Carpe Momentum: The Spectacle and the Witness
In Trump’s authoritarian theater, JD Vance cues the violence. In San Diego, unarmed clergy reveal the mask.
We are no longer governed. We are being produced into a reality show.
The collapse of American democratic norms has long ceased to be a backroom affair. It now operates fully in public view, feeding a constant cycle of spectacle designed for cameras, headlines, and social media loops. Governance has become theater, and the performance is accelerating.
This week offered another meticulously staged scene when Vice President JD Vance arrived in Los Angeles. Ostensibly, it was to assess federal immigration enforcement operations. In reality, it was pure theater. Vance’s visit lasted barely four and a half hours, with just over an hour inside the city itself. Local reporters were barred; only select MAGA-aligned national media were invited to the choreographed event. The true audience was never in the room.
Standing before the handpicked press pool, Vance delivered his monologue: California’s governor and mayor were to blame for making Los Angeles “open season” on federal law enforcement. He invoked violence, chaos, lawlessness, the necessary villains for the regime’s ongoing narrative of national disorder. Then, his most revealing slip came when Vance called California Senator Alex Padilla, his former Senate colleague recently detained in a highly public FBI raid, “Jose Padilla.” Jose Padilla was the name of a long-detained ‘enemy combatant’ from the Bush years, accused of terrorism. But more revealing was Vance’s casual use of “Jose” as a stand-in for any Hispanic name, a reflexive act of racial diminishment that laid bare his nativist instincts. In one stroke, Vance seamlessly fused elected officials, immigrants, and terrorism into a single category of threat, tapping into the oldest American habit of reducing brown-skinned people to interchangeable caricatures.
