[Column ] The obscenity of Trump’s ‘hasbara’

US President Donald Trump announces 25% tariffs on foreign cars on March 26, 2025. (AFP/Yonhap)

By Slavoj Žižek, Global Eminent Scholar at Kyung Hee University

On Feb. 25, Donald Trump posted on his Truth Social account a 30-second video clip that appears to have been created with generative AI and was first put online by somebody with no connection to the White House. The clip, which promotes the transformation of Gaza into a Gulf state-like resort, opens on barefoot Palestinian children walking through Gazan rubble. After a title card asks, “What’s next?” they walk toward a skyline of skyscrapers lining Gaza’s coast, and a voice sings, “Donald’s coming to set you free. Trump Gaza shining bright. Golden future, a brand-new light. Feast and dance. The deed is done.” 

The scenes shown are: Teslas driving through the streets; someone with a striking resemblance to Elon Musk eating bread dipped in hummus; Hamas militants with full beards dancing flirtatiously in bikinis and sheer belly-dancing skirts; a child holding a giant, gold Trump balloon; Trump dancing with a scantily clad woman in a nightclub; Musk showering people with cash; a “Trump Gaza” building; golden Trump merch including his statues on sale;  a gigantic golden Trump statue; Trump and Netanyahu lounging topless poolside while enjoying cocktails. 

In whatever way one understands this clip, Palestinians are deprived of minimal dignity — and dignity is important to them, in spite of, or rather because of, their misery. On Oct. 20, 2024, after a 3-year-old Palestinian boy was killed by air-dropped aid in the southern city of Khan Younis in Gaza, his grandfather said: “We don’t want aid. We want dignity. Enough with the humiliation and insult that we are receiving from the Arabs, not just the Israelis.”

It is easy to make fun of this weird clip, but it deserves a deeper analysis with even philosophical implications. Lacan claims that truth has the structure of a fiction — some traumatic or intense truths are more easily accepted if we present them as moments of a fictitious game. Say, I am passionately in love, but I am ashamed to declare it openly, so I tell use the situation where we both play the role of lovers in a theatre scene to say it, knowing that it will not be attributed to me as a person. 

In today’s political propaganda, the strategy is simpler: fiction has the structure of truth, i.e., a lie is presented as truth. The Trump-Gaza clip fits neither of these two options. The first impression it gives us when we watch it is, of course, that of a tasteless satire, of ridiculous irony. But when Trump himself posted it on his Truth Social account, it looked as if he appropriated it “seriously,” taking it as a possible vision of Gaza in the near future. Or was he aware that the clip was meant ironically and consciously decided to function in his real life as his own caricature? The most probable version is that Trump didn’t think about it a lot at all. He saw it as a funny, crazy clip and thought, “It will raise controversy and make me even more popular, so why not?”

There are cases where the relationship between truth and fiction gets even more complex. In mid-February 2025, reports circulated that Israel’s military was dropping leaflets across the Gaza Strip that openly threatened the territory’s entire population of more than 2 million people with forced displacement or/and death. The message was this: “To the honorable people of Gaza, After the events that have taken place, the temporary ceasefire, and before the implementation of Trump’s mandatory plan — which will impose forced displacement upon you whether you accept it or not — we have decided to make one final appeal to those who wish to receive aid in exchange for cooperating with us. We will not hesitate for a moment to provide assistance. Reconsider your position. The world map will not change if all the people of Gaza cease to exist. No one will feel for you, and no one will ask about you. You have been left alone to face your inevitable fate. Iran cannot even protect itself, let alone protect you, and you have seen with your own eyes what has happened. Neither America nor Europe care about Gaza in any way. Even your Arab countries, which are now our allies, provide us with money and weapons while sending you only shrouds. There is little time left — the game is almost over. Whoever wishes to save themselves before it is too late, we are here, remaining until the end of time.” 

To add an obscene insult to injury, the message includes a passage from the Quran: “We will certainly test you with a touch of fear and famine and loss of property, life, and crops. Give good news to those who patiently endure who say, when struck by a disaster, ‘Surely to Allah we belong and to Him we will all return’” (translation by Jamil Khader). I think these leaflets (on the top of which there are photos of Netanyahu and Trump) are a fake, false news — but done by whom? Not the Palestinians, but by unofficial Israeli sources as part of the complex psychological warfare.

