anti-theatricality and politics (a bit of a backblog)

"Can we return theater to the actual theater?"

Steacy Easton

All I know is that Donald Trump loves the drama and fighting and show.

He has nothing else in his life.

This fills him up until the next episode.

a commenter at New York Times

A second reading is to see Trump’s affinity for reposting fan art as Executive Cope. Here, the slop is a way for Trump to escape and imagine the world as he’d like it to be. In slop world, Trump is not embattled, getting screamed at by his supporters over what looks to them like a guilty cover-up on behalf of a pedophile. Instead, he’s arresting Obama. It’s pure fan fiction that depicts Trump having power in a moment when, perhaps, he feels somewhat powerless.

In this context, Trump’s Truth Social page is little more than a rapid-response account that illustrates a world that doesn’t actually exist: one in which POTUS looks like a comic-book hero, is universally beloved, and exerts his executive authority to jail or silence anyone who disagrees with him. This sort of revenge fantasy would be sad coming from anyone. That it is coming from the president of the United States, a man obsessed with retribution, who presides over a government that is enthusiastically arresting and jailing immigrants in makeshift camps, is terrifying.

.... The same explanation could be applied perfectly to Trump’s Truth Social posts over the weekend. Trump called for Senator Adam Schiff to be prosecuted. He appeared pathologically aggrieved—spending part of his Saturday night posting a detailed infographic intended to debunk the supposed “Russia hoax” from an election that happened almost nine years ago. (Propaganda experts say this is an attempt by Trump and his administration to rewrite history.) He posted a fake mug shot of Obama. And, on Sunday morning, he pecked out a 103-word message congratulating himself on his first six months in office. Rage, paranoia, pettiness, and desolating selfishness: Trump appears consumed more and more by an online world that offers him the chance to live out the fantasy of the unilateral power and adulation that he craves.

Talking about Trump and social media is complicated because, unlike most users, Trump can post ridiculous things, transform news cycles, and force the world to react to his posts. But lately, his posts are not having the desired effect. It’s possible that what observers witnessed this weekend is a tipping point of sorts. Trump’s posts, instead of influencing reality, suggest that the president is retreating from it entirely.

Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic

Attorney General Pam Bondi didn’t just go on Fox News in February to tease that Epstein’s client list was “on my desk” — she staged an elaborate piece of political theater in which right-wing influencers were handed binders at the White House that said “The Epstein Files: Part 1.” When the binders turned out to be a dud, an aggrieved Bondi sent an accusatory letter to Patel suggesting that evidence was being suppressed.

This month, the Justice Department and FBI officially determined that there is actually nothing more of significance to see. That makes their early behavior something of a puzzle. Who thought the administration would benefit from all the anticipatory playacting if it never had the goods? 

Washington Post

Gavin Newsom laughing laughed at Trump’s social media post that seemed to criticize his own administration’s immigration raids on farm

“This is what he does: he creates a problem, and then he tries to be a hero in his own Marvel movie”, Newsom said. “He initiated those raids. He significantly increased the scale and scope of those raids. That’s why he wants the National Guard.”

“Even fans of the president’s theater can get sick of endless drama,” 

- New York Post

Adam Curtis, talking up his new documix, Shifty

Because a new kind of politician rose up, bred in the swamp of distrust. They saw that playing bad in an over-the-top way would give you a great deal of power. Because in a world of disenchantment, where no one believed that politicians could be good, being bad meant you must be authentic. I give you Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and Donald Trump: pantomime villains who are locked together with us in a feedback loop of shock-outrage-badness repeating endlessly

Outside this theatre, really bad people do really bad things – but we are distracted by the pantomime. Meanwhile, the classes that once made up society fractured. The liberals turned on those who voted for Brexit, using with one voice the word Amis had spat out 30 years before: “stupid”.

Jeff Sharlet thread on Bluesky I think

"The Right has theater. The left has critique." That's Avgi Saketopoulou, a radical psychoanalyst, scholar, & I think it concisely expresses so much of how we got here. The Right presents spectacle; the "left"--shorthand for a range--prides itself on seeing through it. 1/

It feels good sometimes to be smarter than the other guy, but remember high school? Being able to critique the cultural dynamics of football didn't make as many friends as being able to play football. We can deride spectacle, but the longing for "theater" is real. 2/

The Right has theater, the left has critique--scholars, takes, "strongly-worded statements." The Right has masked men w/ guns who look like a movie. We have condemnation. But what if we had theater? Better theater? 3/

One strand of though holds that "meet fire with fire"--aka tit-for-tat--is the spectacle the left needs to combat the Right's theater. They've got armored HYDRA operatives? No problem, we've got Bane from Batman on top of car. Touché! Or...  

