President Donald Trump’s first 30 days back in power have been an awesome spectacle. Trump and his agents have engaged in a historic and unprecedented blitzkrieg (“lightning war”) attack on American democracy, government, civil society and the country’s societal institutions more broadly. These attacks have consisted of many dozens of executive orders, diktats and acts that include attempting to revoke the 14h Amendment to the Constitution, usurping Congress’ control over the federal budget and spending, declaring a national emergency at the Southern Border and ordering mass deportations, firing inspectors generals and other non-partisan ethics officials, gutting the FBI and CIA, forcing thousands of career government professionals out of their jobs, establishing a thought crime regime and freeing Trump’s MAGA followers who violently attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Many of Trump’s and his administration’s actions are unconstitutional and likely illegal. Trump promised to be a dictator on “day one” of his return to power, but he is not limiting himself to that one day. As leading historian Heather Cox Richardson bluntly warned in a recent interview, “We’re already in a coup.”
These actions are awesome in the sense that they are causing severe dread and fear and constitute a daunting challenge that cannot be easily countered or overcome. Trump’s return to power and his aptly named “shock and awe” campaign constitute a spectacle in how they reflect a disorienting culture, where events happen so quickly, are mediated by the news media and other (digital) technology and lack coherence so what is left is an alienated and increasingly atomized public that feels disconnected from one another, lacks any meaningful agency to effect broad social change and seeks empty pleasure and distraction. In total, the experience machine of the spectacle has conquered the American people.
In an essay at CounterPunch, Susan Roberts offers these details about the concept of the spectacle:
“The Spectacle’s function in a society is the concrete manufacture of alienation.” Debord’s genius was in seeing that world in its totality and not in the fragmentary form in which it wants to be seen. And he realised that the purpose of the spectacle was to block that totalistic vision and that all of its efforts were focused on defeating such a realisation. To that end, the Spectacle encourages alienation and fragmentation: ‘the alpha and omega of the spectacle is separation.” Which it achieves by connecting to us like the spokes of a wheel. As a result, we are all directed from the centre but kept at a distance from one another. The Spectacle’s success depends on maintaining our alienation and preventing the re-emergence of notions like collective interests, community or solidarity. For its goal is an entirely solipsistic and depoliticised consumerist society.
Debord recognised the importance of authentic human activity, believing that it is by acknowledging and responding to our own volitions that we remind ourselves that we have inner worlds and are capable of reflection and critique, which is precisely why the Spectacle disallows it.
At Truthout, Henry Giroux highlights how the spectacle removes people from “larger social problems” and “public concerns”:
Think of the forces at work in the larger culture that work overtime to situate us within a privatized world of fantasy, spectacle and resentment that is entirely removed from larger social problems and public concerns. For instance, corporate culture, with its unrelenting commercials, carpet-bombs our audio and visual fields with the message that the only viable way to define ourselves is to shop and consume in an orgy of private pursuits. Popular culture traps us in the privatized universe of celebrity culture, urging us to define ourselves through the often empty and trivialized and highly individualized interests of celebrities. Pharmaceutical companies urge us to deal with our problems, largely produced by economic and political forces out of our control, by taking a drug, one that will both chill us out and increase their profit margins. (This has now become an educational measure applied increasingly and indiscriminately to children in our schools.) Pop psychologists urge us to simply think positively, give each other hugs and pull ourselves up by the bootstraps while also insisting that those who confront reality and its mix of complex social issues are, as Chris Hedges points out, defeatists, a negative force that inhibits “our inner essence and power.”
Continuing his starring role in the spectacle, President Trump is much more than a man or a mere mortal, he is now a symbol and character and even a type of godhead and divine savior for his most loyal followers. As the main character in a story that he is writing in real time and imposing on the American people and the world, Trump is ever more extreme in his quest for total power. Trump recently declared that he is a type of American Caesar or Napoleon. He then proclaimed via executive order that he and his attorney general have the final say in disputes over the law. The White House also shared an image of Trump wearing a crown and a robe.
A type of theater of cruelty is central to Trump’s spectacle and exercise of corrupt power. To that point, Trump’s White House social media account recently posted a video of “illegal aliens” being put on an airplane and deported. The audio of the video was enhanced to highlight the sounds of their chains, as MSNBC reports:
The video shows what appears to be ICE officials placing immigrants in chains and handcuffs before they board a plane, presumably for deportation. The post is captioned, “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight,” referring to the acronym for “autonomous sensory meridian response,” a pleasant physical sensation triggered by certain sounds that has become a popular genre of videos on some social media platforms.
The video was filmed during an operation at King County International Airport–Boeing Field in Seattle two weeks ago, reported The Seattle Times, citing a volunteer with an immigrant rights group that monitors weekly deportation flights out of the airport.
At the Daily Beast, Jill Filipovic engages in some needed truth-telling about the depravity of the propaganda video:
The “soothing” sound in this video, apparently, is the jangle of chains.
This was the core message: Putting other human beings in chains makes us feel good. It relaxes us. It’s pleasurable to experience—a white noise machine of human suffering….
