Word count: 759
Paragraphs: 13
The Signalgate scandal continues to unfold and enfold the entire Trump administration, but Timothy Snyder has made a novel argument for its underlying meaning. First, he asked, why is the Trump cabinet using Signal? The answer, he posits, is that it makes it possible to conceal governmental actions from the US population now and in the future, permanently. The invasion chat with the “Houthi PC small group,” as set up by Michael Waltz, was set to self-delete after one week. This is a violation of the Federal Records Act and other laws concerning public records. The former director of litigation at the National Achives and Records Administration told the Atlantic: “Under the records laws applicable to the White House and federal agencies, all government employees are prohibited from using electronic-messaging applications such as Signal for official business unless those messages are promptly forwarded or copied to an official government account.”
Snyder finds that the use of Signal instead of the available secure systems by the Trump cabinet is indicative of their autocratic intent. He avers, “Using Signal enables American authorities to violate the rights of Americans. Signal is attractive not because it is secure with respect to foreign adversaries, which it is not, but because it is secure with respect to American citizens and American judges. . . . It was worth risking the lives of American soldiers abroad in order to have the opportunity to violate the rights of American civilians at home. Making soldiers unsafe is apparently a price worth paying to make the rest of us also unsafe. . . . In Signalgate, we see the shift from the conventional excuse for authoritarian practices to an open embrace of tyranny for its own sake.”1
I just found out (March 27) that Timothy Snyder and his wife Marci Shore, historian and author and also professor at Yale, and also author and philosophy professor Jason Stanley, are all leaving Yale University to go teach at Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Stanley said his decision was “entirely because of the political climate in the United States,” and after seeing how Columbia caved in to the political attacks from Trump. “I just became very worried because I didn’t see a strong enough reaction in other universities to side with Columbia,” he added.
“Snyder and Shore both specialize in Eastern European history and each has drawn parallels between the fascist regimes they have studied and the current Trump administration. Stanley, a philosopher, has also published books on fascism and propaganda, including the popular book How Fascism Works.”2
It’s not news that Trump is a creature of the society of the spectacle. Creature and master, emanation and accelerant. He is the image. The mugshot. He’s the picture of himself on Fox he sits watching for hours each day—rightly understanding that doing so is doing politics, politics as our society now practices it. . . .
You cannot have a society of the spectacle without a constant increase in the rate of illusion.
—T. J. Clark, “A Brief Guide to Trump and the Spectacle”3
On March 23, Trump objected to the portrait of him that has been hanging in the Colorado State Capitol since 2019, posting his complaint on Truth Social: “Nobody likes a bad picture or painting of themselves, but the one in Colorado, in the State Capitol, put up by the Governor, along with all other Presidents, was purposely distorted to a level that even I, perhaps, have never seen before.” Colorado authorities immediately agreed to remove the “distorted” portrait.
At the unveiling of the portrait five years ago, the Republican state senator that commissioned it and arranged for it to be placed in the Capitol (not the Governor) said, “In 2019, there are still nations across this globe that are led by those who rule simply by the force and fear they command. Leaders that do not allow dissent and do not allow critique. Whether this portrait brings a smile or a scowl to your face, remember that you have the right to do so because this is the United States of America.”
But only if the President approves of it.
If Trump is what the image-world has now revealed itself to be—if he’s the ‘society’ we have settled for, looming against us, cruel and false and ugly and determined to destroy—then what answer is left but a fight to the finish?
—T. J. Clark
1. Timothy Snyder, “Signalgate: Violating National Security in Order to Violate Rights,” Thinking About . . . on Substack, March 27, 2025.
2. Ariela Lopez & Yolanda Wang, “Three Prominent Yale Professors Depart for Canadian University, Citing Trump Fears,” Yale Daily News, March 27, 2025.
3. T. J. Clark, “A Brief Guide to Trump and the Spectacle,” The London Review of Books, Vol. 47, No. 1, January 23, 2025.
David Levi Strauss is the author of Co-illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (The MIT Press, 2020), Photography & Belief (David Zwirner Books, 2020), Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow (Aperture, 2014), From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual (Oxford University Press, 2010), Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, with an introduction by John Berger (Aperture 2003, and in a new edition, 2012), and Between Dog & Wolf: Essays on Art and Politics (Autonomedia 1999, and a new edition, 2010). In Case Something Different Happens in the Future: Joseph Beuys and 9/11 was published by Documenta 13, and To Dare Imagining: Rojava Revolution, edited by Strauss, Michael Taussig, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and Dilar Dirik, was published by Autonomedia in 2016, and in an Italian edition in 2017. The Critique of the Image Is the Defense of the Imagination, edited by Strauss, Taussig, and Wilson, was published by Autonomedia in 2020. He is Chair Emeritus of the graduate program in Art Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York, which he directed from 2007-2021.