Posted by: John Phoenx
Still from a video posted to Truth Social by Donald Trump.
Recently, Donald Trump shared a video known as the “Flying King”– an AI-generated spectacle in which he pilots a fighter plane emblazoned with the words “King Trump,” raining brown sludge, representing excrement, onto a group of protesters below. This grotesque display seems to be a direct response to the widespread “No Kings” protests, where citizens reject his self-proclaimed sovereignty. Some of Trump’s supporters hailed the video as “performance art,” a way of “owning the protesters,” or simply as a moment of “fun.”
But there is nothing remotely comic about it. What we are witnessing is the fusion of crudity, cruelty, and unchecked rage into a nightmarish performance of power, where degradation itself becomes the ultimate pleasure. As Stacey Patton aptly observed, this act is not mere vulgarity; it is an assault on dignity, a dark fantasy of absolute control where others exist only to be debased and humiliated. She writes.
This isn’t just trolling or another bout of Trumpian narcissism. It’s something deeper, darker, and far more revealing. What we witnessed in that AI video was one of the most striking public displays of projection and psychosexual rage ever exhibited by a political leader. It gives us an unfiltered glimpse into a diseased ego where rage and eroticism merge, where domination is foreplay, and where humiliation becomes the only language he knows how to speak. This is a public humiliation fantasy rooted in race, class, and power, and it gives us a window into the psyche of an authoritarian man who is eroticizing cruelty.
Trump’s fantasy of domination is hardly new, it is the ancient dream of the colonizer, slave owner, and the pimp who confuse cruelty with strength and humiliation with glory. It’s the same pathology that drives Trump’s campaign to turn cruelty into policy, to make the state itself a theater of sadism. The act of dropping filth from above, literal or political, isn’t about waste; it’s about hierarchy. It declares that my disgust is worth more than your dignity, that power exists to soil what it cannot understand. The protesters below him are not citizens in this theatrical stunt, they are props in a ritual of domination, bodies to be used, soiled, dehumanized, and discarded in a spectacle of contempt. Those below are not people; they are mere objects in a ritual of domination, reduced to props, used and discarded in a performance of contempt.
The waste oozing from Trump’s body pulses in the mouths of his followers, who spew filth in messages praising Hitler, fantasizing about raping their enemies, endorsing slavery, and wishing for the slaughter of those they deem unworthy. This is the true rot behind Trump’s video, laden with the stench of the walking dead whose mouths drip with excrement, their hands soaked in blood. It is a grotesque display of power, more than vulgarity; it is a calculated performance of domination. In these acts, cruelty becomes strength, and humiliation is conflated with glory, a dark pathology echoed by his enablers, like Stephen Miller, who weaponize this sadism into policy.
This is no isolated moment. It is the very essence of fascism, as Susan Sontag described, the eroticization of domination, the fetishization of control. In this sense, Trump’s obscene display is not an aberration but an expression of what she called the aesthetics of pornography, the erotic charge of complete control, the pleasure of submission demanded, the beauty made of brutality. What we witness in that video is not mere performance art, it is a grotesque spectacle of fascist domination. It is fascist pornography; the politics of degradation transformed into a macabre public ritual where delusional violence symbolizes not just a paranoid fantasy of humiliation, but the precondition for eliminating all those deemed as waste.
Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.
By: Henry Giroux