kyle Becker is a content writer and producer with LifeZette. Follow him on Twitter

(photo credit, homepage image: Dinesh D’Souza, CC BY-SA 2.0, by Gage Skidmore; photo credit, article image: Dinesh D’Souza, CC BY-SA 2.0, by Gage Skidmore)