Blue Wall
Some images register so perfectly in your brain that it feels like they were already there. Most pictures jumble around a bit, stay unsettled, give us too much information; but certain rare ones arrive in just the right shape to plug a specific mental hole, and then finally stop the leak. A hush comes over us when they land. Until recently, I had experienced such pictures only in a personal way: photographs of friends, for example, that appear on the screen and align precisely with who I know them to be. Or sometimes, most powerfully, my phone will display pictures of my daughter taken in a previous era (six months ago) that make me well up. Not all pictures of her do this to me. Just the rare one that seems somehow to match the gap in my memory. These are the moments when photography can seem more real than reality. They say that photographs stop time, but these special ones seem, instead, to repair it, to click into the empty place time had left.
A few months ago the news-viewing public had this kind of ecstatic experience with a decidedly impersonal photo when the New York Times printed an image of Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, standing in the Oval Office and blocking her face with blue folders. A friend sent it to me, and I didn’t initially have any context. I knew where the photo was taken because I recognized the mantel. I didn’t know who the person was, but I felt like I did, like it was on the tip of my tongue. Still, it was as if I were looking at a memory I didn’t know I had. This was the Democrats hiding, Democrats in disarray, Democrats collapsing in pure, ideographic form. It hit like a drug.
The blue folders, which astonishingly matched Whitmer’s blue double-breasted jacket, also matched the brand: Democrat. This was the Blue Wall now, this sheepish group of people who occasionally have to come to the White House but find themselves outmaneuvered there, flummoxed and paralyzed and embarrassed to show their faces.
Looking at the folders I thought of Mitt Romney’s goofy comment during a 2012 presidential debate about “binders full of women” and about the many memes it spawned at the time. Then I thought: Things have changed since then. Here was a new kind of image that arrived preformed, almost pre-memed. Always already viral.
No, wait. I had seen this kind of image once before. Do you remember the image of Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg luxuriating on the green leather seats of Parliament during a discussion about Brexit? He was leaning back decadently, aristocratically, in a way that only an out-of-touch Tory could, and in 2019 this photograph spawned a thousand memes. His reclining form was photoshopped onto a graph of dramatically diminishing Tory election results, or onto similar downward jags indicating various post-Brexit economic stats, or onto the couch in the Simpsons universe, where Homer might have been taking a nap. I remember thinking at the time: Some images should not be memed. The photo already said it all, and you are gilding the goddamned Tory with all these riffs and variations, thereby diluting our sense of his entitled idiocy. I didn’t say it then, but maybe I can say it now, scream into the void: Don’t touch this photo, it is fucking perfect.
What kind of perfect? I had to think about it for a few years.
Semioticians note that a photo works in the iconic register but is actually an indexical sign, because the camera lens directly registers light. So while it displays an icon that we might recognize as “a person,” or “a woman in front of a fireplace,” or “Governor Whitmer in the Oval Office,” depending on how familiar we are with the present image and its surrounding system of signification, a photograph produces a visual record — an imprint — of a specific time and place. This is why photographs can be evidentiary in a way that paintings cannot. A painting of this scene might show us “Governor Whitmer in the Oval Office,” but it would not be proof that she was there, that this really happened, because you could just as convincingly paint me in the Oval Office, and I’ve never set foot in there. (Of course, Photoshop and AI muddy these waters, and even undoctored photos can be misleading, but even so photography has a special relationship to reality and truth.)
Perhaps Whitmer, who is compositionally below Washington, has fallen to some kind of depth. Is the fireplace . . . hell?
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The third part of this semiotic triad, after the indexical and the iconic, is the symbolic. That’s when a signifier is coded, so it isn’t direct resemblance that produces meaning. The word woman, for example, doesn’t look like a woman — you have to be familiar with the Roman alphabet and the English language to understand that combination of shapes and what they symbolize. Similarly, you’d have to be familiar with contemporary electoral politics in the US to know that blue stands for “Democrat” or that Whitmer herself stands for “Democrat.”
