Venezuela, Renee Good and Trump’s ‘Assault on Hope’

0:09Awkward

0:28As In the early 20th century, there was this anarchist idea about the propaganda of the deed. The propaganda of the deed was that there were these forms of direct action, and many of them violent, assassinations, bombings, that when you did them, they were so spectacular. Everybody would hear about them. And when everybody heard about them, there would be copycats by making the impossible possible, by making clear that society did not work how you thought it worked, that the state did not have the power you thought it had, that could rupture society itself and create the possibility of a moment of revolutionary upheaval.

1:15I think there is a way in which you should and can understand the Trump administration as operating often through propaganda of the deed. Now, they're not an anarchist collective. They're a state. They're a regime. But they operate not so often through the dull work of rules and laws and legislation and deliberation, but through spectacle. and through the meaning of particular spectacles. Venezuela was a spectacle. They do not seem to have planned for the aftermath. They were decapitating the Maduro regime, but they left the regime otherwise completely in place. Nobody seems to know, even in the administration, what it means for America to be running Venezuela, but it was an example, an act that showed something.

2:12And even before the capture of Maduro, They had chosen not to fight the drug war, the fentanyl scourge, through laws and legislation on addiction and drugs, but instead do these very high-profile bombings of alleged drug boats that, even if they were drug boats, were probably carrying cocaine because fentanyl doesn't come here that way. 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. Liberation Day. You can keep going on and on and on like this. The Trump administration is an administration of spectacle. And I've heard it sometimes described as reality TV administration, but I don't think that's quite right.

2:54Because what reality TV wants is ratings. But these spectacles, this propaganda, is meant to carry messages. It is meant to make clear how the world now works. My guest today is Masha Gessen, who grew up in the Soviet Union, who's my colleague here at Times Opinion. has written remarkable books like The Future is History about living under Vladimir Putin, and who's been a clear and relentless and very perceptive voice on what it means and what it is like to live in a country that is turning into a different kind of regime. And I wanted to talk to them about what propaganda is being spread through these deeds.

3:41What rupture with the way things were done? What revolutionary moment the Trump administration is trying to instantiate through all these moments of spectacle that we are living through one after another after another? As always, my email, Ezra Klein Show at NYTimes.com.

4:10Basha Gesson, welcome to the show. Great to be here. So on one level, the target of the recent operation in Venezuela was obviously President Nicolas Maduro. On another level, you've argued the target was the New World Order of Law, Justice, and Human Rights that was heralded in the wake of World War II. Tell me about that. So, you know, I always feel like I have to make a lot of caveats when I talk about the post-World War II order. All these multilateral institutions were created, all these mechanisms, international courts, the UN, the Security Council, because it was in many ways an aspiration.

4:49An aspiration to creating an order that would, A, prevent a new global war, something at which it has been very successful, and B, prevent the kind of disregard for human life that made the atrocities of World War II possible. And in that, it's been much less successful. But the aspiration remained. And I think even though the United States was historically one of the parties that violated this order because it had the power to do so, it still did it under the cover of respecting those aspirations. And what I think has changed with the pullouts from all these different multilateral institutions and the blatant disrespect for them and actually contempt for them that Trump personally and his administration have articulated, and I think it's sort of culminated with Venezuela.

5:45If there's an event that I think of as sort of the nail in the coffin of the new international world order, it will be Venezuela. I guess when you talk about international law here. The history, including recent history, of what it has clearly not been capable of preventing or bounding is pretty long. I mean, Israel and Gaza is ongoing. Russia inside Ukraine is ongoing. There was much about the drone strikes in the Obama administration that was not working through, let's call it, you know, a normal set of due process. And frankly, Maduro himself, which I think is very important to say in all this.

