Op-Ed
Trump Has Pledged an Era of Spectacular Violence. We Can’t Be Passive Onlookers.
Trump is poised to employ his mastery of spectacle to expand the oppressive forms of state violence at work in the US.January 19, 2025
The incoming Trump administration is preparing to carry out a major chapter of state violence in U.S. history. The mass deportations that Donald Trump is planning aim to be in the same league as the internment of Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II. Attacks on progressive nonprofit organizations (particularly those involved in the movement to stop the genocide of Palestinians), as well as plans for sweeping criminalization of protest call to mind the McCarthy era of the 1950s and the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) of the 1960s and ‘70s.
State violence centrally involves the use of force by police agencies, at the border and by the military, and it is an ongoing feature of daily life. Deportations, detaining migrants, separating families, humiliating and isolating people who seek entry to the country at border stations — these are just some features of the daily violence that constitutes operating the U.S. border. Making a spectacle of that violence — rather than concealing it — is central to Trump’s approach.
Consider, in contrast, President Joe Biden’s approach to the border. There can be no doubt that while Biden rhetorically discussed a more humane approach to the border, his actual tenure has been devastating for migrants. Biden deported 271,484 people in 2024 alone — the highest number of any year since 2014. He maintained Trump-era border restrictions, such as the misuse of the Title 42 public health statute to deny migrants access to the U.S. and violate due process of asylum seekers. In its opening days, the Biden administration detained 14,000 Haitian migrants seeking asylum, and summarily deported them en masse. The devastating episode involved U.S. border agents on horseback whipping Haitians, producing photos reminiscent of slavery.
But the Biden administration disavowed those images. Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary at the time, said: “It’s important for people to know this is not who we are. That’s not who the Biden-Harris administration is.”
Similarly chaotic scenes at the U.S.-Mexico border — where desperate migrants faced deprivation, detention and deportation — were put on an endless loop by Fox News to promote the notion of a “border crisis” to the embarrassment of the Biden administration. He preferred for the actions of U.S. agencies on the border to be invisible.
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Trump, on the other hand, wants his state violence to be highly visible. During his first term in 2018, as caravans of migrants from Central America approached the U.S.-Mexico border, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) actually closed lanes of traffic on the San Ysidro crossing between Tijuana and San Diego, one of the busiest land border crossings in the world, and added additional concrete barriers to the road. The resulting backup of cars and trucks provided visuals that illustrated Trump’s narrative of an overwhelmed border that required violence to establish control over it.
That violence came. Less than a week after the incident at San Ysidro, U.S. police forces fired tear gas across the border into crowds of thousands of migrants on the Mexico side. Trump combined that armed attack on migrant families with a denial of their entry to the U.S. to seek asylum, violating the law and denying them due process.
The 2018 episode is instructive. Trump manufactured a “crisis at the border” to justify the use of graphic violence. His administration used these acts to illustrate a story it told, in which U.S. forces acted as brave defenders of the nation against invading villains. Then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen threatened at the time to prosecute “anyone who destroys federal property, endangers our front-line operators, or violates our nation’s sovereignty.”
She added that, “DHS will not tolerate this type of lawlessness and will not hesitate to shut down ports of entry for security and public safety reasons” — though the only “lawlessness” came from U.S. border agents.
Lastly, Trump deployed this set of actions and rhetoric to officially change policy, reversing longstanding legal rights for asylum seekers.
Trump’s signature campaign promise for his first term — building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border — was similar. By the end of his first term, Trump had 458 miles of wall built. The vast majority of this construction, however, was on sections of the border where there were already barriers built by previous administrations, including Democratic ones. Despite the fact that new barriers were redundant, Trump tweeted video of the construction of what he called a “powerful Wall.” The imagery of the wall’s construction was more important than the actual operation of the barrier.
But there is a function of the spectacle of the wall beyond the physical construction of the wall itself. The deployment of this imagery — broadcasting scenes of children being torn from their families and detained via the “child separation policy” — are central to producing a more violent and repressive society.
Trump as a Master of Spectacle
These actions, and the images that accompany them, are not just the work of a provocative demagogue, as much as Trump is one.
In his seminal work, The Society of the Spectacle, critical theorist Guy Debord writes, “the spectacle cannot be understood either as a deliberate distortion of the visual world, or as a product of the technology of the mass dissemination of images. It is far better viewed as a weltanschauung that has been actualized, translated into the material realm — a worldview transformed into an objective force.”