Memes operate through a process in which a regular image — say, a little girl standing in front of a house on fire with a mischievous look on her face — moves quickly from an indexical signifier (that particular girl was there, in front of that fire) to an iconic one (grinning girl plus evident fire equals causation) to a symbolic one (deriving pleasure from one’s destructive act). This process creates a structure for storytelling, emoting, or joking that can be filled in and retrofitted to various other scenarios. The whole process is so fun, once this circulation and manipulation gets going, that we can start to forget about the indexical significance of the picture. We stop seeing it as an image and begin to see it more as a setup, a kind of Mad Libs template that could point to anything. That is of course the charm and the power of memes. But something — some sense of that particular girl having been there in front of those particular flames — does get lost.
When the image of Rees-Mogg emerged and got mercilessly memed, I felt a mounting sense of this loss. It would have been silly to tell people to stop doing it, as people on the internet simply cannot stop, but as the range of Rees-Mogg meanings was expanded and laughs were had, I felt that something was being erased, something other than the thrilling semiotic alignment of Jacob Rees-Mogg being iconically identified as Tory MP lying down on the job and symbolically understood as an export-grade rendering of “upper-class twit.”
What got erased in all the meme-ing was the indexical part. I’ve tried to think through that loss here, via some amateur semiotics, but the loss isn’t some kind of technicality or purely semiotic concern. What disappeared in this case was the kind of thumbtacking of history that photography can do — the part where Rees-Mogg was seen to be there, in a center of power, behaving repellently, and was therefore documented (in this case by a colleague of his, the Labour MP Anna Turley). And what happens when an image like this stops being forensic and consequential? A certain kind of drift sets in. We forget the details of the Brexit debate, what the upper-class twits thought they were doing, the precise results of their legislative malfeasance. We forget actual history.
Which brings us back to the Democratic emblem that was Whitmer. When I saw the image, back in April 2025, I feared it might be memed, turned into “bad day at work” jokes or something. It turns out it was mostly forgotten. Still, I feel like I need to unpack it a little, preserve its resonances, protect it from any future case of internet image collapse.
The first uncomfortable fact is that Whitmer not only matches her own folders, she matches the decor. Trump has given the Oval Office his usual Mar-a-Lago-style “just put gold things everywhere” treatment, which isn’t very surprising. What is surprising, and somehow incriminating, is that Whitmer almost fits in. The buttons on her jacket echo the decorative scheme on the fireplace, seeming in some way to pin her to the scene. If you zoom in, you can see that these buttons are silver, which, in this all-gold context, starts to suggest “lesser than.”
Uncannily, she also matches Washington, whose portrait by Charles Willson Peale hangs above the fireplace. The painting is scaled in a way that makes it look like his body is the same size as hers, just set a few feet back. Washington’s face, like Whitmer’s, is hidden, though in his case it’s just been cropped out by the Times. Oddly, the dead president is mirroring the living governor’s weird elbow placement, and their left hands are half hidden — Washington’s inside the buttons of his vest, Whitmer’s by her folders. Washington has a wooden cane and a metal sword leaning by his legs, and Whitmer has fireplace tools by hers: presumably a poker, tongs, a broom, and a shovel, but we see only their top handles, so they look like swords. Both figures are wearing blue jackets. Both are cut off right above the knees.
Taken one by one, none of these similarities seem to mean very much, but put together they really start to snowball, forcing a comparison between the two figures. Maybe Washington is hiding, too, we start to think. Or perhaps Whitmer, who is compositionally below Washington, has fallen to some kind of depth. Is the fireplace . . . hell? The fact that neither figure is looking back at us allows us to look at them as long as we want. We can’t interpret their facial expressions. All we are left with is the semaphore of their limbs in blue jackets. They almost look like soldiers in the same unit or a brass band marching out of sync.
