Opinion | Trump’s ‘Propaganda of the Deed’

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 clear the society did not work how you thought it worked, it could rupture society itself and create the possibility of a moment of revolutionary upheaval. I 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 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, 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. “For us to just leave — who’s going to take over? I mean, there is nobody to take over.” But it was an object lesson, an example, an act that showed something. And 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. 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, because 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. If there’s an event that I think of as the nail in the coffin of the new international world order, it will be Venezuela. 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 U.N. 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 transition from the quantity of things that this administration is doing to a new quality of being in the world.