After a U.S. military airstrike on Venezuela and the capture of its President Nicolás Maduro and his wife over the weekend, President Donald Trump posted a photo of the detained Maduro on his Truthsocial account. The post was followed by an additional post, this time from the White House’s official X account, with a photo of Trump taken at the Gimhae International Airport terminal in Busan, South Korea, back in October 2025, with a superimposed text that read: “FAFO.” The colloquial acronym, which stands for “F**k Around and Find Out,” intimates that there are consequences for one’s actions and seemingly justifies the U.S.’s strike and capture mission.
This is not normal. Or is it? We’ve seen televised wars from Vietnam and Iraq. We’ve seen footage of military operations in Afghanistan. We’ve witnessed drone bombings in Iran. So, why does this feel so different? Why does this seem so, dare I say, “wrong?” It’s not the depictions themselves that cause so much dissonance, but the medium in which these images are delivered. In the words of the great theorist and philosopher Marshall McLuhan, “the medium is the message,” and the media works us over completely.
Imagine someone wrote you a handwritten letter that says, “I love you,” versus you seeing the words “I love you” written on the same person’s website. Which one feels more personal? Which one feels like it’s intended for you? They both communicate the same words, the same message, yet the handwritten “I love you” holds more emotional weight and significance. Why? Because the meanings we associate with a written letter are vastly different than those of pixels on a website. A handwritten note feels intimate, while a website feels public. These cognitive associations, therefore, color the message and its meaning. That’s exactly what’s happening here.
Historically, we have attributed a sense of authority and legitimacy to television broadcasts and newspaper editorials, a privilege afforded to these media due to the journalistic standards and fact-checking accountabilities baked into their programming. That’s why reporting from Walter Cronkite or writing from The New York Times’ David Brooks holds a semblance of gravitas that social media does not. Cronkite’s televised messages were serious and real, unlike social posts and memetic images, which are often considered lighthearted and unsubstantiated. That’s why a photo of a sovereign country’s president handcuffed in a Nike sweatsuit and blackout shades—posted on the official social media handle of the capturing president, no less—seems so abnormal. That’s because the message-to-medium relationship is incongruent. When it’s right, it fits. When it doesn’t, it creates dissonance.
Take Matt Williams, for instance, the clever Co-Founder and CEO of OpenFortune. Williams built his entire business on media-and-message congruence. The company places branded content inside of over a billion fortune cookies and distributes them to a network of nearly 30,000 restaurants nationwide. When you open a fortune cookie, you expect to get good news or a prediction of what’s to come. So, when you receive a generous offer from a brand in an OpenFortune fortune cookie after a meal, the message-to-media relationship fits. The cultural meanings of the medium embed themselves in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived. It’s no longer an ad. Instead, it feels more like a gift and, thus, we engage with it differently.
In the context of modern political communication, like in the case of the Maduro capture, McLuhan’s theory underscores a similar significance. When the White House chooses to communicate images of war through a social post or memetic content, the very nature of these media shapes the message being conveyed, often in ways that may not be immediately apparent or intended. This ultimately creates a tension for the audience. Here is messaging and imagery seemingly meant for a legitimated media projected in an incongruent delivery vehicle. Therefore, the unseriousness of social media begins to erode the severity of what the message actually conveys
The visual nature of these communications, whether they depict actual events or are even AI-generated, inherently simplifies complex geopolitical situations into digestible, shareable content. This simplification is not just a byproduct but becomes the message itself—where complex issues can be reduced to striking visuals and that the spectacle of the image is as important as the substance of the policy it represents.
Since the dawn of cave paintings to hieroglyphics, we have always used images as a means of representation to tell stories and express ideas. However, over the years, as society evolved, mass media proliferated, and consumerism dominated, life itself became replaced with representative imagery. The French Theorist Guy Debord refers to this as “the society of the spectacle,” where images mediate our relationships and understanding of the world. In his day, that would have been television. Today, for us, it’s social media—people visiting a place merely for the photo opportunity to post on Instagram, turning our experiences into commodities.
According to Debord, the spectacle serves to pacify the masses, justify the existing system, and even turn dissent into a consumable image, making real change seem impossible. In the case of the detained Maduro image, the representation of political action through carefully curated images becomes more significant than the actions themselves. Just look at the commentary across the social networks for evidence of this dynamic. Much of the discourse on social media after the image was posted revolved around the Nike Tech Fleece sweatsuit Maduro was wearing as opposed to the potentially unlawful act that may have just been committed.
The photo eventually became a meme and was spread across the social web. The Nike product, now dubbed by the internet as the “Maduro Fit,” quickly hit peak popularity on Google search and sold out across Nike’s online stores in a matter of hours, turning a geopolitical event into an opportunity for consumption. As Debord argues, the spectacle of these images—their unbelievable shock value, virality, and an ability to provoke an emotional response—takes precedence over the nuanced realities of governance and international relations.
Debord’s writing was done in the post-World War II 1960s, yet his work is much reflected in our lives today, some 60 years later. It may not seem normal, but it very much is when we allow our media consumption to move from active to passive, eroding our ability to critically analyze the intentions of said media and its relationship with our reality. The unsettling feeling that we get when we see images of a cuffed Maduro, decked out in his Nike fleece, appear in our newsfeed is a timestamp of a new normal. Soon, these kinds of images won’t feel so shocking, just as footage of bombings overseas doesn’t seem as jarring as it was when it was televised back in the 1950s.
We can’t say that we weren’t warned, though. The NYU media theory professor and cultural critic Neil Postman argued decades ago that the dominance of television was turning all subject matter into entertainment, including news and politics. In today’s digital age, where social media has largely supplanted television as the primary medium for many, Postman’s concerns seem almost prophetic. The White House’s use of striking war images across social media reduces complex policy decisions and geopolitical events into pieces of dazzling content, designed to capture attention in an oversaturated media landscape. Their goal is not to inform or engage in substantive dialogue, but to entertain.
The convergence of these theories in the current political media landscape reveals a troubling trend. The medium (social media, with its emphasis on visual content) shapes the message (complex issues reduced to striking images). This creates a spectacle that replaces authentic engagement with political realities, all while turning serious matters of governance and international relations into a form of entertainment or shock value content.
Traditionally, the office of the President was associated with measured communication and a dignified level of formality. However, the use of sensationalized war images has broken from these norms and expectations, and that’s the part that is abnormal. Perhaps it’s more than the message of the media that’s working us over. Maybe it’s not the spectacle that we’ve found ourselves in, but rather our cultural acceptance of it that is haunting us. What would once elicit outrage now spurs consumption, symbolizing that maybe we have become numb to its political implications and enamored by its entertainment. That’s what’s working us over—the ambivalence of it all. These days, reality feels more like a “reality show,” something unrivaled by a West Wing or House of Cards, and we, unfortunately, are just passively watching as we doom scroll.
The views expressed in this column are those of the author, Marcus Collins – best-selling author of For The Culture and clinical professor at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan – and do not necessarily reflect the views of Brand Innovators.