Behind Whitmer are three decorative sculptures featuring caryatids, representations of the women from Caryae who hold up Greek architecture with their heads or hands. Their original symbolism is still debated, but one Roman idea, that they were being punished for siding with Persia in the Greco-Persian wars, also held sway during the Renaissance. I am certain their gold color, not their specific iconography, is what landed them on the Oval Office mantel, but they have always seemed deeply ambivalent figures to me, literal pillars of the community. With Whitmer in front they seem to echo her ambivalent situation, her bind, but the truth is the little golden statues look more loose-limbed, relaxed, and flowy than the governor does. Her situation is kind of a straitjacket, is it not?
The actual jacket that Whitmer is wearing, with its old-school military details, reminded me of the ’80s, of the big-shoulder-pads moment in women’s fashion that somehow stood in for all the treacheries of “making it in a man’s world.” Then, by total serendipity a couple of days later, I saw an image of a very similar jacket — royal blue, double-breasted, brass buttoned — in a still from Melrose Place. That made me realize I had seen the jacket before, in the same place you have seen it before: on van Gogh’s mailman, Joseph Roulin. I started asking around about where this look came from, and one of my art historian friends told me that the French militarized their postal uniforms after losing the Franco-Prussian War, in an embarrassing after-the-fact attempt to imitate their vanquishers aesthetically. I haven’t been able to confirm this fact, but the Whitmer image offers its own confirmation, in a way. The folders hide her face, but the jacket tells its own sad story.
News Bokeh
In late January 2020, I wrote about what I had perceived as a photojournalistic signature for the first Trump presidency: images of press conferences and meetings in which politicians were flanked and framed by dramatic and shadowy blurs, sometimes becoming blurs themselves. These blurs seemed to me to be a shorthand for things going wrong and fuzzy just out of view, and I ended the essay by saying that we all knew something horrible was on the horizon. I meant it in a general way, and when the pandemic hit a few weeks later, it spooked me.
In the intervening years, one image has come to encapsulate those early pandemic days, when the horrible thing on the horizon was starting to look less blurry and more well-defined. It’s a photo the New York Times published on March 5 of then Attorney General William Barr standing at a podium with a huge red orb hovering over him. The orb takes up nearly twice as much space in the frame as Barr’s head and torso and looks like a red planet compared with the round moon of the Department of Justice seal. I had seen a few of those blurry circles in news photography before, and in photos of hipster weddings, but I didn’t know the term for them. I had debated including them in my analysis of the blur, but their perfect geometry and pure color made them seem like a different thing to me, distinct from the murky, bulging shapes of out-of-focus heads of state. I knew what the (usually red but sometimes green) orbs “were.” They were red lights from other photographers’ cameras, glowing in the foreground or far background. I learned that this “hipster wedding photography effect” has a name, bokeh. It’s a Japanese word I still don’t know if I know how to pronounce. Every time I say it aloud people think I’m talking about bouquets.
The big red orb in that Barr photo looked to me less like a hazy anticipation of the crisis than a visualization of the crisis itself. The fact that this particular orb was a perfect red circle made it fitting for Covid, which would soon be visualized as its own spiky red fuzz ball. Of course, there would be further signifiers for the pandemic — the masks, the white-to-orange maps, the social distancing signage — but the orb, a literal floating signifier, has lingered, like a visual symptom we can’t shake.
As with the blur, the orb started out in the background. Photos of police sirens, for example, often feature the police lights in focus in the foreground, while in the background, other city lights form a pleasant pattern of overlapping light discs. In photos of politicians, too, it is common to use a shallow depth of field to focus on the speaker, rendering backdrop lights as these unfocused circles. This kind of thing neatly transforms visual chaos into pure pattern and encourages you to focus on what’s in front. It makes ambience. This must be why it became popular in contemporary wedding photography and certain kinds of gauzy travel diaries. Instead of the cheesy, outré blur of airbrushed makeup and painted pastoral scenes, of Bob Ross and Thomas McKnight, bokeh presents us with a hip, geometric alternative. It organizes the mess of photography and solves the main problem of the camera, which is that it provides too much information at once. The bokeh orb is a useful and sensible tool in photojournalism, when it stays in the background.
