Phantoms and Ghosts

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A week ago, Donald Trump, the new chair of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington and also the president of the United States, convened his first board meeting since seizing power over the center in a quite literal coup de théâtre. In addition to reminiscing about the good old days when musicals weren’t woke—like (erm) Phantom of the Opera and (ermmmmmm) Les Misérables—and proposing to lavish posthumous honors on Luciano Pavarotti, Elvis Presley, and Babe Ruth, Trump used the visit to make news about another long-dead celebrity: Kennedy himself. Shortly after returning to office in January, Trump had signed an executive order laying the groundwork for the release of all the remaining files in the government’s possession pertaining to Kennedy’s 1963 assassination; now, suddenly, he was promising that the records would drop within twenty-four hours. “We have a tremendous amount of paper,” he told reporters. “You’ve got a lot of reading.”

Trump’s announcement reportedly led to an all-nighter at the Justice Department, as officials scrambled to ready tens of thousands of pages for public consumption; after they were released, the scramble extended to historians and journalists, who, as the New York Times put it, quickly “scoured the pages in hopes of finding something, anything, that could be considered consequential.” (“Amateur sleuths,” too; the Times integrated a form into its live coverage of the revelations to make it easy for readers to share any findings of their own.) The files are still being picked over, but journalists were quick to report that they did not appear to contain any new smoking gun on the whodunit front. (They did contain Social Security numbers and other private data belonging to hundreds of people connected to the story and the various probes linked to it, some of whom—including Joseph diGenova, a former lawyer for Trump’s campaign—are still alive.) Over the weekend, Clay Travis, a right-wing media personality, asked Trump, during an interview aboard Air Force One, whether he personally believes that Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy, as the history books say, and Trump replied, “I do.” He appeared to raise the question as to whether Oswald had help, but then said that the files were “somewhat unspectacular,” adding, “maybe that’s a good thing.”

This was an unusual sentiment coming from Trump, who has rarely complained about the prospect of a spectacle—indeed, his trip to the Kennedy Center was an almost impossibly on-the-nose actualization of the old idea that he is a consummate political showman, producing theatrics that delight his base and rile his perceived enemies. The New Yorker’s Susan B. Glasser suggested as much in a column, writing that she was still thinking of the Kennedy Center scene as Trump deported alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador in “made for TV” fashion (and apparent violation of a court order), signed an order to gut the Department of Education in a “glitzy” ceremony, and so on. Glasser noted that Trump has long benefited from the “tendency to view his political career through the lens of theatre criticism,” which can serve to downplay the sharp real-world consequences for those he targets by “casting him as a blowhard who craves the spotlight but cares little for what happens when the cameras are off.” (Among Trump’s latest targets: Glasser, whom he attacked in part of a screed on Truth Social last night that was principally aimed at Peter Baker, the Times journalist to whom Glasser is married; among other slurs, Trump bizarrely used quote marks to describe her as Baker’s “wife.”) And yet, she wrote, Trump’s “second term requires a new understanding: the showman is not at odds with the would-be strongman but his accomplice. Trump is neither one nor the other—he is both, always and forever.”

Both Trump’s Kennedy Center turn and Kennedy-files release can be understood through this lens: headline-grabbing acts of performance art, but with concrete ramifications; consistent with how he has always acted as a politician, but newly accelerated and even more brazen than before. Trump seizing control of the Kennedy Center might seem silly, but is actually of a piece with his other recent expansions and projections of raw power, over not only the political but the cultural realm; the files release—which he teased in his first term, before partially backing off at the behest of intelligence officials—was at least careless in its inclusion of sensitive data. (Officials “rushed to mitigate the impact” of the disclosures, per the Washington Post—but Trump later appeared to brag to reporters about them, or at least showed indifference.) As Glasser suggests, and I’ve written before (especially with reference to the “made for TV” cliché), the Trump-as-showman trope is often trivializing as it emerges from the mouths of Beltway talking heads, but isn’t inherently shallow—and it does indeed now tie into bigger dynamics that are governing how Trump’s second administration is, and isn’t, releasing information, and proving central to how he is being covered and perceived. Meanwhile, the release of the files offered evidence that these dynamics are slightly more complex than the mere projection of artifice—and they might trip journalists up regardless.

