TRUMPERS AREN'T JUST DOING AUTHORITARIANISM FOR THE LIKES

At Bad Faith Times on Monday, Denny Carter published an essay on the Venezuela invasion called "They Did It for the Content."

I think I know why the regime committed a variety of international crimes in kidnapping Nicolas Maduro, the president of Venezuela, and his wife over the weekend.

They did it for the online engagement: For the excitement, for the videos of American aircraft bombing Caracas (and killing 80-some civilians) and the pictures of a blindfolded Maduro being frog-walked out of a government plane in New York and the president presiding over the capture from his make-believe bunker in Mar-a-lago, haggard and tieless and working hard for the average American Joe, who wanted nothing more than for the American government to abduct a head of state from a country he could not identify on a map. It’s why Hegseth and Miller and others in the Mar-a-lago bunker were closely monitoring the X platform during the illegal operation.

They are posters at heart, and they are addicted to the thrill of their content going viral. I say this as someone who understands the sensation. And this – yes, this – was little more than content creation dressed up as serious foreign policy.

At The Atlantic last night, Charlie Warzel made a similar assertion:

It is no secret that the Trump administration is social media–addled. Over the past year, most of the government’s major online accounts—especially on X—have become megaphones for cruel and racist shitposting, not unlike what one might see from a garden-variety troll on 4chan. These accounts have shared deportation ASMR; an AI-generated, Studio Ghiblified version of a real photo of a crying woman being arrested by ICE; a post comparing immigrants to the alien vermin in the Halo video-game series; and Nazi-coded “Defend the fatherland” memes. And who could forget the AI-slop video of Trump in a fighter jet dropping what appeared to be human feces on protesters in Times Square. These official government communications are a key part of how the Trump administration does its job. It is governance through content creation.

Carter sees this as a sign that the Trump administration is less authoritarian than it could be:

The same people who wanted to create content of Maduro’s kidnapping have also created content of the president’s secret police kicking in the doors of their opponents, National Guard troops marching into opposition strongholds for entirely invented reasons, and immigrants dressed in chains shuffling their way to a plane that would take them to a faraway concentration camp. This sort of online content satiates the burning fascist need for the pain and torment of their enemies, both real and perceived....

Almost none of it is real though. In a true authoritarian onslaught, National Guard troops would have stormed into Democrat-run cities and committed acts of unspeakable violence against anyone who dared to protest. They would have arrested and killed every opposition leader in those states and they would have done it quickly and without pretense. Their cameras would certainly not be on for any of this....

In a true authoritarian onslaught, the regime's thugs would not have even entertained the idea of standing before a judge, explaining their attacks on immigrant communities and coming up with faulty legal justifications for their ethnic cleansing campaign. They would have simply arrested or killed the judge, as leading American monarchist and JD Vance adviser Curtis Yarvin has advocated, and carried on with their ethnic cleansing business.

Instead, Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino took glamour shots of himself dressed as an SS officer outside a Chicago courthouse. Because, you see, content is king. Content is the whole point. It always has been.

And Warzel thinks all the content creation is ... nihilistic.

By the time I saw the news of the raid, a photo Trump had posted showing a blindfolded Maduro in a Nike sweatsuit had already become a meme. Just a few minutes later, that meme had mixed with a dozen others....

The result is essentially insane and postliterate. But it is also pretty much legible for those steeped in online culture. It is coherent incoherence, everything reacting to everything else, all at once. The same thing happened after [Charlie] Kirk was shot. The memes, commentary, and speculation became a culture unto itself, a loop of ironic posting, information warring, and commentary on commentary—all before his shooter was identified or Kirk was even pronounced dead. This process is nihilistic....

But that's not what happened after Charlie Kirk was shot. America didn't just enter a multiverse in which your remix of Kirk memes competed with everyone else's for likes. Many people lost their jobs because they engaged in constitutionally protected (and factually accurate) speech about Kirk that our Republican overlords didn't like, as the vice president of the United States led calls for a purge:

In the wake of Mr. Kirk’s death, Vice President JD Vance urged people to call the bosses of those who celebrated the assassination. “Call them out, and hell, call their employer,” he said.

Carter is right: the Trump administration could have gone fascist much more rapidly and brutally, and hasn't hit all the benchmarks yet. But I'm reminded of domestic abusers who prefer gaslighting and coercion to physical violence: they are trying to create an information sphere in which their worldview seems like the only sensible path, and all contrary views must be rejected. Fox has been building a closed information system like this for years, and now the siloing of social media sites plus the paywalling of old-fashioned news means that millions of people never have to encounter a fact that runs counter to their worldview on the way to the memes.

I spend time at Reddit's Forwards from Grandma, which posts right-wing memes and cartoons. In this environment, it's assumed that Democrats are actually pro-Maduro:

Content like this is what your right-wing grandparents on Facebook regard as their "newsfeed" -- and the administration wants to be the top content creator, in ways that substitute image and spectacle for facts.

In America in 2026, this is the news -- memes plus podcasts plus short-form videos. The content the Trumpers are creating is meant to be part of this stream. Warzel writes:

These days, one doesn’t experience the news on these platforms before seeing the memes and reactions—the reaction and the news are, in essence, one thing now.

Right -- so shaping the message in the most viral way is everything, regardless of the facts.