But it didn’t stay in the background. It started floating to the foreground. On June 17, 2020, I took a screenshot of a New York Times photo featuring about seven golden discs in front and to the left of Senator Mitch McConnell, who stands at a podium and gestures toward them with his left hand. The orbs seem to descend into the room, and McConnell is looking at them fearfully. If we weren’t used to lens-flare camera effects, the viewer would think an alien was landing. The gold color repeats the tassels on the American flags behind the podium, so the effect seems weirdly in place, matchy-matchy even. McConnell’s other hand is holding a light blue mask, so the sense that something disturbing is in the air directs the mind quickly toward Covid, which would have been the main topic of the day. The fact that it is McConnell also makes one think of golden years, of aging and oldness and what it might look like for a dying person’s aura to leave his body.
Those same associative thoughts returned to me when I saw a similar, but paler, chain of golden rings of light enveloping President Biden in an otherwise mundane picture of him speaking at a podium in 2022. This time, the rings spiral in from the left, giving Biden a very faded look, more Golden Girls than golden boy. What with all of Biden’s stumbling and bumbling, I felt like the visual editorialization here was pretty clear, and not so different from the depiction of McConnell. Usually billed as adversaries in a two-party system, McConnell and Biden look equally bewildered by the apparitions conjured by the bokeh effect.
Instead of seeing a politician and a microphone — a fairly tight semiotic loop — you get a politician staring at a glowing disc of light. What are we to make of that?
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Most often when the bokeh orbs appear in news photography — which they do to this day, in a steady stream, in all the news outlets I frequent — they do so in photographs of various kinds of congressional hearings. I understand that such gatherings must be boring and repetitive to photograph, leading news photographers to seek new ways to add visual interest. But as these out-of-focus orbs have grown, taking up more and more of the compositional field, they have also taken on meaning. The subject might be looking at the orb, like McConnell, and your main thought is, “Holy shit, tell me what you are looking at,” because it seems like they’re seeing something almost extraterrestrial, like the glowing car in Repo Man. Alternatively, the subject might be looking in another direction and apparently unaware of the orb, as Biden was. In which case you have a version of that horror-movie feeling: “There is a giant fucking orb just behind you! Run!”
In images of hearings and press briefings, the main thing that happens is that the orbs crowd out and replace the microphones. So instead of seeing a politician and a microphone and reading about what was said — a fairly tight semiotic loop — you get a politician staring at a glowing disc of light. What are we to make of that? Any words the politician may have said now seem inadequate, beside the point, when they are in the presence of a conspicuous and terrifying orb.
You could argue that other photographers’ blinking lights provide useful contextual information, a peripheral but significant reminder that in a free society, there will be several news providers at an event to report on it. The lights, at some basic level, index that First Amendment reality — or they would, if they were presented at anything like a reasonable scale. Instead, they have been growing and growing, sometimes taking up half the frame or more — a pretty staggering ratio of visual ornamentation to visual information. Now you have to remind yourself that these are tiny camera lights that have metastasized tremendously.
Why run such dramatically abstract photos in a news outlet? If you take all the pictures together, the overall effect is like being punched in the head, not just seeing double or seeing blurry but seeing stars, losing contact with vision itself. Light-as-sensation overcomes light-as-information. It feels hallucinatory, in part because massive glowing orbs are not something we see in our daily vision, except maybe at sunset and, of course, when we look at our phones to get the news.
The most deeply unsettling picture in this genre is one where Joe Biden is addressing the United Nations. The backdrop is dark-green marble, and Biden is framed in a way that makes him seem small and distant at the lonely podium. In front of him, again taking up more than half the picture, is a bloodred circle whose edges diffuse at the perimeter, just as they meet Biden’s hands on the podium and not before they cover up the UN’s own circular logo. In his address, Biden was imploring UN members not to give up on Ukraine. This was two weeks before the October 7 attacks on Israel and the resulting invasion in Gaza. The dark-red orb distances us from Biden. Russia is no longer “red,” but danger still is, and the image is incredibly ominous. I have been looking at it for more than two years, and its drama still startles me. The red orb is eating the whole picture.
