"Very Strongly"

Trump's Rhetoric of Power

These times are extremely challenging for someone who tries to make a living commenting on politics: the sheer volume of news and the overload of information make parsing the situation feel nearly impossible. It seems with the explosion of war and the wave of domestic repression that now includes elected officials, we have made a vertiginous drop into the abyss. But I believe that a series of recent setbacks and declining popularity has made the Trump administration look quite weak, including his very public falling out with Elon Musk, and has directly contributed to this dangerous turn of events. We don’t know what role exactly Trump played in Israel’s strikes on Iran, but now that they look successful, he has embraced them. I think it’s quite likely that he was waiting to see: in case of an Israeli fizzle and a strong Iranian response, he would’ve then bleated about dealmaking and the importance of negotiation.

But behind Los Angeles and Iran and the D.C. parade lies a single unifying logic of Trump’s moves: a superficial and gaudy rhetoric of power. Uniforms, troops, tanks, planes, drones, bombs—anything that reads “strength” and “control”—are to be employed. This is done to fill in a void of actual consent and political strength. They make the mistake of assuming that “violence = power,” which it does not: power comes from the consent of the governed. As Hannah Arendt wrote in On Violence, “‘[E]very decrease of power is an open invitation to violence only because those who hold power and feel it slipping from their hands... have always found it difficult to resist the temptation to use substitute violence for it.” (In this light, we also should keep in mind the fact that Netanyahu barely sneaked by a no-confidence vote in Israel.)

And while we should not make violence for power, we should not make the opposite mistake of assuming that the employment of repression and war themselves cannot generate power, and the rhetoric will do its job and restore the flagging fortunes of these regimes. Unfortunately, in the case of war with Iran, Trump is moving with the previous consensus: the foreign policy establishment and the media are always friendly to bombing. There is less likelihood that Trump will be framed as an erratic madman leading the country off the edge if Israel’s gambit results in a spectacular defeat for Iran, as it looks at this moment. Again, Trump will try to make it his victory. I believe, in the long run, this attempt to ride the whirlwind of events will result in collapse, but who knows how long?