A classic showmanship v. reality dynamic is at work under this administration—especially around its program of deportations, which has so far clearly been pursued with public consumption in mind and, often, a performed cruelty. (The latter still seems to be the point, as The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer put it in a defining essay of the Trump 1.0 era.) No sooner had Trump returned to office than officials started to produce what the CNN media reporter Brian Stelter described as “deportation TV”: sympathetic media outlets and personalities were given “ride along” privileges for enforcement actions; Kristi Noem, the new homeland security secretary, posted videos from the streets, clad in tactical gear and a tight-fitting baseball cap and talking, at times, like a newscaster. (Also, Dr. Phil was hanging around, for some reason.) Last month, the official White House account on X posted a video of a deportation flight and tagged it as “ASMR,” a reference to a trend of stimulating and supposedly pleasant-sounding online content; then came the “made for TV” footage, set to taut background music, of the Venezuelan deportees being wrestled off a plane then lined up and shaved in El Salvador, shared first by the latter country’s president, Nayib Bukele, then signal-boosted by MAGAworld. This dynamic hasn’t always relied on video footage but has sometimes taken the form of text- or meme-based online trolling, as Politico’s Juan Benn Jr. noted on Friday; the White House X account, for example, posted “SHALOM, MAHMOUD” to mock Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia graduate and green card holder detained over his involvement in Palestine solidarity protests on campus, and a photo of Trump waving aimed at Rasha Alawieh, a kidney specialist and Brown University academic who was expelled from the US. All of this can be seen as part of Trump and his allies’ broader strategy of “flooding the zone” with news and content in a bid to overwhelm adversaries, the media very much included. In this case, the aim appears to be both to distract the press from troublesome stories about the economy and dilute legal pushback to individual deportation actions. 

As I wrote in early February, in addition to flooding the zone with certain types of information, the new administration was also draining the zone by putting up barriers to transparency in various key areas of public administration—twin tracks of a broader censorship strategy, I wrote, even if the acts might appear to be diametrically opposite. On deportations, too, this has been the case. Officials, for example, have not confirmed who the deported Venezuelans are or the precise grounds on which they were suspected of being gang members, amid numerous media reports that some of those rounded up appear to have been targeted on the basis of what family members have described as unrelated and innocuous tattoos. And they have expressed hostility to journalists trying to get to the truth. As CJR’s Josh Hersh reported last month, officials have blamed—and even pledged to investigate—news outlets for covering immigration raids (when, in their view, it amounts to nefariously disrupting them). On Friday, the Justice Department said in a statement that it is probing “the selective leak of inaccurate, but nevertheless classified, information” relating to intelligence about a Venezuelan gang, while castigating the “Deep State” for attempting to undermine Trump’s agenda in consort with “their allies at the New York Times.” (It’s unclear what leak was being referenced here, though as Reuters notes, the Times has recently reported on an intelligence assessment that appears to undercut a key Trump claim about the gang. Some reporters noted that information being both wrong and classified was a new one on them—although, given how thoroughly broken the classification process is, it may hypothetically be possible.) 

The declassification of the Kennedy files seems to reflect a different informational dynamic—it may very well have been an act of showmanship, but there does appear to be some very useful information in there, if nothing immediately explosive on the assassination itself. Historians are still picking through the files, but they have already come across tidbits that demonstrate, or at least point toward, the past conduct of the US intelligence agencies. (One researcher told the Times, for example, that the trove “opens a door on a whole history of collaboration between the Vatican and the CIA.”) This sort of stuff matters not only for the historical record, but also insofar as it pierces, or at least probes at, these agencies’ persistent culture of secrecy, including around things that happened a long time ago. (I was struck while reading a recent, unrelated piece in the Sunday Times of London, about the 1977 assassination of a journalist/spy in Egypt, to see that a modern-day CIA representative would engage with the story only in highly cryptic, Cold War–ish terms.)

And yet the release is still a clear act of zone-flooding from Trump. In part, this is because a lot of files were published and many of them are hard to decipher, or even to physically read; the release may not have been the biggest news story of the week, but it clearly ate into the time and resources of major news organizations that, frankly, have much bigger fish to fry in the present day. (One article about the release published in the Post had no fewer than forty-three contributor credits.) And the release itself can reasonably be seen as encouraging a vein of conspiratorial thinking that—while nothing new in American public life (as the history of discourse around the Kennedy assassination amply proves)—is especially central to it right now, and itself eating into journalists’ ability to do their jobs. Disclosure might intuitively seem like an antidote to such thinking, but that misunderstands its pull; even if these documents don’t prove that Oswald was aided, those that remain unreleased (and there are still a few of those) might, and then what about the other documents whose existence they won’t even acknowledge, and so on. 