In Barthes’s famous “studium/punctum” way of looking at photographs, AI is usually all studium: expected outcomes piled on top of expected outcomes.
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Trump, who is so often pictured doing ominous and otherworldly things (there was that iconic radiant globe in 2017, which he was photographed touching alongside King Salman of Saudi Arabia, a big orb before orbs were big), has also been pictured lately being overtaken by the orb. One recent image has a large red orb eclipsing his head, almost seeming to slice into it as Trump looks off in another direction. In another image, from last year, the red orb intervenes frontally and Trump seems to speak to us through the orb, whose red circle echoes the red circle of his trademark fish-lips way of enunciating. A man next to Trump, someone I don’t recognize, is pursing his lips and looking somewhat cross-eyed, in the overly serious manner of a bodyguard who is receiving crucial information about an oncoming threat. Either that or he is about to fart.
Most recently, in an image that ran in the Guardian on December 2, 2025, the red orb shone like a perfect spotlight on Pete Hegseth’s head. The secretary of war was coming under pressure for authorizing a particularly savage attack on a supposed drug boat. Hegseth was, as they say, under fire. The boat had been under literal fire, apparently twice, just to make sure no one survived. The orb somehow tells us this story, using a floating red spotlight to show us the suspect and to also recall the visual surveillance technologies that are at Hegseth’s disposal. A journalist friend of mine once told me about arriving at the US Embassy in Afghanistan during the forever war. He was there for a party, and as he fumbled in his coat for the invitation, he saw, out of the corner of his eye, that a laser’s little circle had slid up his shoulder and was now resting on his neck. Those little circles have multiplied, the targets are on many necks, and the visuals seem to be haunting our journalism.
Show Tits
Trump is enough of a consummate shitposter that I have mostly stopped trying to assign meaning or intention to his media excretions. But sometimes I can’t help myself. A friend texted me an image of “Star Wars Trump” that the White House posted on May the 4th, in which a very muscular president is pictured wearing brown Jedi garb, and I immediately started wondering about it.
First I wondered what the actual text prompt for the AI image was. You’d think the logical outcome for “Trump” plus “Star Wars” would have involved Darth Vader or the oozing criminal ringleader Jabba the Hutt. But in the image he’s decked out in surprisingly humble robes, which makes me think the command must have been “Jedi Trump” or something like that, plus some additional prompting to produce bald eagles and podium flags in the background. “Patriotic Jedi Trump” might get us close. But there is the question of his muscularity, a quality as foreign to the Star Wars universe as it is to Trump. You could imagine telling DALL-E to generate “patriotic Jedi Trump” and getting something lumpy and fat at first, and then asking for something like “jacked patriotic Jedi Trump” to ensure the desired surface effect of spray-tanned muscles. Even so, the AI doesn’t know that two bald eagles aren’t more patriotic than one bald eagle, or that a two-headed eagle says “Russia, Serbia, Albania” more than it says “USA, USA.”
But I digress. The point is that, in Barthes’s famous “studium/punctum” way of looking at photographs, AI is usually all studium: expected outcomes piled on top of expected outcomes. For a while, when an AI punctum did appear, it was only to point back at AI itself, a seven-fingered hand poking a hilarious hole in the pixel fabric. Sometimes we can still identify bad seams and internal inconsistencies, which I think of as sort of shabby puncta, because they do catch you with what Barthes called that “unexpected flash” — but they don’t reveal anything about the world. AI provides revelatory glitches only about itself. It cannot produce the unmistakably specific details of actual photography, which is why it is so monotonous and numbing to look at. It can only be perused.
