For any authoritarian government, defining reality is crucial to exercising power. History becomes a series of myths that justify and animate the regime’s actions; truth becomes a weapon to be wielded against enemies; lies become a shield for supporters and sympathizers to escape scrutiny. Trump has adopted one authoritarian trick after another to his playbook over the years. But obscuring truth with theater will always be his signature act.

On Sunday, after a peaceful march protesting U.S. immigration policies on Sunday, some members of a Central American migrant caravan tried to cross the border at the closed San Ysidro port of entry. Border Patrol agents responded by firing tear gas at the crowd to drive them away. Among those caught up in the incident were young children traveling with their parents.



Liberals were shocked. But conservative media outlets eagerly devoured the imagery. Fox News Channel aired wall-to-wall coverage of the saga over the past 48 hours, casting asylum-seekers as an invading force and justifying extraordinary measures to stop them. Rob Colburn, the president of the Border Patrol Foundation, told Fox & Friends that pepper spray wasn’t harmful because “you could actually put it on your nachos and eat it.” Other commentators responded with unnerving enthusiasm. “Watching the USA FINALLY defend our borders was the HIGHLIGHT of my Thanksgiving weekend,” right-wing pundit Tomi Lahren wrote on Twitter.

Cruelty, I noted in May, is both a means and an end for the Trump administration, which aims to curtail legal and undocumented immigration to whatever extent Congress and the courts will allow. And on Sunday, the sensationalism through which the administration carries out that cruelty was on full display. The White House, over the past two years, has taken every opportunity it could to exacerbate the tensions that ultimately led to this moment: threatening to close the border if migrants in the caravan tried to lawfully seek asylum, shutting down the channels by which they could obtain it, deploying thousands of soldiers to the border in a campaign stunt, signing an executive order to ban some asylum claims, and more. It’s hard to see what more they could have done to manufacture the conditions—desperate migrants denied internationally recognized legal processes for entry—under which Sunday’s clash unfolded.

It’s hard to see what more they could have done to manufacture the conditions under which Sunday’s clash unfolded.

Favoring chaotic, freewheeling press scrums instead of reading policy memos, Trump prefers to govern by spectacle over substance. Immigration is one of the few policy spheres where he can do both. Whether consciously hewing to a premade plan or not, the White House’s sequence of policy decisions effectively engineered a border crisis with clear political benefits. With Democrats now set to retake the House in January, this penchant for governing through public surreality will only get more aggressive as his opposition gathers strength.