The public diplomacy of Israel — called “hasbara,” which roughly translates as “explaining” —is a well-coordinated massive effort to justify measures which are perceived as unacceptable by the global opinion. The “explaining” is done in multiple forms, by official state organs, private organizations and visible public figures (artists, journalists, scientists), but also as anonymous rumors spreading conspiracy theories or faked “documents” attributed to the enemy. Another hasbara strategy is to allow (or solicit) lower-level political figures to state openly what the top leaders don’t say openly or even deny — such statements, although not widely reported in the media, “explain” what the more polite statements of top politicians imply. 

For example, Owen Jones has shown on his podcast a recorded statement by the Israeli Deputy Parliament Speaker Nissim Vaturi which says: “Who is innocent in Gaza? Civilians went out and slaughtered people in cold blood… We need to separate women and children and kill the adults in Gaza, we are being too considerate.” And then he makes even a step further, including children: “Every child born now — in this minute — is already a terrorist when he is born.” This is in no way a mistake but part of a well-planned complex strategy. 

The amount of work grew exponentially so that the Israeli hasbara machinery had to rely also on the AI — the Israeli government decided to use “AI-generated pro-Israel content and astroturfed social media campaigns,” as Jamil Khader writes in “The Hasbara Glitch.” 

“One of the new AI bots, which was reported in the press, was branded as FactFinder AI. It was designed to ‘correct’ misinformation, reconcile the paradoxes of hasbara, automate and expand hasbara campaigns, and reinforce Zionist narratives. However, when exposed to the real data landscape, the bot encountered undeniable realities — Israel’s history of occupation, apartheid, and war crimes — and, instead of ignoring them (as Zionist hasbara does), the AI bot began processing them into responses. Israel’s AI hasbara campaign backfired spectacularly, because even AI, when confronted with historical records, existing media narratives, and empirical data, could not fabricate a coherent pro-Israel stance because there is no coherent pro-Israel stance,” Khader writes.

The result was thus that AI glitches happen from time to time — glitches which are “not just a technical malfunction; it is a symbolic rupture, an inevitable revelation of the inherent failure of Zionist ideology it was designed to serve,” Khader writes. And what if the genocide leaflet is something similar: not simply a glitch but a second-level fake: a fake document whose very (rather obvious) “glitches” (the leaflet is printed on a paper with Shin Bet marks; the reference to the Quran is ridiculous, no Muslim Arab would write like that…) were intended and serve a precise function? What if the true goal of the “discovery” of this leaflet was to sow doubt about its own authenticity, but at the same time leaving behind the vague impression that there must be some truth even in this fiction?

But such glitches fail to even reach the level of Trump-speak, which works in a different way. Trump doesn’t even try to mask contradictions or constant shifts in his position. From day to day, he blurts out what pops up in his mind — not (as some think) as part of his mental confusion but as the result of his (fully conscious) assumption of the role of a master beyond law and logic, a master who asserts his power by way of constantly changing what he claims. One day Zelenskyy is a legitimate leader of Ukraine to be received in the White House, next day he is a dictator; one day Russia attacked Ukraine, next day Ukraine defends itself against Russian aggression; one day EU is a respected partner reproached just for not doing enough for the West, next day Trump says EU was formed to “screw” the US…  

A true master doesn’t just obey the rules and laws — from time to time, he makes an unexpected gesture, changes a political line, condemns or pardons a person, without giving any clear reasons. Such changes are a way for the master to assert his unconditional authority. When, usually in late evenings, Stalin was confirming long lists of people to be shot, he from time to time inexplicably crossed out a name (although in all probability he didn’t even know who that person was) — the total opacity of such acts made his authority unconditional. 

However, there is a difference here between Stalin and Trump. What was with Stalin an exception (to the reign of a brutal law) is for Trump a modus operandi. Trump is here effectively an anti-Stalin (not that this makes him any better — to paraphrase Stalin, Trump and Stalin are both worse). In both cases, factual truth takes second place; however, in Stalinism, the ignorance of factual truth is part of a precise hermeneutics — the very fact that a statement is factually not true delivers a clear message.

 The gap that separates exactitude (factual truth, accuracy about facts) and truth (the cause to which we are committed) was precisely formulated by Jean-Claude Milner:
“When one admits the radical difference between exactitude and truth, only one ethical maxim remains: never oppose the two. Never make of the inexact the privileged means of the effects of truth. Never transform these effects into by-products of the lie. Never make the real into an instrument of the conquest of reality. And I would allow myself to add: never make revolution into the lever of an absolute power.”

