Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.
Some of the individuals who have been apprehended under the Alien Enemies Act have been rendered to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison. Yesterday, Kristi Noem, America’s secretary of homeland security, toured this facility and then staged a photo-op and interview in front of a cell containing dozens of what we can only assume are prisoners of the supposed “war”1 we are fighting with Tren de Aragua.2
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The use of prisoners for propaganda purposes is as old as war itself. But there are a few recent examples you may recall. ISIS made extensive use of videos and pictures of imprisonment and execution. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese alternated their approach. Sometimes they used American POWs as props to suggest that all was well in their camps and that prisoners were being treated properly. (They were not.) Other times, they used images of American prisoners as tools to spread fear. They would parade captured American soldiers before mobs and display them at press conferences.
The goal is always the same, though: To use prisoners’ bodies as weapons of political war and to do so against their will.
This is what evil, illiberal regimes do.
Liberal regimes have standards for the treatment of prisoners. These standards are codified under the Geneva Conventions, which the United States has signed and ratified.
Among the standards dictated by the Geneva Conventions is this: Prisoners may not be publicly exploited for purposes of propaganda.3
Another standard of liberal governments is that people who present themselves through legal pathways as refugees fleeing oppression are vetted and provided due process, not disappeared into foreign gulags.
And yet here we are.
A high-ranking American official visits a prison on foreign soil which we are using to warehouse enemies of her regime. She appears in a fitted long-sleeve tee and active-wear slacks. There is a ballcap on her head and a pound of makeup smeared across her plasticized face. A gold Rolex Daytona—worth more than some of these men will make in their entire lives—sits proudly on her dainty wrist. Every piece of this visual is carefully engineered.
She visits the prison armory and shakes her head approvingly while inspecting the rifles. Then she pauses in front of a cage where human beings have been posed to her liking so that she can speak to the cameras in front of a powerful visual. She is sending a message on behalf of her country.
The message is this:
America is no longer a shining city on a hill. It is no longer the leader of the free world. It no longer stands on the side of liberty as a beacon for those who yearn to breathe free.
