WHCD: Spectacle and Performance Replace Freedom and Rights
The performance of political narrative disguised as the news represents the aestheticization of politics, which will be on display during the White House Correspondents Dinner.
The performance of political narrative disguised as the news represents the aestheticization of politics, which will be on display during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
Donald Trump was brought into being as a political power by our media turning itself back into 19th century style tabloid journalism run by various groups vying for power. The model upholds gossipy access journalism as the ultimate success.
Fascism brings an aestheticization of politics, critical theorist Walter Benjamin wrote in a fiercely anti-fascist manifesto* in 1935-36 during the Nazi regime, noting how spectacle was used to replace rights.
“The logical outcome of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life,” he wrote in the Epilogue, arguing that fascism transforms political power into spectacle like rallies, propaganda, and war so that the masses can express themselves instead of granting them their rights or altering economic policies to benefit them.
It is burying the theft of freedom in the pleasure of spectacle, culminating in the people experiencing their own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure.
The imagery evokes the cult of Trump and the fawning, asymmetrical media coverage of the spectacle.
Tonight, that will be on display as companies “throw events that can cost $300,000” and the “parties around the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner - like this 2024 soiree hosted by Time and Amazon MGM Studios - are becoming as buzzy as the dinner itself. And companies want in.”
They’re all so excited because Donald Trump will attend for the first time as a sitting president! Wow! The cash cow will be in the building. The excitement and money are flowing.
Rumors are Trump reportedly even has a “mic-drop” moment planned of a made-for-TV confrontation with the media for tonight’s Big Show.
These moments, so widely shared and enjoyed, are too often part of political theater that does not benefit the people. It’s often (not always!) controlled opposition and spectacle put on for your aesthetic enjoyment.
Instead of rights, you get the joy of constant outrage and release of tension when some other elite who once did something important gets a book deal after standing up to the little Oz in the White House. It’s a show.
What do the people actually get? What is a tangible result of these theatrical moments for the people?
Legacy Media Always Wins
In his first nine months of campaigning in the 2016 election, Trump earned nearly $2 billion in free media. He’s their cash cow baby. They made him and they benefit from him.
Who can forget former CBS Chairman and CEO Leslie Moonves admitting the game in 2016 by saying of Donald Trump’s presidential run that the wall-to-wall coverage wasn’t just beneficial to Trump. “The money’s rolling in,” he bragged, adding that a Trump candidacy “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”
Our media continued their obsequence to their convicted felon and demented cash cow in the 2024 election. Oh, how they loved them some Trump profit!
Surely women don’t mind dying so media organizations can make more profit. Surely thousands of people dying in a needless war of aggression are just collateral damage for profit.
Profit is their god, after all. Their only value. They will even tell you that.
The Washington Post’s owner Jeff Bezos wrote in a February 2025 announcement that the paper would “be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets… viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”
Bezos described those viewpoints, the viewpoints of the uber-wealthy and protected, as “under served.”
So for ten years, the US media have served us up the spectacle that makes them money and has fed into a mass delusion among Trump’s core supporters that mass screaming about people they hate somehow makes their lives better.
It does not. And in 2026, that is becoming abundantly clear to even many of the cult, because everyone has to buy groceries and fill their gas tank.