So there I was, perusing this “Star Wars Trump” picture a few months after he posted it, when I finally saw the cleavage. I had been studying the musculature, you see, to discern whether it was anatomically accurate, and I was examining the topography of his bulging veins, letting my mind drift to bulging veins as they appear on Hulk Hogan — who seems like the model for this kind of steroidal ’80s body — and then to the idea of bulging veins more generally, which made me think of foreheads and erections. That’s when I spotted Trump’s rock-hard tits. Before this I had missed the cute little wrap number he is sporting here. It’s very flattering! It almost looks as though the AI image generator adjusted the iconic Jedi look from boxy samurai-inspired cuts to a form-fitting Diane von Furstenberg kind of thing, moving us along from Star Wars’s late-’70s vibe and into the early ’80s, the Hulkster’s and Trump’s golden era. AI, I owe you an apology — I wasn’t really familiar with your game.
I think that if you asked a human to render a “jacked patriotic Trump Jedi,” the human would probably have some subtler instincts about the sexuality and gender codes regulating the interactions of pecs and plunging V-necks on straight men. The human would likely come up with something a little more discreet. Maybe the president would still get huge pecs, but they’d be covered by the fabric, as they invariably are in Star Wars, where the V-neck stays close to the neck. Our hypothetical human renderer might know that Trump’s flapping neck folds aren’t something he likes to emphasize, so perhaps they would also throw a dark shadow under the chin, but I feel like the decision to have the shadow point straight to the president’s peekaboo cleavage — that’s not a decision that would be made by a natural intelligence. Still, the AI gets something right about one of the weirder aspects of Trump, what I can only call his swish. The dancing to “YMCA,” the campy slapdash makeup, the drag-king overlong red tie, the theatrical hand gestures. When I went to look up the most common phrase for Trump’s fish-lips, the second entry on Google was a Quora post asking, “Why does Trump make his lips so round when he talks?” The first answer, upvoted forty-six times, from Frederick Talbott, whose profile identifies him as a former Vanderbilt professor, states things flatly: “It may likely be a homoerotic prompt or tease to male followers, many of whom are ‘men’s men’ a.k.a. far more comfortable with men than women and thus more attracted to them.” Most of the other posts are variations on “because his mouth is a shithole,” but I think this homoerotic reading is onto something. Even AI seems to know, which is why it gave us this little pectoral punctum.
Fist and Pinkie
Trump’s hands are famously small, and his fingers famously short. He is apparently ashamed of this, and so pointing out his “tiny hands” continues to get a lot of mileage when people want to take an easy swipe at him. But have you ever really looked at Trump’s hands? Up close and at length, as a stoner would?
I first started to study the president’s hands when he was appearing more regularly in court. I was taken with the fact that he was always sitting silently. When you look at a lot of Trump pictures you realize that he is very often photographed talking, and photographs of him tend to have an implicit sound. Each shape of his mouth — the pucker, the jutting lower jaw — refers to one of his trademark sounds, and when I see images of him I find myself . . . if not quite lip-reading, at least helplessly filling in his blabbery tones. But in the courtroom pictures, he was silent. I relished how he had to just sit there and listen to a judge.
Maybe it was this silence that allowed for extended viewing and for me to notice his hands. His hands were almost always in the same position. Other elements in these Trump-on-trial photos were not so static: His face changed photo to photo, perhaps revealing the shifting moods as the indictments piled up. Even his tie showed variation. But again and again the hands were the same: He kept placing his right hand over his left fist, letting the pinkie on the top hand drift away from his other fingers and down over the ridge of his lower hand’s clenched knuckles. Nine of the fingers were very tense and contained, the gesture of a child who is forced to put his hands in a certain way and keep them that way or else. The tenth finger is sliding away, trying to escape the configuration, also as a child might try, repeatedly, to escape, to just sneak out of the room.