6:28He was not a peaceful, humanistic, democratically elected leader. He was a brutal, repressive dictator, destroying his political opposition, remaining in power after losing an election. And so when we talk about there being a tipping point, you know, are we just upset because it is Donald Trump doing it, but he's just revealing the way the world really works and has worked, just stripped of its veneer of bureaucratic opacity? Well, first of all, the veneer is important. It's important that at least the George W. Bush administration felt it was necessary to lie to the UN rather than disregard the UN altogether.

7:12Out of respect for the institution, I mean, it sounds ridiculous, right? But there was a moment after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine when it seemed that actually all these mechanisms that were so painstakingly created and one step forward, two steps back, that they may all finally kick into gear because there was this unprecedented consensus, at least Western consensus, on Russia's crimes in Ukraine. And then with Gaza, that consensus fractured and the hope for these institutions really kicking into gear dimmed. At the same time, there was the International Court of Justice hearing initiated by South Africa's suit against Israel that was itself a new phenomenon in international law.

7:59And it's very easy to look at all the ways in which international law has failed. it's much more difficult to be able to measure what it has prevented. Certainly one thing that it has prevented over the last 80 years is another global war. And at least until Venezuela, it seemed that it wasn't a foregone conclusion that the attempts to create an international rule of law were doomed. I've been thinking about the differences and similarities of Venezuela and Iraq, because ultimately Iraq is also the invasion of is a betrayal of the international order. But you watch through the quite long run up to that invasion.

8:50The Bush administration doing two things that at least reflect a view that it should be caught trying. One is there's a very long period of deliberation in America itself. deliberation with Congress, deliberation on Sunday morning news shows. There is a long debate in this country in which arguments are being made back and forth, in which bills are being considered, in which debate is being had. And there's also a debate internationally, Colin Powell going to the UN and giving a presentation we now know had falsehoods in it and in some ways knew then. And ultimately, the UN does not go along and then you have the coalition of the willing and it is a betrayal of the order.

9:33But it has this idea that the U.S. should still be working within. And so there is this way in which you see the total wiping away of that. And you can understand it's having both continuity and discontinuity. And I'm curious how you see that. Well, exactly. It's very difficult to say, you know, it's better to lie to the United Nations than to disregard the United Nations. But I think maybe it is better to lie to the United Nations. But I wouldn't just look at the Iraq War as precedent. I think Kosovo is a really interesting precedent, right? Kosovo, which was an air war launched by NATO, but without sanction of the UN Security Council.

10:20And that, you know, that seemed to me even at the time hugely problematic. But there was still lip service to, first of all, NATO. second on to respecting international norms. We can point to times when the president didn't get congressional approval. We can point to times when the United States didn't get approval of the UN Security Council. We can point to times when it acted independently of NATO. We can point to times when it blatantly lied about what it was doing. But I can't really think of a time when it was doing all of that at the same time demonstratively. And I think there's a kind of transition from sort of the quantity of things that this administration is doing to a new quality of being in the world.

11:07And the Trump administration both, I think, appreciates, but in many ways governs through spectacle, where other administrations govern much more through rules and laws and regulations. They really focus on spectacle. And Venezuela was structured as spectacle, right? Not a long planning process for what the post-decapitation of the regime would look like. But just you go in and, you know, then you have this picture of Maduro on the plane, blindfolded. You have this, like, you know, very triumphant press conference from Donald Trump. What is the role of spectacle here? So I think 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.

12:05And we've known that since his first term, right? His obsession with military parades and the spectacle of the transformation of the White House, both the gold leaf and the destruction of the East Wing, right? The demonstration of dominance and power. But I also think that Trump is always in a movie. He's always watching himself on screen. And 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 i think is in some ways his superpower right it's what gives him the ability to shake his fist after literally dodging a bullet and saying fight fight fight and you know 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.

