We Can’t Be Passive Onlookers.
By Khury Petersen-Smith , Truthout
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| Joey Murphy |
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.
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.
Khury Petersen-Smith is the Michael Ratner
Middle East Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.
