MAGA Aesthetics and Fascist Power: Spectacles of White Supremacy |
Photograph Source: usicegov – Public Domain
Spectacles of State Violence and the Culture of Cruelty
The United States is not merely awash in brutalizing and murderous acts of state-sanctioned violence. It is being restructured by them. The killings of Rachel Good and Alex Pretti are not aberrations or tragic mistakes; they belong to a longer and darker history that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People once named with chilling precision. In earlier periods of American turmoil, such killings were called lynchings, acts “carried out by lawless mobs, although police officers did participate, under the pretext of justice.” Today, this violence extends well beyond the bullet and the baton. It takes form in the expansion of prison camps, what Thom Hartmann rightly calls concentration camps, the war on immigrants, and the routine assault on Black and brown lives made disposable through policy, indifference, and neglect. At the same time, the country is saturated with a culture steeped in fascist spectacle and authoritarian display. Under the Trump administration, aesthetics itself becomes a battleground, a weaponized field where power works on desire, memory, bodies, and pleasure to consolidate domination.
As Toni Morrison warned in her Nobel Prize lecture, oppressive language does not merely describe violence; it doesviolence, narrowing thought, erasing responsibility, and preparing the ground for cruelty. For Morrison, this is dead language “that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind… Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance.” In his monumental The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin chillingly grasped this danger with prophetic clarity, insisting that the connective tissue between state violence and the colonization of public consciousness lies in the corporate-controlled pedagogical apparatuses of print culture, screen culture, and social media. In a hyper-mediated society, as the historian Richard J. Evans argues, fascism does not rely solely on force or decree. It aestheticizes politics itself, converting violence into pleasure, domination into entertainment, and obedience into desire. That insight quietly underwrites much of what follows. This fusion of language, image, and power forms the theoretical groundwork for understanding how fascist aesthetics now operate in the United States.
Fascism Educates Before It Governs
We live in an age in which fascist aesthetics has become a powerful tool of authoritarian pedagogy, functioning, in part, to mobilize myth, emotion, ritual, and spectacle in order to celebrate fascist sentiments including white nationalism, racial and ethnic hierarchies, state terrorism, and the performative cruelty of the powerful, but also to crush dissent and prevent the redistribution of power.
Fascism educates before it rules, working through spectacle, cruelty, myth, facile beauty, and erasure long before it consolidates power through formal political institutions. In the Trump era, this spectacle-driven authoritarianism illuminates the aestheticization of power by offering pageantry and the pleasure of submission as beautifying practices that celebrate war, hierarchy, a survival-of-the-fittest ethos, regressive individualism, and the militarization of everyday life. Fascism aestheticizes politics to render domination pleasurable, converting power into spectacle and obedience into desire, and this logic is now unmistakably visible in the visual culture that saturates Trump-era authoritarianism. Politics, in this sense, follows culture because political agency itself is culturally produced, not merely through policy or ideas but through affect, image, and embodiment.
Aestheticizing Power: Trumpism and the Visual Grammar of Fascism
The visual grammar of fascism is on full display in government-produced videos of immigrants filmed in chains and marched onto deportation planes, which transform state violence into spectacle, staging cruelty as administrative order and teaching the public who belongs and who is disposable. Trump’s grotesque, AI-generated fantasy of Gaza, recast as a luxury playground, extends this aesthetic logic outward, laundering colonial devastation through the visual grammar of real estate branding, imperial leisure, and technological fantasy. Violence is not denied in these images; it is aestheticized, stripped of history and consequence, and re-presented as progress itself. Cruelty, deportations, and ICE assaults on immigrants and people of color are recast as reality-TV entertainment through a steady stream of slick propaganda videos produced by the Department of Homeland Security.
White Supremacy as Pedagogy: The Nation as a Biological Project
The same pedagogy of contempt animates the circulation of grotesque spectacles, including images that depict Trump defecating from an airplane onto protesters below, a scatological allegory that converts hatred of democratic dissent into visual pleasure and collective affirmation for his followers. This aesthetic does not merely signal oppression; it luxuriates in it, inviting audiences to take pleasure in humiliation itself. At its core lies an unabashed embrace of white supremacy. MAGA spectacles, racist imagery, and governing policies are organized around the presumption of a racial hierarchy with whiteness fixed at the apex. White supremacy is not incidental to Trump’s politics; it is their animating DNA. As the historian Robert O. Paxton argued in The Anatomy of Fascism, a defining feature of fascism is the redefinition of the nation as a biological rather than a civic entity. Crucially, this redefinition is not transmitted only through doctrine or law but also through a dense pedagogical field of images, rituals, performances, spectacles, and cultural apparatuses that teach audiences how to see the nation, how to recognize enemies, and how to feel righteous in their exclusion.
Under the Trump regime, citizenship is severed from even the fragile promise of shared democratic values and anchored in racial belonging, a violent recalibration that redraws the moral and political map of the nation, determining who counts, who is disposable, and who must be expelled. In this logic, the very claim to citizenship by nonwhite populations is treated as a criminal act, and their presence in the United States is recast as a crime scene. Exclusion is elevated into civic virtue, while assaults on racialized communities are not only permissible but necessary. Such reasoning does more than authorize cruelty; it normalizes the language and practice of racial cleansing and, at its most lethal extreme, summons the specter of genocide itself.
Once the nation is defined as a biological project, exclusion no longer appears as excess but as necessity. What follows is a cascade of policies, images, and performances that give administrative form to racial hierarchy and train the public to accept cruelty as governance. This logic surfaces in policies that welcome only white South Africans as refugees, in the systematic weakening of civil rights protections, and in claims that immigrants with “bad genes” are “poisoning the blood” of the nation. It appears in the deployment of armed federal agents into states with disproportionately nonwhite populations, creating what civil rights advocates have described as a new and terrifying reality for targeted communities. Trump’s racist rhetoric is evident in his disparagement of people from African nations and Haiti as coming from “shithole countries,” and in his dehumanization of Somalis as “garbage.”
Trump’s embrace of white supremacy is further revealed in his claim, in an interview with the New York Times that the civil rights movement and the policies it produced hurt white people who were “very badly treated.” He extended this logic on the global stage, asserting in a speech to the United Nations that Europe faced a civilizational crisis because of mass migration, which he cast as a threat to Western culture itself. This worldview reached its most unvarnished expression when Trump posted on Truth Social a blatantly racist, AI-generated video portraying Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, an image drawn directly from the archive of colonial and fascist racism. Such vile language and imagery would be at home in Ku Klux Klan pamphlets. As Susan Sontag observed, these authoritarian fantasies are inseparable from “the fetishization of dominance found in fascist aesthetics,” where cruelty becomes spectacle and racial hatred is staged as entertainment.
Cruelty as Spectacle: Rallies, Rituals, and Authoritarian Pleasure
Trump’s rallies intensify this toxic authoritarian aesthetic, transforming politics into a mass performance that fuses theatrical cruelty, racial grievance, white supremacy, and ritualized obedience. What emerges is a carnivalesque politics in which humiliation is rewarded, submission is celebrated, and dissent is disciplined through spectacle. This dynamic reaches a chilling apotheosis in the viral video of Kristi Noem posed like a plasticized Barbie doll before........