13:07So I think there's a whole other level of spectacle that we're seeing here that we still need to understand. I think sometimes about the way in which Joe Biden and Donald Trump are not far apart in itch. Biden felt fundamentally of another era. Biden was a politician of the past who is somewhat governing as a caretaker of the present. Trump to me sometimes feels like he is somewhat from the future. He is hyper-modern. What I mean by that is he is always his profile picture. There's no, I don't want to say truly there is no backstage to him. but I am not sure there is a backstage to him. I just think that there is a way in which he fully inhabits himself as a public brand and has for so long that it is absorbed on a cellular level to him in the way that even many people who are understood as influencers or famous or they're a little bit faking it.

14:16But for him, the Donald Trump as a media spectacle, as a human being turned into a spectacle, is a fully inhabited persona. Yeah, exactly. I think that's what I'm trying to get at. And I didn't mean to say that he's thinking, what will this look like online? What will this look like on the front page of the newspaper? It's that all there is is the external view. There's no internality there. It would be one thing if it's just him, but it's no longer just him. And my sense is that people all over the administration understand this on some levels, like what it means to be doing politics. Christy Noem going to the El Salvadoran torture prison and posing in front of all these human beings stacked up behind each other in a cage, that's not who Christy Noem was 15 years ago.

15:19That's an attempt to learn in an artificial way what Donald Trump embodies in an intuitive way. But it's turned his instincts into not a governing philosophy exactly, but a governing mode. I think that's a great observation. I do want to temper it a little bit because I think there's a craziness to what we're living through that has to do with how we got here, which is that, you know, politics should have a spectacle. Politics should have a public dimension. In the preceding more, quote-unquote, normal administrations, we didn't have that. the Biden administration was a bizarrely closed black box, bizarrely for any administration, but particularly for the Democratic administration.

16:14It was an administration that utterly failed to tell any kind of story. And a lot of it had to do with Biden's deterioration and his inability to really be in public. But really it was like a closed management company that was just trying to get stuff done without being distracted by doing public politics. So the transition from that to this is even more bizarre. We're not seeing a juxtaposition of two different kinds of public politics. We're seeing that this is what public politics in America now looks like. I think that's a really interesting point. And I began thinking while we were talking about this, about a moment I haven't thought about in a long time, which is Barack Obama was capable of spectacle and created spectacle during the fight over the Affordable Care Act.

17:09Deep in it, Obama functionally holds a public debate on C-SPAN with him and a bunch of congressional leaders, of which for the Republicans, Paul Ryan ends up being the star and lead communicator. in which they are just arguing the details of healthcare policy in front of the public. And there are many things happening in that, but in some ways it was a spectacle of deliberation. It was a spectacle very aligned with sophisticated policymaking in a democracy where the view was that people might align to whoever made the best argument. and the message of a lot of trump is spectacle to me is the wiping away of all that again the absence of congress here i think is a very very important thing the absence of congress in so much of it i think in part because congress is like anti-spectacle it's slow you get bogged down it's details but it also is itself a kind of to the degree it is a spectacle it is a spectacle of constraint.

18:16So you've aligned at one point where you say that it is institutions and norms and laws that make a democracy. And I think the spectacle here, the way the Trump administration does it, is actually about the contempt for those institutions and norms and laws, such that the message is we are not that kind of system. We are this kind of system run by this one man. Absolutely. I agree with everything you just said. And I would just add one thing. it's not just institutions and laws and norms that make a democracy. It's institutions and laws and norms functioning in public transparently that make a democracy.

18:56And that's what we're lacking, and we're lacking it demonstratively. Your observation about why he's not using Congress is spot on, right? because even using the power that he has now with the trifecta to effectively rubber stamp White House legislation would be empowering something other than himself. You have a line in one of your pieces where you say that Trump and autocrats like him are opposed to deliberation as such. And I've been thinking about this line because the idea that the U.S. just entered into, as Trump himself has now said repeatedly, a multi-year open-ended commitment to in some form or another running Venezuela with zero domestic debate about it.

19:49The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is not debating this. What it means for America has not been described by anybody. So tell me, in your view, both about the relationship between leaders like Trump and deliberation and what it means that there was so little deliberation for such a profound assumption of responsibility and violence here so i think there are two aspects to deliberation one is just a way of exercising power it's hard to get inside his head but i think trump's first conception of power appears to be something that's wielded unilaterally, and it is diluted by any kind of public deliberation.

