Mass Media and the Spectacle of the Imperial Presidency

I’ve been thinking a lot about how the Trump administration has been using television, social media, and AI-generated digital graphics to advance its policies. This particular thought experiment started when my friend and I were watching the evening news. There was Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem prancing triumphantly in front of detainees in the CECOT concentration camp in El Salvador where Venezuelan immigrants had been deported. Noem was dressed to kill for the occasion with a designer outfit and a $50,000 Rolex watch. The dynamics of the event were telling. She scolded the detainees like they were 10-year olds caught smoking and, curiously, she did not target gang activity but rather illegal immigration as the cause of their plight.

The prisoners (mostly men) were naked from the waist up, packed into tiny cells, and looked like caged animals. While viewing this quasi-surreal and clearly staged event, my friend turned to me and said: “It looks like Auschwitz.” I will have to say that the unquestionable dehumanization in this image still haunts me. This spectacle alone should’ve struck some variant of fear and loathing into the minds and hearts of every American about how aspects of the immigration crisis are being handled.

Political dialogue has now largely shifted from a platform of reasoned discourse to battles of digital imagery and “optics.”

Thankfully some media pundits got the message. But, in some cases, they appeared more focused on Noem’s watch than the evocative images of dehumanizing treatment. One commenter writing in USA Today looking to win the “too much information” award noted: “The watch that she wears in the video was identified as an 18-karat gold Rolex Cosmograph Daytona, as first reported by The Washington Post, and reportedly sells for $50,000.” Good to know. The writer went on to say that “except for President Donald Trump, presidents in recent decades have opted for more modest timepieces to avoid being labeled as elitist, according to The New York Times. For example, President Joe Biden was criticized by conservative media for wearing a $7,000 watch to his inauguration.” Also good to know. Eventually, however, the writer did feel compelled to point out that “the juxtaposition of Noem’s luxury accessory and her setting was noted by critics and human rights groups.”

The Power of the Viral Photo Op

The Noem footage appeared to be little more than a calculated video-based photo op. It was apparently designed to demonstrate that the Trump administration was fulfilling its campaign promise to deal with the immigration problem. But it made me think of a larger trend. It seems that, thanks to the pervasiveness of our “global village” and how easily digital tech can be used to shape our collective thinking, political dialogue has now largely shifted from a platform of reasoned discourse to battles of digital imagery and “optics.” The poet Robert Bly has pointed out that, cognitively speaking, television images bypass the parts of the brain involved in rational processing and nest comfortably in the so-called reptile brain where raw emotion dwells, a phenomenon well understood by the advertising industry. The political analysis of Trump’s actions that surfaces in the mainstream media needs to take his admittedly skillful media manipulation into far more serious account.

To understand Trump’s control of the media (and hence the typical voter mindset) it’s helpful to look at the work of the French media theorist Guy Debord. In The Society of the Spectacle, Debord addresses the media-induced degradation of contemporary life where authentic social interactions have been replaced with their mere representation. He posits that “passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity.” Here it’s worth noting that Debord was writing this well before the advent of the internet, which added yet another layer to the commodification of societal and political interaction.

The Spectacle of the “Imperial Presidency”

It was the media theorist and prophetic thinker Marshall McLuhan who pioneered the concept of the global village in the 60’s. Decades later, heightened media awareness expanded even more, wrought by a combination of television, the internet, social media, and telecommunications technologies which some refer to as the New Media. This new mediasphere has radically altered our collective awareness while subtly shaping the underpinnings of political dynamics. Its effects on polity and political outcomes are incalculable. While television viewership has been declining for some time, the images generated by television often become viral social media fodder in a kind of endless feedback loop. So, in this sense, television is still a force majeure in our perceptions of accelerating world events.

The televised debate between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy in 1960 has been cited as a political milestone. For the first time in history, the televised image may have helped elect a president. The election of a former television actor, Ronald Reagan, continued on this trajectory. An article by Matthew Wills framed it this way:

“Politics in the United States has always been a performance art,” writes Tim Raphael in his analysis of the branding and image-crafting that now dominate our political system. Throughout his eight years as president, Ronald Reagan had much more positive poll numbers (60-70%) as a person than did his actual policies (40%). Raphael attributes Reagan’s success to the potent combination of advertising, public relations, and a television in every home. (There were 14,000 TVs in America in 1947; by 1954, 32 million; by 1962, 90% of American homes plugged in.)

If Reagan plowed this territory, then Donald Trump, with his many years of experience as a Reality TV star, turned it into an art form. Trump learned to use the media to advance what historian Arthur Schlesinger called “the imperial presidency.” The New Media, in combination with the trajectory of politics as “performance art,” has accelerated this process significantly. As just one example of many, one of Trump’s recent media plays has been to allow television coverage of a two-hour Cabinet meeting. Given in historical terms that this is an unprecedented event, it seems important to ask: Where does what appears to be or is sold as “transparency” cross the line into being mere performative optics? And while the Biden presidency was characterized by Oz-like behind-the-scenes operation in terms of press conferences, speeches, and media events, Trump is quite the opposite. Many of his visits with foreign leaders are attended by the media, staged, and televised. In this sense, while there is nominally more transparency there is also the deliberate use of optics for political advantage.

It’s likely that the meme fodder of Donald Trump’s imperial presidency will only increase in frequency and intensity. This media saturation has a purpose: It creates displacement sucking up available bandwidth in both the media and our own cognitive processing. “All Trump, all the time” is a familiar trope that we will somehow have to learn to live with and correct for. Back in the day, you could spot the occasional bumper sticker that said: “Kill your television.” On one level at least, there was a certain wisdom to that. But the advent of full-blown technocracy now makes it very difficult to turn away from a kind of forced participation in the now all-pervasive digital mediasphere.