Last night I excerpted portions of a 1.10.26 N.Y. Times Ezra Klein Show podcast — an exacting discussion by Klein and M.Gessen that identifies and describes in depth the ongoing Donald Trump spectacle barrage.
Here’s what I wrote this morning in the comment thread:
Klein and Gessen have seriously nailed and bull’s-eyed it with their assessment of Trump being deeply, instinctually invested in brash, totalitarian spectacle. Swayed and swooned by it.
Spectacle as a theatrical tool or grand dramatic strategy. Spectacle as a demonstration of force and grand power. Spectacle doesn’t seek to persuade or acquire broad consensus — it trumpets, parades, dramatizes, symbolically bludgeons.
When Klein and Gessen said that word something clicked in my head. Tom Wolfe called it “the ‘aha’ phenomenon”, and I swear to God it just clicked into place.
The killing of Renee Good obviously wasn’t planned in advance, but it was a cruel, media-flooding spectacle all the same.
MAGA stalwarts believe that Trump is doing God’s work by pushing back against the multi-cultural immigrant hordes (“They’re eating the dogs!”) and warring with the deeply deranged, white-guy-hating, gender-fluid wokeys, but they also know that he has only the remainder of ‘26 and possibly early ‘27 before it all starts to topple and crash into a heap.
Trump surely knows this. He’s fortified by strong German-family genes, yes, but he’s old and clearly withering (turns 80 on 6.14.26 — five months from now) and declining after a fashion, and knows he’ll be impeached after the Democrats re-take the House and possibly even the Senate in November.
So he’s in a hurry to throw more logs onto the fire and swamp the country with more and more Trumpian spectacle (including the likelihood of a forthcoming attack upon Iran’s theocratic dictators as the street furor grows — a prospective move that I personally agree with) while he still has the moxie.
Spectacle, spectacle, spectacle.