Masha Gessen

And there's also a debate internationally, Colin Powell going to the UN and giving a presentation we now know had falsehoods in it, and in some ways knew then.

And ultimately, the UN does not go along, and then you have the Coalition of the Willing, and it is a betrayal of the order.

But it has this idea that the U.S.

should still be working within the

And so there is this way in which you see the total wiping away of that.

And you can understand it as having both continuity and discontinuity.

And I'm curious how you see that.

And the Trump administration both, I think, appreciates but in many ways governs through spectacle.

where other administrations govern much more through rules and laws and regulations, they really focus on spectacle.

And Venezuela was structured as spectacle, right?

Not a long planning process for what the post-decapitation of the regime will look like, but just you go in and, you know, then you have this picture of Maduro on the plane, blindfolded.

You have this, like, you know, very triumphant press conference from Donald Trump on,

What is the role of spectacle here?

I think sometimes about the way in which Joe Biden and Donald Trump are not far apart in age.

Biden felt fundamentally of another era.

Biden was a politician of the past who is somewhat governing as a caretaker of the present.

Trump, to me, sometimes feels like he is somewhat from the future.

He is hyper-modern.

What I mean by that is he

He is always his profile picture.