Masha Gessen

In the early 20th century, there was this anarchist idea about the propaganda of the deed.

The propaganda of the deed was that there were these forms of direct action, and many of them violent.

Assassinations, bombings.

That when you did them, they were so spectacular.

Everybody would hear about them.

And when everybody heard about them...

There would be copycats by making the impossible possible, by making clear that society did not work how you thought it worked, that the state did not have the power you thought it had.

They could rupture society itself and create the possibility of a moment of revolutionary upheaval.

I think there is a way in which you should and can understand the Trump administration as operating often

through propaganda of the deed.

Now, they're not an anarchist collective.

They're a state.

They're a regime.

But they operate not so often through the dull work of rules and laws and legislation and deliberation, but through spectacle and through the meaning of particular spectacles.

Venezuela was a spectacle.

They do not seem to have planned for the aftermath.

They were decapitating the Maduro regime, but they left the regime otherwise completely in place.

Nobody seems to know, even in the administration, what it means for America to be running Venezuela.

But it was an example, an act that showed something.

And even before the capture of Maduro, they had chosen not to fight the drug war, the fentanyl scourge, through laws and legislation on addiction and drugs, but instead do these very high-profile bombings of alleged drug boats that, even if they were drug boats, were probably carrying cocaine because fentanyl doesn't come here that way.