The image above is an altered detail from a video posted on X by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, along with a series of still photographs from her tour of the El Salvador prison to which Trump is deporting an untold number of immigrants.
You know, of course, that Trump claims that they’re all gang members. And you know also, I suspect, that many aren’t. But most of all you know, I hope, that regardless of their innocence or guilt sending them to a foreign prison described as “notorious” by both critics on MSNBC and fans on Fox News, absent any due process and likely in defiance of a court order, is the work of a regime, not an administration; a fascist authority, not the rule of law.
You know all this, and Kristi Noem knows you know all this. She’s not worried about whether it thrills you or terrifies you—either pleases her. The point of her video isn’t to make an argument; it’s aesthetic. It’s her look. I’ve cropped and altered the detail above to emphasize, as much as possible, the men behind her. Here’s the original, about which more below:
I posted this on Bluesky with the following alt-text:
Kristi Noem in tight athleisure—white top, drawstring grey pants—in front of a prison cell packed with mostly shirtless men. Noem’s hair cascades out of her navy DHS cap. The men appear to be wearing loose white patient pants. Noem wears a heavy gold-and-silver watch [which, according to experts, sells for $50,000]. The men’s arms are at their sides or clasped in front, as if they’ve been told to stand at attention. Noem’s cap is pulled low, so we can’t really see her eyes; instead, her face appears comprised mainly of lips. The men’s heads have been shaved; there’s lighting on Noem but they’re in the murk, hard to distinguish from one another.
When I showed my wife the video, her first response was “Holy shit.” Because it’s a lot. The caged men, the pose, the look. My wife, Julia Rabig, a historian, identified the look as Lara Croft, Tomb Raider (we both, journalist and historian, recognize that the politics here are the look, not Noem’s generic “tough” words). “There’s a way in Trump world,” she said, “in which performing a certain kind of ‘sexy’ is ‘serious.’” That is, she argued, in the gendered politics of Trumpism certain women convey their particular authority by conforming to conventional ideas of “sexy,” ultra-femme variations of styles appropriate to the situation: “Lara Trump’s sky-high heels and pencil skirts—tight, with a slit up the side. Kristi Noem outfitted for action, but with what looks like a push-up bra, her hair long and styled rather than back in a ponytail.”
Trumpist rhetoric, from Trump on down, is rife with the idea that “their” women are “sexier” than Left or liberal women. This rhetoric is as common among right-wing women as among men. And even as it celebrates body modification—there’s no shame in plastic surgery on the fascist Right—it frames itself via a topsy-turvy idea of authenticity. Trump women, goes the thinking, are “real” precisely because they try hard to perform “woman”; liberal and Left women are not “real women” because, in this logic, feminism makes them rebel against their “natural” roles. The range of such roles has expanded from those of the 1950s even for fascism women, which is why Noem can comfortably show her power—just so long as she contains it within a still-just-as-narrow spectrum of femininity: “maternal” or “sexy.”
Much is rightly being made of the Noem video’s tone of domination. Stacks of anonymous men of color caged by Noem, who looks more Hollywood than “Homeland Security.” Awful echoes of the real —
— and of the farcical.
But the video does more than broadcast a kind of debased BDSM, stripped of dumb humor, devoid even of the candor of the leer. Noem and her stylists—those who’ve arranged both the frightened men in the cell and Noem’s luxurious locks—have made her a model for Trump women, “sexy & strong”; a thirst trap for right-wing men; and bait for everybody else. That is, it’s an invitation to criticize her in the very terms we condemn as sexism. To talk about her look rather than her ideas. “See?” fascists say. “Who’s the sexist now? Hypocrites!”
The video is a trap because for fascism the aesthetic—the physicalized embodiment of a theory of power—has always been a central “idea.” But that trap only “works” if we judge its result by pre-fascist norms. The Noem video, like the ASMR video of faceless immigrants being shackled, dares us to name their intention: the sadistic eroticization of power. The trap is: name it, and then you’re the pervert, the one who makes something perfectly ordinary—a White House video (or fetish porn), a video of a cabinet secretary (or Lara Croft with shirtless caged men)—weird. Which is why we have to identify the whole apparatus of the trap, not just the bait.
For instance, consider this photograph also shared by Noem of a moment before her video shot, when she’s just entering the ward. Here, the men we’ll see bare-chested in the video are still clothed:
Let’s consider, too, Noem’s commando outfit. Suitable for prison-touring, correct? Her male colleagues didn’t think so, evidently, since they wore suits or uniforms:
Note the footwear. It’s true the guards wear boots; but neither Noem’s colleagues nor the men who appear to be prison officials felt that precaution necessary. Unlike Noem, whose boots, it must be said, are shiny.
I don’t need to ask you to resist seduction. But that’s not the only way this bait works. Even ordinary insults are to fascism’s advantage. To give in to speculation about botox or extensions, or to run the gamut of derisive and mostly sexist terms for physical ugliness, is a form of submission to fascism’s eroticization of power. It’s playing a role in a BDSM scenario from which “play” has been excised. Because “erotic” doesn’t equal “attractive.” Eros means desire. Fascism pursues an “erotic” aesthetic precisely because both desire and our rejection of it kneels before fascism’s false terms, in which our only real existence is in relationship to power. The work now is to try to name the whole apparatus of the trap—not just the bait but the springs behind it; the metal jaws above and below; the cage we see in this video and the one that awaits.
This article was originally published on Jeff Sharlet’s newsletter, Scenes from a Slow Civil War, based on his book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War. Read and subscribe here.