This struck me initially as a very un-Trumpian gesture. He looked less like himself and more like a good student, sitting primly with one hand folded over the other on the desk. Were these Trump’s listening hands? He does occasionally have to listen; he must have a routine to help himself do it. In Zen meditation you put your left (resting) hand on top of your right (working) hand to signal contemplation. Something similar seemed to be happening here, but instead of the restful and open pose of the mudra that we all know from sculptures or meditation class, here the fist was turned down, with the fingers facing the desk and the knuckles facing the ceiling.
The “executive” thing to do with the closed left hand would have been to hold some kind of expensive pen, but in all my zooming I have never found one. Later, I started to imagine what other objects he might have been holding in that fist. All I could come up with was a house key. Maybe a nice round stone? Because the fist is like a snail shell, isn’t it? It makes you wonder what’s inside there. Maybe it’s pure rage?
If the left hand is raging, the right hand is soothing it. In photos, the right-hand pinkie always seems to be drifting down, but maybe in reality it goes back and forth, like a little massage. I’m sort of charmed by seeing the pinkie frozen mid-caress. It feels like we’ve caught it, spotted it doing something outside the realm of what we think of as Trumpy, performing an unmasculine gesture of self-care that Trump himself might struggle to recognize as his own.
I was disappointed to realize that from the waist up I could, on some days, look like I work for ICE.
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The split pinkie reminds me of one of the canonical Saturday Night Live skits, the one where Joe Pesci goes into a jewelry store and tries on a pinkie ring before facing a full-length mirror to mime a crescendo of mobster gestures — adjusting his suit, drinking an espresso, unfolding a wad of cash, and so on, and then pummeling someone repeatedly before the jeweler pulls him back from the mirror. We know Pesci, more than anything, from his “You think I’m funny?” scene in Goodfellas, so there are layers of recognition going on as he rolls through the standard mob-movie repertoire. But just beyond that recognition, we sense something fundamentally weird about how the effeminate pinkie gets involved in all this violence. That weirdness is missing in Goodfellas, but it floats over the SNL sketch, and it floated into my mind as I viewed these presidential fist-pinkie pairings.
I’d initially thought these “listening hands” were a fearful, paralyzed gesture, a result of Trump’s impending felony conviction. But after he retook the presidency I’ve noticed that he has continued to strike the same pose when he is at his own desk, in the Oval Office, wielding all his power. It’s not the gesture of a helpless schoolboy facing the headmaster, but rather of the gangster who is biding his time, warming up, trying on a new ring.
ICE Outfits
Like all of America, I’ve been watching ICE raid videos recently on my social media feeds. As I watched these videos — or rather, as I watched the beginnings of these videos and then let the Instagram timer usher them away, or quickly clicked out of them myself, as soon as people started getting pinned to the ground — I of course noticed the expected ways ICE agents project the law-that-is-above-the-law power of white supremacy. They do this, as we have come to know, by employing a set of aesthetics that suggests secrecy and chaos, concealing their badge numbers and masking their faces. But I started to think the more subtle and maybe more insidious part of the ICE look is what happens around and beyond the badges and masks. I think it’s the outfits, which, as I watched the videos, I began to codify.
There are a lot of branded ball caps, with a mix of some big-name athletic logos and ones I didn’t initially recognize. Most of the hats are black, steel gray, or olive: the standard military-derived color palette that dominates men’s clothing at every Gap and Target. The ubiquitous neck gaiters and balaclavas are also in that color range, with the additional options of beige, tan, or ochre. Then, sunglasses. There has been an update here. The wraparound “Iraq subcontractor” glasses from the Halliburton era of paramilitary thuggery are still used, but now preppier frames are also in play — alongside aviators, which provide a nice “Obama and Biden also funded ICE” touch. Then, of course, some T-shirt or sweatshirt, the flak jacket that says police, and cargo or tech pants. I have listed these accessories from top to bottom, but I have also, I realize, gone in order of things I myself wear to things I do not. I own a few obscure-logo black hats, one ochre and one black neck gaiter, some Warby Parker matte black sunglasses that are not not ICE, and lots of black T-shirts. I don’t own a flak jacket or any cargo or tech pants. Still, I was disappointed to realize that from the waist up I could, on some days, look like I work for ICE.
