Venezuela, Renee Good and Trump’s ‘Assault on Hope’

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

News, Government, Society & Culture

4.3 • 14.5K Ratings

🗓️ 10 January 2026

⏱️ 66 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The shocking events of January have sent a message: America works differently now. M. Gessen is a Times Opinion columnist and the author of books about living under autocracy, including the National Book Award-winning “The Future Is History.” They have been a clear, relentless and perceptive voice on what it means and what it is like to live in a country that is turning into a different kind of regime. And they wrote an essay this week on the seizure of the president of Venezuela, calling it, “a blow — quite likely fatal — to the new world order of law, justice and human rights that was heralded in the wake of World War II.” Mentioned: “329 Days of Trump” by Michael M. Grynbaum and Stuart A. Thompson “Two Middle East Negotiators Assess Trump’s Israel-Hamas Deal” by Ezra Klein The Future Is History by M. Gessen Book Recommendations: Tomorrow Is Yesterday by Hussein Agha and Robert Malley One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad The Hill by Harriet Clark Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin and Marie Cascione. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota and Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The In the early 20th century, there was this anarchist idea about the propaganda of the deed. The propaganda of the deed
0:39.5	was that there were these forms of direct action, and many of them violent, assassinations,
0:45.3	bombings, that when you did them, they were so spectacular. Everybody would hear about them.
0:51.6	And when everybody heard about them, there would be copycats
0:55.7	by making the impossible possible,
1:00.1	by making clear that society did not work
1:02.9	how you thought it worked,
1:04.4	that the state did not have the power you thought it had.
1:07.4	They could rupture society itself
1:09.9	and create the possibility of a moment of revolutionary upheaval.
1:15.7	I think there is a way in which you should and can understand the Trump administration as operating often through propaganda of the deed.
1:26.1	Now, they're not an anarchist collective.
1:29.5	They're a state, their regime.
1:32.7	But they operate not so often through the dull work of rules and laws and legislation and deliberation,
1:43.9	but through spectacle and through the meaning
1:48.0	of particular spectacles. Venezuela was a spectacle. They do not seem to have planned for the
1:55.2	aftermath. They were decapitating the Maduro regime, but they left the regime otherwise,
2:00.1	completely in place.
2:01.8	Nobody seems to know even into the administration what it means for America to be running Venezuela,
2:06.8	but it was an example, an act that showed something. And even before the capture of Maduro,
2:14.4	they had chosen not to fight the drug war, the fentanyl scourge,
	...

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