Ezra Klein: “The Trump administration often operates through propaganda of the deed. They’re not an anarchist collective — they’re a state, a regime. But they operate not so often through the dull work of rules, laws, legislation and deliberation but rather through spectacle.
“Venezuela was a spectacle. They do not seem to have planned for the aftermath. They were decapitating the Maduro regime, but they left it otherwise completely in place. Nobody — not even Trump or his administration — seems to know what it means for America to be running Venezuela. But it was an example, an act that showed something.
“Even before the capture of Maduro, they had chosen not to fight the drug war, America’s fentanyl scourge, through laws and legislation on addiction and drugs. Instead, they chose to do very high-profile bombings of alleged drug boats, which, even if they were drug boats, were probably carrying cocaine.
“It was spectacular. It was a message. It was showing what they could do. It was a deed that everybody could see and would talk about.
Masha Gessen: “The Trump administration is an administration of spectacle. I’ve heard it sometimes described as a reality-TV administration, but I don’t think that’s quite right. Because what reality TV wants is ratings. And these spectacles, this propaganda — they’re meant to carry messages. They’re meant to make clear how the world now works.
“Venezuela was structured as spectacle. There did not seem to be a long planning process for what the post-decapitation of the regime would look like, but just: Go in. And then you have this picture of Maduro on the plane, blindfolded. You have this very triumphant news conference from Donald Trump.
“There’s the level of this love of a particular aesthetic of strength, a particular aesthetic of dominance and organization that Trump seems to be instinctively drawn to.
“We’ve known that since his first term. He has an obsession with military parades and, obviously, the spectacle of the transformation of the White House — both the creation of all the gold leaf and the destruction of the East Wing as a demonstration of dominance and power.
“But I also think that Trump is always in a movie. He is always watching himself onscreen. That’s something that makes him different from anyone I’ve ever read or written about. There just seems to be this constant external observation of this character that he’s playing, which is in some ways his superpower. It’s what gives him the ability to shake his fist after literally dodging a bullet and shouting, ‘Fight, fight, fight’ — and having that incredible photo op. Because even at a moment when he really did come face-to-face with death, what he’s thinking of is what it looks like from the outside.
“There’s a whole other level of spectacle that we’re seeing here that we still need to understand.”
Klein: “When I listen to MAGA and Trump and then its theorists and its followers, I hear something being said about this idea that we have restrained the animal, masculine, dominance-oriented, conquest-oriented instincts that made humanity great — that, in the Elon Musk version, will get us to Mars in the future — and tied them up in hollow, liberal values and self-restraints and debate, discussion, deliberation, rules and procedures.
“There’s something being said that is operating at all levels, that the way America is acting under Trump is the way America should act, the way a superpower should act. That is what it means to be a superpower: To be unrestrained. But that the way Trump acts is also the way a man should act.
“I’m almost having trouble having this conversation because the thing I am thinking about is the public execution of Renee Good in Minnesota. It’s a little unclear what happened. Her car was in the middle of the street, and then you watch the federal agents rush the car, and she begins executing a multipoint turn to try to leave. And then an agent shoots her dead in the middle of the street.
“The Trump administration is saying she was trying to run them over. But you can very easily see that she was not trying to run everybody over. She was parked first. They run at her, and she tries to leave. Not even speed out, just leave.
“And it is a spectacle of its own. It is the kind of thing they’ve always been creating the conditions to see happen. I’m not saying they intended for this to happen, but everybody has predicted things like this happening, myself included. And it feels like a message to every protester.
“I’m curious how you have understood her killing and this moment — what its meaning is.”
Gessen: “I think this is a huge event, for lack of a better word. Which I also feel is important to say because in one sense, the spectacle of a driver being executed in an American street is not unfamiliar. It actually happens all the time. Police shoot Black men in their cars with stunning regularity. What was different here was that it wasn’t police — it was ICE. And the person they killed was a white woman, not a Black man.
“So this is another one of those instances where we’ve been on this descent and then fell off a cliff.
“And the particular cliff is: Trump has been, for almost a year now, talking in military terms and war terms about American cities. He has deployed ICE as a military force. Or I shouldn’t say as a military force — as his own paramilitary force.
“Another essential component of a fascist dictatorship is to have a paramilitary force that reports directly to the president, that doesn’t have independent authority — which is effectively what ICE is. And ICE has been recruiting thugs all over the country and swelling its ranks. And Trump has talked about the protesters against ICE — particularly in Portland, not in Minneapolis, where this happened — as the criminals, as extremely dangerous, as people whom war should be waged against.
“So the stage has been set for this execution for nearly a year. It’s almost surprising that this didn’t happen earlier, but now that it has happened, what happens as autocracy establishes itself is that the space available for action shrinks very rapidly.
Wiki intro: M. Gessen (formerly known as Masha Gessen; Russian: Маша Гессен) is a Russian and American journalist, author, and translator who has written extensively on LGBT rights. Bio-female, nonbinary, trans, uses they/them pronouns.
“Gessen writes primarily in English but also in Russian. In addition to authoring several nonfiction books, Gessen has contributed to The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, New Statesman, Granta, Slate, Vanity Fair, Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, and U.S. News & World Report.
“Gessen has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 2017 and an opinion columnist at The New York Times since May 2024.”