It is like the trailer for a brutal Hollywood thriller, a soundtrack of dramatic menace meshing with images of violent repression. Heavily armed soldiers and masked guards muscle bewildered men off a plane, forcing their heads down, frogmarching them on to buses.
The camera pans high so we can see the journey to a dystopian incarceration facility, where the shackled detainees are made to kneel, their hair shaved off as, in terror, they call out their names. Then, in white prison uniforms, they are herded into cramped pens.
The production values are worthy of Sicario or Narcos. But this is not fiction. It is a clip posted proudly on X on March 16 by President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, depicting his country’s reception of 261 Venezuelan and Salvadoran deportees from the US. At the time of writing, it has been viewed 23 million times.
In response, Donald Trump reposted the horrific footage on Truth Social in celebratory fashion: “These are the monsters sent into our Country by Crooked Joe Biden and the Radical Left Democrats. How dare they! Thank you to El Salvador and, in particular, President Bukele, for your understanding of this horrible situation… We will not forget!”
Bukele, who describes himself as the world’s “coolest dictator”, is a darling of the MAGA movement. Last week, on Vince Coglianese’s new podcast (the show he has taken over from Dan Bongino, who, unbelievably, has been appointed deputy director of the FBI), his guest Tucker Carlson hailed the Salvadoran autocrat as “a very powerful model for how the world is going…To fix [our problems] is going to take resolve – like, real resolve, like, ‘We’re not putting up with this crap, period’.” Carlson also mentioned that Bukele has stayed at his home.
To be clear about what this “very powerful model” entails: the prisons of El Salvador, and especially the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) in Tecoluca where the new deportees are being held, are notorious for their human rights abuses, malnutrition, appalling overcrowding and negligible medical facilities. In December 2023, Amnesty International reported the “systemic use of torture” in these hellholes.
And it is to the very worst of these hellholes that the US – still, notionally, the UK’s closest international partner – has reportedly consigned hundreds of people. I say “reportedly” because their precise whereabouts and wellbeing are uncertain, and, as one would expect from an authoritarian regime like Bukele’s, their access to legal representation close to zero.
What is clear is that, while Trump insists the deportees were members of the gangs Tren de Aragua and MS-13, some, perhaps many, were no such thing. One unnamed LGBTQ individual, who sought asylum in the US from Nicolás Maduro’s tyrannous regime in Venezuela, was seized by immigration officials who insisted that his tattoos were gang-related. His lawyers now describe him as “disappeared” – a word one associates with the dictatorships of the past rather than the land of the free. Chillingly, many deportees have simply vanished from the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency’s digital locator service.
José Caraballo Tiapa, a 26-year-old Venezuelan barber who crossed the US border with his wife in 2023, was detained at a routine asylum application appointment in Dallas last month, after officials declared that a tattoo on his arm was a sign of gang involvement. In fact, it was a clock that showed the time of his daughter’s birth. But why let the truth get in the way of a fascistic crackdown?
Other such cases of mistaken identity are piling up. But it is wrong to assume that the errors are really errors. As Lindsay Toczylowski, the founder and president of Immigrant Defenders Law Center, told the Guardian last week, such flagrant violations of justice are “intended collateral damage” (my italics).
This is the whole point. A glancing familiarity with medieval heresy trials, the Salem witch-hunts, the McCarthy hearings and the methods of the Stasi teaches us that, in the theatre of tyranny, it is essential that the obviously innocent are punished. It is order, not justice, that the fascist seeks to enforce; power, not morality.
For all to fear the ruler, it is essential that anyone’s freedom can be taken away – and be seen to be taken away – at any time: capriciously, unfairly, unashamedly. Remember the first sentence of Franz Kafka’s The Trial: “Someone must have made a false accusation against Josef K, for he was arrested one morning without having done anything wrong”.
Much has already been written and said about Trump’s defiance of the courts in this case; his absurd invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798; and the scope for a full-blown constitutional crisis. And rightly so: little over two months into his second presidency, the republic is careering towards a nerve-shredding confrontation between commander-in-chief and Supreme Court.
But, as these horrors unfold, it is no less important to scrutinise the sheer spectacle, pageantry and stagecraft with which this administration commits its crimes; what might be called the choreography of fascism.
As the Atlantic essayist Adam Serwer has written, “the cruelty is the point” – a grim maxim that is also the title of his excellent book on Trump’s America, published in 2021. Serwer’s core insight is that the 45th and 47th president identifies and exploits the very worst instincts of the country, “essential forces of political conflict in American history that have been concealed by accidents of conservative sentimentality and liberal optimism”.
One can go further and observe the increasing brazenness of this cruelty. When the grotesque conditions at Guantanamo Bay became clear in 2002, and, subsequently, the use of torture at that facility and CIA black sites was revealed, there were furious rows within and beyond George W Bush’s administration.
When the disgraceful abuse of inmates at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was disclosed in 2004, Donald Rumsfeld tried twice to resign as defense secretary. In the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama and John McCain disagreed on many issues, but were as one in their abhorrence of torture and determination to close the Guantanamo detention camp.
Seventeen years later, depressingly, that facility still holds 15 detainees. But the point is clear. The excesses of the US response to 9/11 and its human rights abuses during the war on terror were a matter of political shame.