It is hard for a person with a basic level of human decency and empathy to understand how anyone finds it enjoyable. But it’s also a signal, a green light to the everyday extremists who enjoy human suffering and have now been told their sickness is not just acceptable, but wonderful.
And it’s an attempt by the truly malevolent to weaponize their dangerous ignorance, to make their viciousness normal—and to implicate all of us in their inhumanity.
Continuing his joyful cruelty, Donald Trump’s Valentine’s Day “greeting” (which also featured “border czar” Tom Homan) was a digital card posted on social media that included the following poem, “Roses are red, Violets are blue, come here illegally and we’ll deport you.”
It is no coincidence that one of Trump’s primary means of communication is via social media and his platform Truth Social. One of the deciding factors in support of Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election was whether a given person received their news information from newspapers and other traditional mainstream news sources or instead from social media and/or smartphone apps. The latter group proved much more vulnerable and easily manipulated by disinformation, misinformation and other lies and distortions about politics and reality — which helps to explain their support for Trump and his MAGA authoritarian populist movement.
On this, Kenn Orphan writes at Counterpunch about the spectacle and the power of social media in the Age of Trump and beyond:
Indeed, I am certain Debord would be horrified at the age of social media. At no other time in human history has there been a greater confluence of authoritarian dominance or social control implemented in such an intimate and ubiquitous manner. Unlike Debord’s time, social media provides a new medium to not only socially condition the masses but for the corporate state to gather what was once private information about those masses via their personally owned devices and apps.
That it masquerades as a form of democracy is equally disturbing, especially since at its core it represents the policing of thought and dampening of dissent. He wrote as if penning a prophecy: “The spectator’s consciousness, imprisoned in a flattened universe, bound by the screen of the spectacle behind which his life has been deported, knows only the fictional speakers who unilaterally surround him with their commodities and the politics of their commodities. The spectacle, in its entirety, is his “mirror image.””
This spectacle reigns supreme in today’s social media culture. It is essential to its formulation and operating guidelines. Under such a paradigm history must be sterilized of analysis and ultimately atomized into unrelated instances to make an eternal present, divorced from any transformative potential.
Donald Trump has now almost fully turned against Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and is basically on the side of Putin and Russia. Trump is rewriting history, declaring that Ukraine provoked the war with Russia. In reality, Russia was the aggressor and invaded Ukraine.
Continuing with the spectacle, Trump is lobbing insults and lies at Zelenskyy like a professional wrestling “heel” (the villain) cutting a “promo” on the “babyface” (the hero). Trump called Zelenskyy a “dictator” and a “moderately successful comedian.” Trump also said that “[Zelinskyy] refuses to have Elections, is very low in Ukrainian Polls, and the only thing he was good at was playing Biden ‘like a fiddle.”
CNN’s Stephen Collinson observes, “Trump’s turn against Ukraine is not just a remarkable spectacle as the United States changes sides in the middle of a war. It’s one example of Trump’s stunning transformation of US foreign policy as America becomes a nation that is rejecting the international system of alliances and friendships that it built to defend democracy and as its president seeks accommodation with authoritarians like Putin.”
One of the defining features of the Trumpocene and ascendant fascism is how so many people did not believe that such events in their full and now obvious horror would ever be possible in post-World War II and “post-racial” America, the “strongest” and “most vibrant ‘democracy’ in the world.” Unfortunately, it is now all too real. Such people are groping for answers and meaning.
Michael D’Antonio, author of a biography about Donald Trump, previewed much of this in an essay at CNN – which was written in 2017: “In his most authentic moments as President, most recently in Harrisburg, he has made himself into a riveting but also terrifying spectacle that is the shame of the Republican Party and the nation.”
In a previous essay here at Salon, I offered a list of keywords and concepts for describing the collective emotions and feelings that many Americans are experiencing in the weeks and months from Election Day to Trump’s formally taking power on Inauguration Day and beyond. I have added “discombobulated” to that ongoing list and type of guide to the long Trumpocene.
The purpose of Trump and his allies’ shock and awe campaign against American democracy, the rule of law, the Constitution, a humane society and reality itself is to wear down and distract the opposition. Pro-democracy Americans and other people of conscience and honor who care about the present and future of the country must immediately reorient themselves and move from reaction and inaction to immediate action. The time for recalibration and rest is over.
In a recent essay in the Los Angeles Times, Mary McNamara offers some solid practical advice about how to respond: “The fight must dodge Trump, the persona, and be brought to Trump, the president, and the changes he does or does not bring to this country.”
If the leaders of the Democratic Party and other pro-democracy civil society organizations are not moving fast enough, in the correct direction – or at all – it is up to their members and the broader public to force them to. If the leaders will not lead, then it is up to the people to lead from the bottom up. Those so-called leaders can then follow or be left behind.
There is a deep and rich and vibrant history and tradition of liberal, progressive, and real pro-democracy populism and organizing and mass collective action in the United States. It is long overdue that it was mined and harnessed in defense of multiracial pluralistic democracy and to counter the Age of Trump and American fascism.