When Debord published this work in 1967, he was grappling with the rise of mass media — not just as a new means to transmit the ideas of governments and corporations, but as a force all its own in imposing capitalist relations on society. The result is a society where we are by and large reduced to “spectators,” watching history happen to us rather than subjects who are collectively shaping it.
Today, in a time shaped by both mass media and social media, the powerful portray their actions as inevitable and invincible — and the rest of us are relegated to being observers and commentators.
With a lifetime in the elite and years of experience as a media personality, Trump is a master of spectacle. He will use this mastery — along with a robust right-wing media infrastructure; social media platforms helmed by executives eager to serve him and promote their shared worldview; and a powerful policing, detention and border apparatus — to ratchet up oppression.
This oppression will be highly functional and strategic. Trump’s broader program includes extremely unpopular policies such as enormous tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations at the expense of Social Security and public services. Trump takes potential outrage from those who will suffer from his policies and redirects their energy into furious resentment against immigrants, LGBTQ folks, Black people, and others. This approach is not particularly new or unique, but Trump is highly effective at it, which explains his support among the wealthy.
But Trump’s program cannot be reduced to a distraction to implement a regressive economic program. It is instead an ever more oppressive worldview that reserves special brutality for targeted communities.
The Transition From Trump to Biden
Will Trump be worse than Biden? This has been a complicated question to answer for many on the left in light of Biden’s unwavering participation in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. For sections of the population, there will be a dramatic, catastrophic change from Biden to Trump. The new attacks on reproductive rights, LGBTQ folks and women, immigrants and Muslims should not be underestimated. We should also prepare for a new round of attacks on organizing, beginning with especially vulnerable activists, such as international students, Muslim and immigrant organizers. But such attacks are already happening under Biden, who has presided over mass arrests of student protesters and the criminalization of organizing for Palestine.
Beyond formal policing and other actions of the state, Trump’s return to the White House seems certain to encourage far right elements on the ground. In some cases, this will be direct and literal, as Trump pardons Proud Boys and other far right actors who participated in the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
This continuity between Biden and Trump — and convergence between the Democratic Party and MAGA — complicates an assessment of Trump and made it difficult for many progressives to support Kamala Harris’s campaign.
The Democratic rightward turn is not limited to support for Israel and repression of the movement resisting genocide. As Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott have made moves similar to Trump’s — stationing the military at the U.S.-Mexico border and busing migrants to cities run by Democrats — Democratic officials have responded with their version of anti-immigrant politics. From Mayor Eric Adams declaring that “immigrants will destroy New York City” to Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey seeking to revisit the state law requiring the sheltering of homeless families in the face of what she called “waves and waves of people,” many Democratic leaders have accepted the premise that immigration is a “problem” because immigrants drain public resources. This is hardly the basis for a firm opposition to the unfolding anti-immigrant onslaught.
Similarly, Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton’s comments targeting trans children following the election, which provoked fairly little outcry among his colleagues in office, may be an indicator of just how far right politics in the U.S. have shifted, especially within the political class, including among Democrats.
The continuity between Biden and Trump means that Biden inherited a set of tools from Trump to crack down on immigration. Biden used and stewarded the deportation infrastructure, which he is now handing back to Trump even stronger. Biden may have deported people more quietly than Trump, but the incoming president will employ his mastery of spectacle to both use and extend oppressive measures that Biden has put in place.
None of this is to minimize the impact of Trump’s program, which is certain to be devastating. It is worth drawing lessons from similar figures around the world, like El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, who has tweeted from his personal account videos of his government humiliating people it has incarcerated. Making a spectacle of this violence has gone hand in hand with Bukele’s endlessly extended “state of emergency,” which he has used to usher in a new era of authoritarianism.
In this context, what is possible in terms of resistance and progressive politics under Trump? This is also a complicated question to answer, because on one hand, Trump’s broadcasting of a cruel crackdown may provoke mass opposition. But conversely, Trump’s wave of repression may achieve its goal of intimidating many into inaction and despair. It will likely be a mix of the two, and the challenge for organizers, activists and the left is to defend against such attacks and push the possibilities for a radically different direction for society as far as they will go. Above all else, we need to find our collective strength as actors, and must refuse to be spectators.
This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.
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Khury Petersen-Smith is the Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.
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