When the media is less honest than Trump
On coverage of the Maduro kidnapping
“What the president said is true. The United States of America is running Venezuela…. We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”
This is not the critical analysis of an angry left-wing writer, nor an excerpt from some bitter retrospective on the second term of Donald Trump retrieved from far in the future. These words came out of the mouth of White House Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller, a uniquely repulsive member of an already repulsive administration, speaking with Jake Tapper on January 5 about Venezuela with the intonation of an alien who knows how to speak English but not how to sound like a human being.
Miller was not the only member of the Trump administration to describe Nicolás Maduro’s abduction as an exercise of naked force, bereft of any legal or even moral justifications. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, at the press conference following the raid, stated, “America can project our will anywhere, anytime,” and then repeated an internet meme beloved by online fanboys of American imperialism: Maduro, like Iran, “effed around and he found out.”
The language of memes has been singularly embraced by this White House, and was part of the familiar playbook after Maduro’s kidnapping. Official State Department accounts posted black-and-white photographs of Trump, who appears barely awake as he watches Maduro’s compound being attacked, with blood-red text declaring, “Don’t play games with President Trump,” and, “This is our hemisphere.” A satirical political cartoon from 1905 about the Monroe Doctrine was repurposed on the administration-affiliated “Trump War Room” X account, showing the president as Uncle Sam, extolling the rebirth of what he called the “Donroe Doctrine.”
All of this is to say that the administration has been transparent: this was an openly colonialist venture, an explicit show of force to impose the will of one nation on another, to seize natural resources, and to push naive concerns about sovereignty to the wayside. But it seems that most Western media has, so far, missed the memo.
Most mainstream American and European outlets — including CNN, NBC News, The Wall Street Journal, Politico, and Reuters — called the apprehension of a sovereign nation’s leader an arrest, a capture, or a seizure, with words like “abduction” or “kidnapping” left to non-Western publications like Al Jazeera and left-wing media organizations like Democracy Now. The New York Times described it as a “tactically precise operation” that “successfully extracted Mr. Maduro with no loss of American life.”
The BBC reportedly directed staff to describe Maduro as “captured,” with “seized” as an appropriate alternative, but to avoid using “kidnapped.” BBC journalists followed this guideline dutifully; a clip circulated showing one on-air anchor seemingly stumbling over her words after remembering that she was supposed to use “seize” in her description. Despite the channel’s insistence that this was the official American terminology for the operation, President Trump’s own language has been considerably more colorful. On Air Force One, when questioned by an incredulous journalist if he disagreed with Venezuelan acting President Delcy Rodríguez’s use of “kidnapping,” Trump simply replied, “That’s alright. That’s not a bad term.”
Even as the White House under Trump has dropped almost all pretenses regarding the United States’s real designs, the media seems determined to keep the consent-manufacturing machine running as long as possible. These attempts to curry favor with the administration may ultimately be in vain; perhaps the inevitable fate of the Western journalist is represented by CBS’s new evening news anchor Tony Dokoupil, installed under Bari Weiss. No great scoops, no tough questions, just these words on the teleprompter for eternity: “Marco Rubio, we salute you!”
To read more about foreign policy under Trump and the legacy of neoconservatism, take a look at my Issue Sixteen Drift essay, “Be Grateful.”
Be Grateful | Trump’s Latter-day Neoconservatism
SÉAMUS MALEKAFZALI
In his second administration, Trump has sought to eliminate the last vestiges of the idea that the goodwill of the rest of the world is something America needs to work to earn.
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Image by John Kazior. Source image credit: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff / Flickr and The National Guard / Flickr.
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