The Masquerade of Power

Or, DOGE did not take place

Public Domain

There are two basic ways of understanding the blitzkrieg of executive orders, pardons, hostile takeovers, liquidations, mass layoffs, spending freezes, and other dramatic actions that have characterized the first few weeks of Donald Trump’s second term. The first is: “You can just do things.” Trump’s supporters have been exhilarated by the sense that the excessive caution of the conservative “controlled opposition” has been thrown to the wind in favor of a resolute program of action. The right has spent years talking about the need for “regime change,” for “de-wokification,” and it suddenly seems as if the revolution they dreamed of is underway.

Many in the liberal opposition share this assessment, but see it as the fulfillment of their nightmares. But The New York Times’s Ezra Klein offers an alternative view: “The projection of strength obscures the reality of weakness.” In other words, a great deal of what Trump has done is a performance of “doing things,” especially insofar as some of the “things” he has done are not things he can do or get away with doing. Klein gives the examples of the birthright citizenship executive order—“the president cannot rewrite the Constitution,” he notes—and the almost instantly rescinded federal spending freeze (rescinded even as the White House simultaneously denied it was being rescinded). The purpose of these actions, Klein argues, wasn’t so much to “do things” as to create the appearance of doing things, so as to then make things like them more plausible down the road. To meme things into reality, in other words. As Klein writes: “Trump knows the power of marketing. If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true. Trump clawed his way back to great wealth by playing a fearsome billionaire on TV; he remade himself as a winner by refusing to admit he had ever lost.”

Klein rests much of his analysis on a 2019 statement from Trump’s former consigliere, Steve Bannon: “The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because they’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time … All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done.” For Bannon, as for Klein, there is indeed a level at which the administration is in fact “doing things,” but there is also the mediatic realm of pure appearances, which can be deployed as a smokescreen so as to sow perpetual confusion between what is actually being done and what is merely simulated. Klein’s advice to his fellow Democrats is: “Don’t believe him.” In other words, focus on the things Trump does, not all the things he appears to be doing but can’t.

Klein’s commentary—and Bannon’s—diverges from the “you can just do things” assessment insofar as it suggests many of the “things” being done are really a simulation of things being done. Nonetheless, they share the conclusion that the administration’s goal is to do things. “His plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king,” writes Klein, “we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.” But is Trump’s goal to “govern as a king”? This conclusion contradicts another familiar understanding of what is distinctive about Trump’s political career: that just as, in his business career, being known as a rich guy—including by playing one on TV—always seemed to take precedence over the actual accumulation of wealth, perhaps “playing king on TV” is the real goal, to which “govern[ing] as a king” is subordinate.

In his last book, The Agony of Power (2007), Jean Baudrillard wrote of the “masquerade of power”: the point at which the “signs of power” become indistinguishable from its reality; or at which “power is only the parody of the signs of power.” He found the culmination of this process in the rise of another celebrity-politician: “With the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Governor of California, we are deep in the masquerade, where politics is only a game of idolatry and marketing. It is a giant step toward the end of the system of representation. This is the destiny of contemporary politicians.”

What this reveals, Baudrillard believed, is a shift from a world of “domination”—in which some held power and others had it exercised upon them—to one of “hegemony,” in which power is located everywhere and nowhere. “Hegemony,” he writes, “begins here in the disappearance of the personal, agonistic domination,” which is supplanted by “the reality of networks, of the virtual and total exchange where there are no longer dominators or dominated.” What this means is that those positioned within the traditional centers of power—the Oval Office, for example—are no less part of the network than the rest of us.

The activities of the Department of Government Efficiency can be understood in this light. The first question to ask about DOGE is in what sense it exists. It began its institutional existence as a nebulous para-governmental entity conjured into existence as a meme, even named for a memecoin; it was then semi-officialized as the United States DOGE Service, a “department” without departmental status nestled awkwardly inside a “service.” Crucially, in order to facilitate this nestling while keeping the acronym intact, “DOGE” replaced “digital,” appropriately since its activities seem to focus on seizing the chokepoints of the digital networks through which government now operates—although supposedly its access remains “read-only” at this point.

Is DOGE a site of power, a sign of power, or something else? It is all of these: simultaneously the tip of the spear of a revolutionary project and a sort of elaborate prank being done for the lulz. Not long after being summoned into official existence by a post-it note, DOGE seemingly gained access to the entire payments system of the federal government and was empowered to liquidate an entire federal agency. It is unsurprising in light of the account of “hegemony” just offered that this would be the case. What the architects of DOGE have intuited is that once we have all become nodes in the same vast network with no determinate center, the ambiguity around where power resides is a vulnerability to be exploited. Yet as Baudrillard warns, “those who live by the show will die by the show”: The weakness it has identified in the system is also its own, as will become evident sooner or later.

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