Death comes calling. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Weaponizing Distraction: Spectacle as Governance

Under the Trump administration, the politics of diversion has hardened into a governing strategy and been normalized by a compliant mainstream media ecosystem. As James Oliphant observes in Reuters, “Donald Trump is a human hurricane,” generating so many simultaneous controversies that tracking any single event becomes nearly impossible. Oliphant is only partly right, because what he describes as chaos is in fact method. Trump is more than a whirlwind of chaos and distraction. He is an unchecked authoritarian who poses a grave threat to democracy and the planet—he is a modern day avatar of domestic terrorism. What masquerades as spectacle and turbulence is, in fact, the calculated exercise of power, a form of governance that weaponizes confusion, accelerates cruelty, and functions as a domestic analogue of terrorism, designed to intimidate, disorient, and exhaust the public into submission. It is through this machinery of distraction and shock that state terrorism now takes shape, not as a single event, but as a continuous sequence of calculated ruptures and relentless acts of violence.

Aftershocks of Power: Kinetic Action and State Terror

State terrorism unfolds through what the historian Nikhil Pal Singh calls its “aftershocks,” a cascading sequence of spectacles engineered to generate emotional outrage intense enough to displace sustained analysis and comprehensive understanding. As Singh writes, such shocks fragment public attention and dull critical judgment, rendering brutality episodic rather than systemic. These acts do not simply terrorize; they instruct. In this register, “kinetic action” names a new grammar of governance: landing a Black Hawk helicopter packed with armed police atop an apartment building in Chicago’s South Shore, hurling stun grenades and zip-tying residents; seizing roofers at gunpoint from the top of a house in upstate New York; or blowing up a small boat carrying people in the Caribbean.

In this political climate, outrage is incessantly manufactured and then swiftly displaced, replaced by the next shock before the public can assemble the fragments into a coherent political picture. Each incident appears as an isolated rupture rather than as part of an unfolding structure of power, severed from the conditions that produce it and from the larger architecture of domination it sustains. This fragmentation is not accidental. It is a calculated strategy to drain meaning from public life, exhaust critical attention, and foreclose any sustained democratic reckoning or resistance. In the age of escalating fascism and a nihilistic worship of greed and raw power, American politics has devolved into a theater of violence aligned with a ceaseless stream of spectacles severed from history and emptied of systemic meaning. What vanishes in this fractured field of sensation is the recognition that these acts are not excesses or breakdowns. They are the governing grammar of a neoliberal–fascist gangster capitalist order, organized around militarization, white supremacy, historical erasure, dispossession, and punishment, now treated as inevitabilities rather than indictments.

Depoliticization by Design: Renée Good and the Machinery of Erasure

In early January 2026, the U.S. staged a dramatic military abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, a flagrant breach of sovereignty that should have dominated global headlines and provoked profound legal and ethical debate. Instead, by the time many Americans were beginning to process that emerging foreign crisis, the nation’s attention had been reshaped by another state-sanctioned act of violence: on January 7, Minneapolis resident Renée Nicole Good was murdered by a federal ICE agent during an immigration operation. Good, a 37-year-old mother, was killed while driving away from federal agents, a lethal encounter the administration defended as self-defense despite eyewitness accounts and video footage disproving the official narrative.

Racist violence now saturates American society, no longer confined to the margins but woven into the fabric of everyday governance. Under Trump, people of color, whether citizens or noncitizens, are rarely exempt from being cast as targets, whether inside the nation’s borders or beyond them. As the historian Greg Grandin observes, the logics of extraction, violence, and permanent threat have fused foreign and domestic policy into a single, brutal continuum. He writes: “The same rule by domination Mr. Trump showcases abroad is little different from what is being applied at home. Polarization is deepening, cities are under assault by federal forces, and the degrading, at times lethal treatment of citizens and noncitizens alike by government agents is now routine.” What emerges is a politics that governs through fear and force, erasing any meaningful distinction between war overseas and repression at home.

What followed reveals how distraction functions not merely as diversion but as a technology of depoliticization. Rather than treating Good’s killing as a moment demanding scrutiny of unaccountable force and part of a broader strategy of state violence and domestic terrorism, top federal officials immediately doubled down on enforcement and sought to recast the incident as evidence of domestic threat. Homeland Security leaders described her actions as “domestic terrorism,” and the administration launched Operation Salvo — a nationwide increase in ICE raids and enforcement initiatives in the aftermath of her death. This mass retribution was choreographed through government-produced propaganda videos.

Vice President JD Vance alleged, without a vestige of evidence that Renee Good was “part of a broader left-wing network to attack, to dox, to assault and to make it impossible for our ICE officers to do their job” and “that she used the techniques of domestic terrorism to target federal officials.” He further stated, shamelessly and without evidence, that she was “brainwashed” and tied to a “broader, left-wing network.”

Within days of Renée Good’s killing, the mainstream media cycle shifted once again, overtaken by a cascading series of distractions engineered to smother sustained attention. Trump allies demanded criminal investigations of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Federal officials revived anti-communist delusions, falsely claiming that left-wing organizations constituted domestic terrorist threats, while repeated speculation erupted over Epstein-linked scandals. At the same time, renewed fascination attached itself to Trump’s incendiary threats against Mexico, Cuba, and Colombia, alongside his grotesque annexation “fantasies” directed at Greenland.

The mainstream press once again performs its role as an army of stenographers, loudly amplifying Trump’s feigned concern for Iranian protesters while remaining willfully blind to the central contradiction it refuses to name, his ruthless suppression of dissent at home, most notably his escalating assault on those who stand in solidarity with Palestinian freedom. These spectacles did not merely compete for public attention, they functioned as acts of erasure, actively burying any serious reckoning with Good’s killing and with the chilling threat issued by the proto-fascist ideologue Stephen Miller to “create an empire in reverse,” that is, to turn the full machinery of a militarized empire inward, “toward the homeland, and its enemies within.”

In this inversion, the war on terror comes home saturated with state violence, marked by the routine shooting of civilians by an increasingly rogue police apparatus and by a calculated effort to ensure that public attention dissipates before the underlying pattern of domestic terrorism and authoritarian rule can be named. What is lost in this relentless mix is not simply narrative or a comprehensive understanding of the many strands of neoliberal fascism, but the very capacity to recognize these acts as part of a coherent political project, one aimed at normalizing repression, criminalizing dissent, fragmenting resistance, and emptying democracy of its remaining substance.

This is the operation of the politics of disconnection: a system in which state violence, institutional complicity, and media spectacle........

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