None of this really hit me until it hit me unaware.
I fly a lot for work. As someone with a Serbian name, a US passport, and an Ecuadorian place of birth, I have encountered a range of attitudes as I’ve crossed various borders over the years, spanning from smooth friendliness to aggressive questioning and pat-downs. (In the ’90s, when the US was bombing Serbia, I was stopped for a while on a layover in Amsterdam and made to feel pretty Serbian.) I have never been detained, only delayed. I don’t think it’s likely that I will be detained, but the possibility does now occur to me.
But it didn’t occur to me bodily until I was suddenly surrounded by the ICE aesthetic. I was on a small airplane flying from Lincoln, Nebraska, to Chicago. The National Guard had recently been deployed in Chicago and was stationed in the suburbs awaiting a judge’s order, so they were probably on my mind, but it was early in the morning and I was boarding a small plane, so I was mainly worried about finding my seat without banging my head. I put away my bag and sat down and began to study my fellow passengers in the way that one does, hoping, as a big person, that another big person wouldn’t sit next to me, and so on. In this state of light commuter awareness, and just as I was settling into my headphones and possibly an in-flight nap, I started to see, in the gaps between the seats, some of those fitted polyester baseball caps with brands I didn’t recognize. I started to see the tech-fabric shirts and thick belts on non–dress pants. A whole entourage of men in front of me had close-cropped hair. Some of them were putting somewhat military-style backpacks into the overhead bins.
Now, there wasn’t any pixel camouflage or wraparound sunglasses or balaclavas. Neither were there blue-line American flags or red MAGA hats. But also: There weren’t any regular carry-on bags (the ones with rollers), and nobody was wearing anything in any kind of bright color. This was all gray, dark blue, black, and beige. The military-surplus palette. Part of me thought, “This is how Midwestern men dress; I don’t know all the fitted-hat brands; maybe this is just about golf or hunting.” But behind that reassuring line of thought was another line, which went: “These guys are ICE and they are flying to Chicago to kidnap people.”
So, in the cramped airplane’s limited sightlines, I looked for clues about whether these were just regular Midwestern dads, like me, flying for work, or whether they were regular Midwestern dads, flying for work, to terrorize and disappear people. How would I know the difference? One of the men made a nice gesture toward a fellow passenger, and I was partly relieved before I reminded myself that occasional politeness is not incompatible with ruthless violence and racism in other situations. I waited for them to open laptops, to become traveling salesmen, IT dudes. This didn’t happen. I waited for them to talk to one another about their work, as I’d seen Northwestern University baseball coaches do on another recent flight. They traveled in silence. I wasn’t sure if they were traveling together, but they were sitting together. They were clustered in an aesthetic.
The longer I stayed in this state of suspended fear, of hypervigilance, of confusion, the more clearly I understood that this was the point. The new aesthetic wasn’t about doofuses in red hats announcing themselves to you from a distance. That was first-term Trump aesthetics, when the goal was to make people feel like part of the club with merch and slogans. The new aesthetic, the second-term aesthetic, is about regular everyday dudes who might all of a sudden jump out of a car and take you away.
The new non-uniforms, too, suggest an update of old-school fascist aesthetics. It was once the case that a special uniform (brown shirts, swastika arm bands) marked the state forces and other signs (yellow star, pink triangle) marked the victims. The adoption of a “normie” aesthetic to carry out state violence weaponizes the banality of evil, pollutes everyday life in a way that previous regimes could not. I’m still not sure whether I have seen an actual ICE officer in the flesh. But the fact that I have seen their “uniforms” on videos, and that these uniforms are everywhere in America, means that any given plane ride or walk down a Chicago street can feel terrifying now, terrifying and fascistic. [/MM_Access_Decision]