We might, then, need to update the metaphor of Trump simultaneously flooding and draining the zone to make room for other possibilities. A lot of stuff gets drowned; a lot of stuff withers and dies; occasionally something grows; but that thing might be tangled up in weeds. Trump appears to be the constant, feeding and depriving and, yes, managing the scene. Strikingly often, this appears to succeed. But he can’t totally control how we see it. Far from it. 

We know what Trump said at the Kennedy Center—about Phantom and all the rest— because someone present at the meeting leaked the audio to the Times, though it’s not hard to imagine Trump saying exactly the same things in front of the cameras; when those were pointed in his direction, he mugged for them, including, Glasser reports, by appearing to direct news photographers to capture him in an imperious pose redolent of another Andrew Lloyd Webber favorite, Evita. Two days earlier, in El Salvador, a different photojournalist—Philip Holsinger, who has embedded in that country while he works on a book about it—was taking photos of the arriving Venezuelan deportees from the US. On Friday, he published some of the photos in Time, along with a written account of what he saw. One detainee sobbed—protesting that he was a barber, and gay, not a gang member—and Holsinger believed him, he writes, if only because the man didn’t look like a “tattooed monster.” The violence of the guards toward the deportees “had rhythm, like a theater of fear,” Holsinger writes. They eventually disappeared into silent, cold cells. “Holding my camera,” Holsinger wrote, “it was as if I watched them become ghosts.”

Other notable stories:

• Late last week, the Times reported that Elon Musk was set to receive a Pentagon briefing on top-secret US plans for war with China, alarming many observers given that Musk is a civilian and has extensive business interests in the country. The Times’ story appeared to take Trump by surprise, and the briefing plans were reportedly canceled after it appeared—though that didn’t stop Trump from attacking the Times and calling the story made-up. (The Times is standing by the story.) The Pentagon has since launched a leak inquiry and threatened to use polygraph tests, without specifying the leaks in question. Musk also pledged to crack down on leaks to the press—though, per Politico, this doesn’t appear to have deterred officials who have already shared information about his chaotic cuts, and see doing so as a public service.

• The Times also published a trio of interesting stories on the news business late last week. Katie J.M. Baker profiled Evie, a conservative women’s magazine that assumes a typical reader “aspires to be a wife and mother, even while it acknowledges that she has some options.” Meanwhile, Benjamin Mullin reported that the beloved magazine Lapham’s Quarterly—whose future appeared in doubt after its founder, Lewis Lapham, died last year—will get a new lease of life under the ownership of Bard College, a liberal arts school in New York State. And Mullin and Katie Robertson revealed that two top former editors at the Post recently advised Jeff Bezos, the paper’s owner, to get rid of Will Lewis, its controversial CEO.

• Last week, a court in the US awarded Anas Aremeyaw Anas, a prominent investigative journalist in Ghana who wears a curtain of beads to hide his face, eighteen million dollars in damages in a defamation case that he brought against Kennedy Agyapong, a former Ghanaian lawmaker who, during a podcast appearance, described Anas as a criminal and suggested that he was behind the murder of a fellow journalist. Agyapong argued that the case shouldn’t be heard in the US, but he owns property in New Jersey and reportedly made the comments while in the state. The BBC has more (and ICYMI, we profiled Anas back in 2019). 

• For The Atlantic, Timothy W. Ryback, an expert on Nazi Germany, explores what the press of the time got wrong about Hitler as he rose to power. We have come to view his rise as “inexorable, and Hitler himself as a demonic force of human nature who defied every law of political gravity”—and yet many journalists saw him as a figure of ridicule. From today’s vantage, “Hitler’s rise seems overdetermined, and in some ways it was. But to have imagined in advance the series of events that brought such an unlikely figure to power would have required unusual powers of clairvoyance.”

• And Max Frankel, who served as executive editor of the Times from 1986 to 1994, has died. He was ninety-four. Frankel fled Nazi Germany as a child and “landed in New York in 1940 without a word of English, a refugee in knickerbockers with European sensibilities for opera, art, languages and mathematics,” the Times writes in an obituary. He would go on to preside over “a newspaper in transition—financially, technologically and journalistically—after years of innovation and record growth in circulation, advertising and profitability.”

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