I'm not looking for a fight right now. If you feel certain that's the spectacle that's needed, godspeed. I don't feel any certainty about my view. But as a spectacle-critic--that's a lot of my work--that seems unpromising. If the "image" is "violence," the house--the state--always wins. 5/

Problem is, not much of the "left"--broadly speaking--engages with the the theater of the Right, so they don't know that while it's big move is violence, it's also heavy on sentimentalism. And that's where it's weakest. When people who hate vulnerability try to play vulnerable, it's shaky. 6/

For context, I'm thinking of Lionel Richie's "Hello" played at Trump rallies, Fox News' heavy investment in "human interest," the appropriation & weaponization of veterans' genuinely disproportionate suffering as, paradoxically, a rightwing truth.

That's the theater of the Right's version of tenderness. My uncertain argument: The left *at best* could meet the Right tit-for-tat in terms of spectacle of strength or "violence," but probably not even close. But when it comes to tenderness, we can make the better theater, because it's true. 

It's the brilliant @jeanguerre.bsky.social's column on videos made by families of those abducted by ICE that helped me think thru this. If you haven't seen the videos she links to, please consider watching. Be prepared for watery eyes. 

Maria Bustillos:

Oh but the left has theater, the best there is: Power to the People

The problem is every time the left takes the stage, the oligarchs close the theater.

Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy 

by Stephen Duncombe 

From an acclaimed, original observer of media and culture: how we can draw upon popular fantasies to create an alternative politics through imagination and spectacle - a twenty-first-century manifesto for the left.

What do Paris Hilton, Grand Theft Auto, Las Vegas, and a McDonald's commercial have in common with progressive politics? Not much. And, as Stephen Duncombe brilliantly argues, this is part of what's wrong with progressive politics. According to Duncombe, culture and popular fantasy can help us define and actualize a new political aesthetic: a kind of dreampolitik, created not simply to further existing progressive political agendas but help us imagine new ones.Dream makes the case for a political strategy that embraces a new set of tools. Although fantasy and spectacle have become the lingua franca of our time, Duncombe points out that liberals continue to depend upon sober reason to guide them. Instead, they need to learn how to communicate in today's spectacular vernacular.  not merely as a tactic but as a new way of thinking about and acting out politics. Learning from Las Vegas, however, does not mean adopting its values, as Duncombe demonstrates in outlining plans for what he calls "ethical spectacle."

book published in 2007 

The tepid theatrics of Trump’s parade

by Carolina A. Miranda

For once, the showman president was the audience, not the performer.

With a president who was once a reality TV star and who, in news headlines, is frequently likened to a “showman” and “performance artist,” living through the Trump era is a bit like inhabiting an immersive theater 24 hours a day. On official Defense Department channels, Secretary Pete Hegseth posts cinematic photos of himself working out with troops, playing the role of enlisted everyman. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem appears at raids staged by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in tactical gear, acting the part of a front-line soldier. And of course there is the content maker in chief, Donald Trump, who turns everything he touches into theater, be it signing executive orders — onstage after the inauguration! — or transforming his office into a simulacrum of a golden palace.

Now add to the theater the tepid military parade held on Saturday in D.C., an event that began as a way to celebrate the Army’s 250th anniversary but was inflated to satisfy Trump’s ravenous appetite for show business — with tanks, jeeps, helicopters, horses, parachutists, robot dogs and thousands of soldiers. (The event landed on the president’s birthday, after all.) Yet, in this highly choreographed stunt, which provided the absurd sight of a president who never served saluting troops as if he were Gen. George S. Patton, Trump missed his mark — by a mile.

Theatrics in politics are intended to distract from reality. Hegseth might do a photogenic burpee, but he has done little to contend with quality-of-life issues affecting service members, such as housing, according to Military.com. What’s more, the Defense Department budget is running three months late. About a week before Trump’s parade, thousands of veterans descended on D.C. to protest proposed cuts to a separate agency, the Department of Veterans Affairs, which will affect, among other things, the quality of health care they receive. In Trump’s speech on Saturday, he described soldiers as “our most precious resource” — yet his policies would make it harder for low-income vets and their families to access benefits such as food assistance.

