In the early 20th century there was this anarchist idea about the propaganda of the deed. The propaganda of the deed was that there were these forms of direct action \u2014 and many of them violent: assassinations, bombings \u2014 that when you did them, they were so spectacular, everybody would hear about them. And when everybody heard about them, there would be copycats. By making clear the society did not work how you thought it worked, it could rupture society itself and create the possibility of a moment of revolutionary upheaval. I think there is a way in which you should and can understand the Trump administration as operating often through propaganda of the deed. Now, they\u2019re not an anarchist collective. They\u2019re state. They\u2019re a regime, but they operate not so often through the dull work of rules and laws and legislation and deliberation but through spectacle, through the meaning of particular spectacles. Venezuela was a spectacle. They do not seem to have planned for the aftermath. They were decapitating the Maduro regime, but they left the regime otherwise completely in place. \u201cFor us to just leave \u2014 who\u2019s going to take over? I mean, there is nobody to take over.\u201d But it was an object lesson, an example, an act that showed something. And even before the capture of Maduro, they had chosen not to fight the drug war, the fentanyl scourge, through laws and legislation on addiction and drugs but instead do these very high-profile bombings of alleged drug boats that, even if they were drug boats, were probably carrying cocaine. It was spectacular. It was a message. It was showing what they could do. It was a deed that everybody could see and would talk about. \u201cLiberation Day\u201d \u2014 you can keep going on and on and on. Like this. The Trump administration is an administration of spectacle, and I\u2019ve heard it sometimes described as reality TV administration. But I don\u2019t think that\u2019s quite right, because what reality TV wants is ratings. But these spectacles \u2014 this propaganda is meant to carry messages. It is meant to make clear how the world now works. If there\u2019s an event that I think of as the nail in the coffin of the new international world order, it will be Venezuela. We can point to times when the president didn\u2019t get congressional approval. We can point to times when the United States didn\u2019t get approval of the U.N. Security Council. We can point to times when it acted independently of NATO. We can point to times when it blatantly lied about what it was doing. But I can\u2019t really think of a time when it was doing all of that at the same time demonstratively. And I think there\u2019s a transition from the quantity of things that this administration is doing to a new quality of being in the world.<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/EKS_GESSEN_CLIP-1_260112_THUMB_A_CLEAN-jumbo.png\")
The columnists Ezra Klein and M. Gessen discuss the message President Trump sent by ousting the president of Venezuela.<\/p>\n
By \u2018The Ezra Klein Show\u2019<\/p>\n
January 13, 2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"new video loaded: Trump\u2019s \u2018Propaganda of the Deed\u2019 transcript Back transcript Trump\u2019s \u2018Propaganda of the Deed\u2019The columnists Ezra…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":513279,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,67,586,132,5230,68,11038,11036,229355,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-513278","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-new-york-city","11":"tag-newyork","12":"tag-newyorkcity","13":"tag-ny","14":"tag-nyc","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-united-states-of-america","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","19":"tag-us","20":"tag-us-foreign-policy","21":"tag-us-politics","22":"tag-us-venezuela-conflict","23":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115888313184540011","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=513278"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513278\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/513279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=513278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=513278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=513278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}