20:34There's probably deliberation happening behind closed doors, but the concept of power that he projects is the kind of power that's unilateral. There's also another aspect to deliberation, which is that deliberation is, and I'm using an idea that I borrowed from Balint Panger, who's a Hungarian political scientist who I think is just the absolute best and clearest thinker on autocracy out there. And he talks about deliberation as an expression of our obligations to one another. And I think that's a very useful way to understand what that projection of power is, right? It is a rejection of any kind of obligations to one another.

21:44I was very struck by Stephen Miller, who I think is functionally the prime minister of the U.S. right now, talking to Jake Tapper about the possibility of America taking Greenland, which again, under the structure of international law, is unthinkable. We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world. That's the beginning of time. Let me start here. What do you think when you hear that comment? I think Putin. You know, I think that we've had, actually, since the end of World War II, we've had two post-World War II orders.

22:29There's the structural one, the institutional one, the rhetorical one, right? This is the order that aims to prevent another global war. And then there's the victors' order. the order that's summed up by, I think, Putin's favorite photograph of Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt sitting in Yalta, which is now in Russian-occupied Crimea, carving up the world. And he refers to that constantly when he talks about his right to do what he has done, when he talks about the war in Ukraine. and that's basically the argument that he's been putting forward is look strong men carve up the world and really you know what i'm willing to sit down and discuss is how we draw the lines not what any international institution has to say about it and so what i hear steven miller saying is basically the exact same thing there always seems to me to be here an assertion not just about international institutions or nations, but also about human beings.

23:44When 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 on some level made humanity great, that, you know, in the Elon Musk version that will get us to Mars in the future, and tied them up in hollow liberal values and self-restraints and debate and discussion and deliberation and rules and procedures. And there's something being said that is operating really at all levels. The way America is acting under Trump is the way America should act, the way a superpower should act.

24:44That is what it means to be a superpower. It is to be unrestrained. But the way Trump acts is also the way a man should act. I think that's a very astute observation. And I think you're absolutely right. And, you know, I'm going to use the word fascism here because I don't think we can analyze this well enough without some kind of framework. And we often talk, when we talk about fascism, we talk about ideology of a superior race. But it's also a worldview. And what's fundamental to that worldview is that the world is rotten. And that everyone in the world is rotten. And anybody who pretends not to be rotten is lying.

25:26And part of the mission is to expose that lie. And so it's impossible to talk to a person who is sort of encased in that kind of ideology because everything you say is a priori a lie. If you say that you value human rights and human dignity and human life, well, then obviously you're being a hypocrite and you must be exposed. And I think that that's what we're seeing and that's what we're hearing from Stephen Miller. I don't always hear them saying that everybody else is lying. I hear them saying almost something different, like their idea of like the woke mind virus, that something has happened and an ideology has taken over that is poisoning.

26:16ambition and aggression and a set of forces, a kind of vitality, that is what drove civilization forward. Right. No, I think that's a great observation. Yeah. They're seeing a sort of a weakness virus. A weakness virus. It's a better way to put it. I want to play for you a clip of Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, talking about at least one of the ways in which he wanted to change the culture of the U.S. military. Frankly, it's tiring to look out at combat formations or really any formation and see fat troops. Likewise, it's completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon and leading commands around the country and the world.

27:05It's a bad look. It is bad, and it's not who we are. He goes on to launch an attack on beards also in that. There is a real obsession with aesthetics across this administration. Who to point and then what they want from the people beneath them. What do you make of that? I mean, it feels so familiar to me. I grew up in the Soviet Union where we watched parades on TV. We, one of the happiest days of my life as a kid was finally receiving the Red Kerchief. What is a Red Kerchief? A Red Kerchief is a sign of membership in the Young Pioneers, which is the kids' communist organization. And it's amazing because I grew up in a dissident family by the time I was 10 years old, which is when you get inducted.