The performative posturing is accompanied by genuine violence. Noem’s notorious ICE raids are spectacles of aggression featuring unidentified masked men in tactical gear popping out of unmarked vans to seize not violent criminals but farmworkers and roadside flower vendors. On Sunday, heavily armed ICE agents showed up at an L.A. area swap meet looking as if they were entering the battles of Fallujah. It has been a theater of cruelty designed to strike fear in the hearts of immigrants and perhaps in dissenting members of government, too. Last week, when Sen. Alex Padilla (D-California), who sits on a Senate subcommittee tasked with overseeing immigration functions at DHS, tried to ask Noem a question at a news conference, he was thrown to the ground and cuffed by men in FBI vests. A (gaslighting) statement issued by DHS after the incident described Padilla’s appearance as “disrespectful political theatre” — with the word “theater,” curiously, spelled in the British style.

Trump’s parade — because let’s be real, it became his parade, whatever the intentions of the Army — likewise offered a dystopian split screen between idealistic reverence for the military in D.C. and images of the National Guard and Marines stonily guarding federal sites on the streets of Los Angeles, where I live. This is an immigrant city that has historically rejected Trump’s nativist policies, and the military was deployed over the objections of California’s governor to help quell anti-ICE protests in a few square blocks of downtown. It has been a deployment that has brought tension — not to mention irony worthy of “Veep”: The first person detained by the Marines after they arrived was an Army veteran.

Each of these elaborate performances is targeted at a specific audience. Hegseth perpetually plays the character of red-blooded enlisted guy for the “Fox & Friends” flock. Noem and her ICE raids deliver action-movie levels of violence to the White nationalist base. Trump’s parade was purportedly designed to play to the nation at large in advance of the country’s 250 years of independence — not to mention to other global superpowers, since a military parade invariably conveys military might. “We have the greatest missiles in the world,” the president said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” last month. “We have the greatest submarines in the world. We have the greatest army tanks in the world. We have the greatest weapons in the world. And we’re going to celebrate it.”

As The Post reported earlier this month, the celebration, in its early stages, was conceived as a relatively demure affair on the National Mall. When the Army filed a permit application last year for an anniversary celebration, while Joe Biden was still president, the plans included the participation of some 300 soldiers and civilian personnel, as well as a concert by the U.S. Army Band. As part of the proceedings, four cannons would be fired. The scale of the event, however, ballooned under Trump — who’d been itching to stage a military parade since his first term in office, after attending a 2017 Bastille Day parade in Paris.

Appetite for this sort of spectacle in the United States, a country with no strong tradition of military pageantry, however, was muted from the start. Jim Mattis, Trump’s first defense secretary during his first term, was reported to have said he’d rather “swallow acid” than stage a parade. And, though Trump now has a more obliging defense secretary, many GOP lawmakers opted to sit out the spectacle, as Politico reported last week. Crowds were also sparse. A viral clip on social media, captured by Scripps News correspondent Liz Landers, shows a pair of tanks squeaking along Constitution Avenue before half-empty stands.

Ultimately, the audience for this military parade wasn’t the nation. It was just Donald Trump. This marks a disconcerting inversion of typical political theatrics: Rather than Trump performing for the United States, the country was performing for Trump — at an estimated cost of up to $45 million. It’s the sort of action intended to keep a dear leader believing that he is wrapped in a mantle of glory. Call it a Potemkin parade, after the fake villages reportedly created by a Russian nobleman to impress Catherine the Great during her 18th-century tour of Crimea.

The Army, to its credit, did its best to keep the parade about the Army. An announcer delivered facts about its roots in the Revolutionary War and the ways its various units had evolved over time. There was also plenty of information about hardware. The Bradley Fighting Vehicle, named for Gen. Omar Bradley, we learned, “is fast, it is tough, and it is lethal.” But also part of the event were the rather jarring ads for sponsors including Palantir, Oracle and Ultimate Fighting Championship. And the interstitial films that played on jumbotrons behind the dais seemed to contain more footage of Trump than of any Army general.

Rather than Trump performing for the United States, the country was performing for Trump.

Things got truly bizarre about an hour into the event, when an Army band started playing instrumental covers of popular songs, including Heart’s “Barracuda” and Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child of Mine” — which set a vibe that was part music video, part 1980s bar mitzvah. Though whoever chose the music clearly has a barbed sense of humor. On the set list was Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son,” a ’60s-era tune about rich kids getting out of fighting in Vietnam — which could have been written about Trump, the son of wealthy real estate developer who avoided that conflict after a timely diagnosis of bone spurs.

