Source: Counterpunch

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.


This article was originally published by Counterpunch; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.

Henry Giroux (born 1943) is an internationally renowned writer and cultural critic, Professor Henry Giroux has authored, or co-authored over 65 books, written several hundred scholarly articles, delivered more than 250 public lectures, been a regular contributor to print, television, and radio news media outlets, and is one of the most cited Canadian academics working in any area of Humanities research. In 2002, he was named as one of the top fifty educational thinkers of the modern period in Fifty Modern Thinkers on Education: From Piaget to the Present as part of Routledge’s Key Guides Publication Series.


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