Masha Gessen

There's no... I don't want to say truly there is no backstage to him, but I am not sure there is a backstage to him.

I just think that there is a way in which he fully inhabits himself as a public brand and has for so long that it is absorbed on a cellular level to him in the way that even many people who are understood as influencers or famous or... They're a little bit faking it.

But for him...

Donald Trump as a media spectacle, as a human being turned into a spectacle, is a fully inhabited phenomenon.

It would be one thing if it's just him, but it's no longer just him.

And my sense is that people all over the administration understand this on some levels, like what it means to be doing politics.

Kristi Noem going to the El Salvadoran torture prison and posing in front of all these human beings stacked up behind each other in a cage.

That's not who Kristi Noem was 15 years ago.

That's an attempt to learn in an artificial way what Donald Trump embodies in an intuitive way.

But it's turned his instincts into not a governing philosophy exactly, but a governing philosophy.

I think that's a really interesting point.

And I began thinking while we were talking about this about a moment I haven't thought about in a long time, which is

Barack Obama was capable of spectacle and created spectacle during the fight over the Affordable Care Act.

Deep in it, Obama functionally holds a public debate on C-SPAN.

with him and a bunch of congressional leaders, of which for the Republicans, Paul Ryan ends up being the star and lead communicator, in which they are just arguing the details of health care policy in front of the public.

And there are many things happening in that, but in some ways it was a spectacle of deliberation.

It was a spectacle very aligned with sophisticated policymaking techniques

in a democracy where the view was that people might align to whoever made the best argument.

And the message of a lot of Trumpist spectacle to me is the wiping away of all that.

Again, the absence of Congress here I think is a very, very important thing.