On television, the parade felt listless. As members of the Army Special Forces passed by, an announcer stated that the unit “is always combat ready, mentally and physically tough and prepared to fight our country’s adversaries.” Yet its march was an uncoordinated shuffle. Soldiers carrying drones looked like boys carrying toys. On the whole, the parade, wasn’t “America, hell yeah!” It was “America, okey dokey.” And it violated a cardinal rule of governing by theatrics, which is that the drama should be absorbing. Cut to the viral footage of Secretary of State Marco Rubio barely stifling a yawn. And, at the end, a speech by Trump lacking in oomph. As he declared, “We’re the hottest country in the world right now,” he sounded as if he was ready to nap.

Some commentators were relieved that the parade wasn’t a full-blown authoritarian display of goose-steeping troops and deadly missiles — a la Russia or North Korea. But you don’t have to go full-on dictator to put on a good parade. The Bastille Day parade in Paris features the remarkable sight of troops marching in perfect formation down the Champs-Élysées — including members of the French Foreign Legion in eye-catching historic uniforms that include leather aprons and axes. In my mother’s native Chile, the annual military parade features horsemen in historic Prussian-style uniforms, special forces in snow camouflage bearing skis, a large canine unit that includes dogs wearing helmets, and a mounted musical division that plays drums at full gallop.

Trump needn’t travel all the way to France or Chile, however, to find an impressive military spectacle. He could just pop over to Mexico, which every September puts on a truly epic Independence Day parade. Set in the Zócalo, Mexico City’s main square, it begins with the president saluting the country’s independence leaders from the balcony of the presidential palace with shouts of “¡Viva!” and is followed by the sort of extravaganza that makes Bastille Day look tame. A ginormous flag is raised and a military band plays — the drum corps’ instruments are encircled with golden fringe that quivers with each step. Afterward begins a procession of troops in a range of historic and contemporary uniforms, from peasant fighters wielding machetes to special forces in jungle camouflage. Also included is a large canine unit of Belgian Malinois featuring a troop of puppies in training. Puppies! Now, that is a show.

On Saturday, America got a far less inspiring production: a limp attempt at pageantry that felt more like a thin pantomime staged for one man. America, okey dokey.

New York Times piece on Trump versus Los Angeles on immigration

Trump often advances his goals through images, and the images his administration was producing in Southern California were as filmic as anything in Hollywood. There were the videos of men in balaclavas and unmarked vans swooping down on farm fields and garment factories, which drove protesters into the streets in and around Los Angeles. There were the images of federal agents facing off against the protesters with tear gas and pepper balls. There were images of demonstrators waving Mexican flags in front of burning cars, the backdrop for Trump’s pronouncement on Truth Social that a “once great American City, Los Angeles, has been invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens and Criminals” and overrun by “violent, insurrectionist mobs.” He authorized administration officials to “take all such action necessary to liberate Los Angeles from the Migrant Invasion, and put an end to these Migrant riots.” And finally, here were the Marines, rolling into Los Angeles as if it were a foreign capital.

But the story the images from Los Angeles were telling did not always extend far beyond the frame. The undocumented immigrants swept up in the raids by ICE and other agencies in recent months, based on the limited data available, appear to be overwhelmingly without criminal records, not the violent invaders that Trump had conjured in so many speeches and all-caps Truth Social posts. And apart from more serious disturbances like blocked freeways and some damage to businesses, the rioting might have underwhelmed anyone who had been downtown after a Lakers championship victory; it was the sort of disturbance the Los Angeles Police Department was easily equipped — enthusiastic, even — to contain.

“This whole thing is Kabuki,” Gavin Newsom, California’s Democratic governor, told me. “There are some professionals here, some patriots,” in the military, he said. “They’re struggling under very difficult circumstances and recognize the absurdity of this.”

Still, something very real was happening amid all this unreality — a production that the president was intent on staging, one he seems keen to perform again. 

A week into the conflict he engineered, though, it was beginning to look as if Trump had miscalculated. After the cinematic clashes of the first few days, the protests generated few of the images that served the narrative of Democratic fecklessness and impotence. The theatrical harshness and ominous secrecy of the immigration raids, meanwhile, had forced Americans to confront their ambivalence about immigration.