28:02I was quite aware of where we lived and what we thought about it. And yet the aesthetics of it were irresistible because, I mean, it was beautiful and it was also like other people and you could march in formation. and it's so incredibly appealing. Embarrassingly, right? And I just watched, there's this terrific new documentary called Mr. Nobody Against Putin, which was filmed in secret by a teacher in a Russian school in like a small town of 10 ,000 people in the Urals over the course of a couple of years after the start of the full-scale invasion. And it's really about sort of the imposition of propaganda in the school and how that school and all other Russian schools became sort of retooled as junior military organizations.

28:58But you can also see the imposition of an aesthetic. These kids start marching in formation. They start carrying the flag. They eventually get these uniforms that huck them back to those exact uniforms with the red kerchiefs that I wore 50 years ago. It's, you know, it's a fascist aesthetic. And it's what the 20th century taught us about what power looks like, what strength looks like. This is something I've become slightly weirdly obsessed with. why do fascist movements, authoritarian movements why do they seem to care so much more about aesthetics and in their own way beauty than Keir Starmer's government or Joe Biden's government even Donald Trump coming into office and amidst everything else he had to do deciding to chair the board of the Kennedy Center as that was clearly the thing he really wanted to do.

30:01And then recently having his name etched into the institution, the Trump Kennedy Center, it's now called, if you go to the website, if you go to the building, he immediately signed an executive order about bringing classical architecture back to federal construction. I do not share Donald Trump's aesthetic. He filled the Oval Office with gold. but he really does have one and he really understands it as a dimension of politics and power and cultural control and this goes through other leaders like him I mean Putin has you know his bare chested photos and his aesthetic and you go back to the mid-century and early 20th century fascists and you see an incredible you know I have a whole book on Nazi aesthetics at home I have come to think it's first a weakness of liberal politics that it does not see itself as having a relationship related to beauty, that it does not believe beauty should be part of politics necessarily.

31:01It likes beauty. It wants other people to do beautiful things. But, you know, we're the people in the suits who have the charts and can tell you how a healthcare system is run, not the people who have views on what is and is not beautiful. Why do you think it is that these movements see spectacle, see beauty, see aesthetic as so much more central to how politics should operate and how power is wielded than certainly liberal left-wing coalitions do? So I think it has to do with two things. One is the past, and the other one is race. So we've talked about how Trump is a leader of the future, which I think is a really interesting observation that you made.

31:44But he's also, of course, a leader of the past, right? His singular political promise is, I will take you back to an imaginary past before all this happened, before all the bad things happened, before you felt uncomfortable, before you felt scared about what would happen to you, before you felt scared about being alienated from your children. It's going to be warm and cozy and exactly as you imagine the past to have been. And aesthetically, a representation of that past is classical architecture. It's an entirely white American history. It's the great monuments and whatever else that he has promised to bring back.

32:28But it's really interesting how the Soviet Union, sort of the initial revolutionary movement, was artistically experimental. And then very quickly, with the establishment of terror, it turned back into this classical architecture and extremely conservative art and all of it as though the Soviet Union was trying to transport itself back into the 17th and 18th century aesthetically. So I think that's one dimension of it. The other dimension of it is the assertion of a superior race, right? This is the other dimension of fascism and aesthetically it's very present. And race can be defined differently.

33:10But what we're seeing is it's white, cis men who are in excellent physical shape. That's what the ideal of this administration looks like. And of course, like every fascist administration, it's not actually led by men who look like that. But they want to look like that and they want to be surrounded by men who look like that. But I think we might be falling into a sort of equivalency trap, and I'd be careful here, right? It's not incumbent on whatever we want to call this politics, liberal, democratic, left, anti-fascist. It's not incumbent on us to produce an equal and opposite aesthetic. It's actually a much more complicated task, which is to assert an entirely different aesthetic direction.