Venezuela, Renee Good and Trump’s ‘Assault on Hope’
About this episode
Columnist M. Gessen joins Klein to argue the Trump administration governs through spectacle — a 'propaganda of the deed' — rather than laws or deliberation. Venezuela exemplifies it: the regime was decapitated without a plan for afterward, and boat bombings sent a message, not a drug policy. Gessen calls Venezuela the nail in the coffin of the postwar order, insisting veneer mattered — Bush lied to the U.N. rather than disregarding it. Trump is hypermodern, 'always in a movie,' no backstage, and officials imitate his aesthetic instincts. Autocrats oppose deliberation itself, Gessen says, on deliberation as mutual obligation. The episode turns to ICE's killing of Renee Good in Minnesota: political violence, and a message to protesters — ICE as a presidential paramilitary. Speed favors the autocrat, since democracies defend themselves slowly; it is unclear whether Americans will accept the totalitarian trade-off of greatness for hardship — an 'assault on hope.'