Trump, in contrast, barely has a pretext for his extra-judicial actions: his claim that Tren de Aragua “has invaded the United States” scarcely bothers to be serious, a melodramatic line straight from an episode of 24 or a Tom Clancy movie. His brutality, his indifference to basic decencies, is not concealed or covert. It is given maximum publicity and hyped on every social media channel. These deportations are his latest tentpole release – one he hopes will be a spring blockbuster.
As shocked as we are (and must remain), we should not be surprised. Fascism has always been marked by theatricality and showmanship. The locus classicus is, of course, Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies, Leni Riefenstahl’s films, Hugo Boss’s Nazi uniforms and the branding of the swastika and eagle.
But the Ku Klux Klan, in its 20th-century iteration, was no less aware of the power of costume and display. To a great extent, its iconography, visual identity and costumes were directly inspired by DW Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) and made possible by the commercially exploitative eye of William J Simmons, who established “The Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Incorporated” a week before the movie’s premiere, and cleaned up selling hoods and robes.
At its height, Islamic State behaved as much like a streaming service, producing studio-quality propaganda videos, as it did a theocratic movement seeking to establish an Islamist caliphate characterised by ruthless violence, torture and industrial-scale rape.
Why does Trump’s fascistic theatre find an audience today? A clue may be discovered, as so often, in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), and, specifically, her focus upon what she called the “front generation”. These veterans of the first world war trenches had witnessed unspeakable horrors and raged at the lies of political elites.
“They read not Darwin but the Marquis de Sade,” writes Arendt. “If they believed at all in universal laws, they certainly did not care to conform to them. To them, violence, power, cruelty, were the supreme capacities of men who had definitely lost their place in the universe….they elevated cruelty to a major virtue because it contradicted society’s humanitarian and liberal hypocrisy”.
Today’s MAGA voters – with the exception of military veterans – have no direct experience of wartime carnage. But they have been brutalised in different ways: reared on insecurity, diminishing expectations, the collapse of trust and the technological turbocharging of humanity’s meanest instincts. They can watch unspeakable horrors and the most violent pornography whenever they wish on their smartphones.
Like Elon Musk, millions of them are addicted to the bloodstained, bone-crunching ultraviolence of video games. To those desensitised by such daily on-screen horror, the deportation of 261 people without anything approaching due process is not a moral outrage; it’s a high score.
Timothy Snyder, one of the most astute chroniclers of 21st-century tyranny, calls this “sadopopulism”. As he wrote in his most recent book, On Freedom (2024): “Sadopopulism salves the pain of immobility by directing attention to others who suffer more… Sadopopulism bargains, in other words, not by granting resources but by offering relative degrees of pain and permission to enjoy the suffering of others… Sadopopulism replaces the American Dream with that American nightmare”.
In this grotesque world, the deportation of the innocent is all part of the sadistic spectacle, the comedy of choreographed cruelty. In tyrannies, scarcity and relish at the pain of others are two sides of the same coin. Think of Syme, the Newspeak specialist, gleefully describing a public execution to Winston Smith in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: “It was a good hanging… I think it spoils it when they tie their feet together. I like to see them kicking. And above all, at the end, the tongue sticking right out, and blue – a quite bright blue. That’s the detail that appeals to me”.
As nauseating as Trump’s strategy is, the much more troubling question concerns its reception. How responsive are ordinary Americans to the hateful production he is mounting? Are they repelled, or gratified, or a morally confused hybrid of the two?
Bear in mind: Trump campaigned heavily on mass deportation, was explicit before the election that he would exhume repressive measures such as the Alien Enemies Act and was unambiguous about his readiness to expel those he considered undesirable by any means necessary. As the repellent Bongino likes to say: “Cutesy time is over”.
Last month, a Washington Post-Ipsos poll found that 51% of Americans supported the president’s ambition to deport all 11 million undocumented immigrants. On average, polls in the past month suggest that, in spite of
all the front-page controversies, a similar percentage of Americans still approve of Trump’s handling of immigration.
And if you think all these respondents are snaggle-toothed white supremacists, think again. According to a recent study by the Democratic consulting firm Blue Rose Research, based on 26 million interviews, naturalised immigrants, who backed Joe Biden by a margin of 27 points in 2020, crossed the partisan divide to back Trump (albeit by a margin of one point) in November: that huge swing is one of the most extraordinary electoral data points in the recent history of the free world.
Could it happen here? Not yet. But think of Nigel Farage’s deplorable “Breaking Point” poster; think of the Daily Mail’s “Enemies of the People” headline in November 2016 attacking the judiciary; think of the Conservatives’ deranged Rwanda scheme, essentially a more polite version of Trump’s El Salvador deal; and think of the growing consensus among all parties of the right that the UK should leave the European Convention on Human Rights to stop the courts blocking deportation. The full-blown MAGA culture of public hate has not reached these shores yet. But it might.
Asked what she had learned from the Holocaust, Susan Sontag replied: “10% of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10% is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80% can be moved in either direction”.
The present readiness of most Americans to live in Trump’s theme park of brutality is a terrible illustration of her point. There may yet be a meaningful resistance to his methods, but it is not yet visible, even in germinal form.
The planes depart, the cell doors slam shut in the Salvadoran gulag, and life goes on in America. What is happening to the US is not only a terrifying demonstration of the ease with which, as it turns out, the republic’s checks and balances, high-minded norms and civic culture can be swept aside. It should be a warning to us all. In the carnival of cruelty, the most frightening feature of the lot is the mirror.
