On Saturday at Mar-a-Lago, as he was supposed to be speaking to the White House press corps about the overnight military raid in Venezuela, Donald Trump was busy doing what he loves most: posting on social media. While the reporters waited for him, he published an 84-second video on Truth Social featuring footage of the attack set to Creedence Clearwater Revival’s 1969 hit “Fortunate Son”—the opening guitar lick of which has been a Vietnam War movie cliché for decades.
But “Fortunate Son” is also, as many pointed out on Saturday, an antiwar song that rips on privileged draft dodgers—something Mr. Bone Spurs knows more than a bit about himself. This song choice thus baffled people online, me included. Did Trump even know what the song was about? Was it because he’s a boomer who came of age during the song’s heyday? Was he trolling? Did he even care?
These are the wrong questions—but they’re exactly the questions the Trump administration wants us to be asking. The choice of “Fortunate Son” was no mistake, and it’s just the latest example of how the far right understands and exploits the aesthetics of contradiction, senselessness, and absurdity to shock and numb us.
Trump is singularly obsessed with the spectacle of power. This isn’t new for the far right, of course; fascist Italy and Nazi Germany were obsessed with aesthetics, particularly visuals, in a way that other political ideologies generally aren’t. But Trump, who’s described himself as a “very aesthetic person,” takes it to a new level.
Since returning to the White House, he’s filled it with golden decor that he thinks is fit for a king. No matter that it looks cheesy or tacky or, ironically, cheap to a lot of us. For him and the coterie around him, it’s a projection of power, a glued-up palace presented as a spectacle for the cameras and thus the world.
You could see this singular obsession with the spectacle of power on hyperactive display in the wake of the Venezuela raid. In his comments to Fox and Friends just hours after the attacks, before he even addressed the media at Mar-a-Lago, Trump spoke with awe about watching the violence he’d set in motion.
“I watched it literally like I was watching a television show,” Trump, the would-be auteur of this show, said. “If you would have seen the speed, the violence … it was an amazing thing.” Even photos of Trump and his advisers watching the raids in real time from Mar-a-Lago reveal they were also watching their X feeds on their computers: They wanted to see how their spectacle was being received on their Nazi-friendly, CSAM-filled platform of choice.
So it’s safe to say that the aesthetic choice to set war footage to a known antiwar song is a deliberate decision. But the goal is not to communicate some kind of coherent political message; it doesn’t need to make sense, and in fact it’s better that it not make sense. This is blunt-force aesthetics. You are not meant to think about the lyrics of “Fortunate Son”; you are meant to feel that this is a really cool movie, not unlike ones you’ve seen before. You might even forget for a moment that this isn’t Forrest Gump or Born on the Fourth of July, but real life.
We’ve come to expect such aesthetic absurdity from him. Heck, that wasn’t even his first time using “Fortunate Son” as a soundtrack to military spectacle; it played during his June 2025 military parade in Washington, D.C. Another video from the same genre, which he posted back in June, pairs a montage of stealth bombers raining munitions with Vince and the Valiants’ 1980 song “Bomb Iran,” a parody of the Regents’ chipper 1961 hit “Barbara Ann.”
So it’s no surprise that in his second term, Trump has leaned especially hard into the most absurd content that exists today: AI-generated videos. He has posted videos of Barack Obama being arrested and of Santa Claus in an ICE vest rounding up foreigners, not to mention the infamous one in which he pilots a fighter jet, a golden crown atop his head, and unleashes shit on No Kings protesters. And as with “Fortunate Son,” he has used content without an apparent understanding of its meaning: Almost a year ago, he shared an AI-generated video of “Trump Gaza,” which depicted the Strip as a resort paradise, replete with a golden statue of Trump. The video’s creators later said it was a satire of Trump’s “megalomaniac idea.”
The far right suffers from what one scholar of Theodor Adorno has described, drawing from the German critical theorist’s writings on antisemitism, as “the incapacity to be moved by contradiction.” For the far right, what’s more important is an aesthetics of domination. The Trump administration is flooding our senses without regard for coherence, in the hope we exhaust ourselves trying to make sense of something that’s completely contradictory or willfully absurd. At which point we become numb to it all, which is the ultimate goal.
This aesthetic of domination was on display again in the wake of the ICE shooting in Minneapolis, where an ICE agent shot and killed a protester in her car. Despite all the videos showing that there was no conceivable element of self-defense, the far right on social media—all the way up to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and Trump himself—tried to tell us otherwise. Even the Bari Weiss–run CBS News ran an article debunking the notion that the agent had been hit by the car and was hospitalized.
You know what it’s like to try to make sense of stuff that just doesn’t makes sense. It confuses you, and can leave you feeling powerless. And if it happens often enough, you can feel yourself giving up. You might even get the urge to withdraw from the world. What, you ask yourself, is the point of anything?
They’ve got you right where they want you.