If the language of the new post-human AI is a language of signals, no longer properly representing the subject, the Stalinist language is the most violent imaginable opposite of this language. What characterizes human language, in contrast to the most complex bee signals, is what Lacan called the “empty speech” — the speech whose denotative value (explicit content) is suspended on behalf of its functioning as an index of intersubjective relations between speaker and hearer, and this suspension is the key feature of the Stalinist jargon. 

Here is a tragi-comical detail that exemplifies this point: the public prosecutor in the show trial against the “United Trotskyte-Zinovievite Centre” published a list of those that this “Centre” was planning to assassinate (Stalin, Kirov, Zhdanov…); this list became “a bizarre honor since inclusion signified proximity to Stalin.”  Although Molotov was on good personal terms with Stalin, he was shocked to discover that he was not on the list: what did this sign mean? Just a warning from Stalin, or an indication that soon it will be his turn to be arrested? (Indeed, a couple of years later, his wife was arrested, accused of being an American and Jewish spy.) It was the Stalinist Soviet Union that was the true “empire of signs.” In this sense, we may say that not only is Stalinism (also) a phenomenon of language, but that language itself is a Stalinist phenomenon — a certain key feature of human language finds its clearest expression in Stalinist jargon — only in human language can the statement that I am not on the list of those to be killed by the plot mean that I am losing my political position.

A story told by Soviet linguist Eric Han-Pira provides another perfect example of the Stalinist total semantic saturation of this “empire of signs,” the semantic saturation which, precisely, relies on the emptying of direct denotative meaning. For many years, when the Soviet media announced the funeral ceremonies of a member of the high nomenklatura, used a cliché formulation: “buried on Red Square by the Kremlin wall.” In the 1960s, however, because of the lack of space, most of the newly deceased dignitaries were cremated and urns with their ashes were placed in niches inside the wall itself — yet the same old cliché was used in press statements. This incongruity compelled fifteen members of the Russian Language Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences to write a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, suggesting that the phrase be modified to fit the current reality: “The urn with ashes was placed in the Kremlin wall.” Several weeks later, a representative of the Central Committee phoned the Institute, informing them that the Central Committee had discussed their suggestion and decided to keep the old formulation; he gave no reasons for this decision.

According to the rules that regulate the Soviet “empire of signs,” the CC was right: the change would not be perceived as simply registering the fact that dignitaries are now cremated and their ashes placed in the wall itself; any deviation from the standard formula would be interpreted as a sign, triggering a frenzied interpretive activity. So, since there was no message to be delivered, why change things? One may oppose this conclusion with the possibility of a simple “rational” solution: why not change the formulation and add an explanation that it means nothing, that it just registers a new reality? Such a “rational” approach totally misses the logic of the Soviet “empire of signs,” since, in it, everything has some meaning, even and especially a denial of meaning, such a denial would trigger an even more frantic interpretive activity — it would be read not only as a meaningful sign within a given, well established, semiotic space, but as a much stronger meta-semantic indication that the very basic rules of this semiotic space are changing, thus causing total perplexity, panic even!

In Trump’s discourse, language functions in a totally different way. Yes, he generates inconsistent statements again and again, but beneath them there is a clear “general line” he follows, sustained by censorship of the press, purges, much worse and more extensive than cancel culture, which almost reminds us of Stalinism. Let’s take a closer look at the press conference in the Oval Office of the White House, which shocked the entire world, and let’s focus on the details of manners, gestures, and style, which may appear less important than the issues at stake but effectively disclose more about the underlying basic stance.

The first thing that catches attention is that we got two arrogant and self-assured US politicians treating in an extremely disrespectful and brutal way the leader of Ukraine who was under terrifying pressure, on the verge of a breakdown. The only country I know whose representatives resort to a brutal language similar to Trump’s is Russia. The press representative of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Marija Zaharova wrote: “How Trump and Vance held back from hitting that scumbag is a miracle of restraint.” And, as expected, the chorus was joined by the ex-president Medvedev, who designated Zelenskyy as a “cocaine clown.” But such statements are made by the second-rank figures, never by the top leaders: at the level of public diplomacy, Trump and Vance violate the rules respected even by Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Only the North Korean state media sometimes resorts to similar brutalities — no wonder Trump openly admires Kim Jong-un as a good leader and sometimes calls him even a friend.

Before Zelenskyy even entered the room, one of the White House personnel reproached him for showing disrespect by not being properly dressed. The entire treatment of Zelenskyy in the White House was disrespectful, and what makes it even worse is that Donald Trump, the man who set new standards in public vulgarity, now shamelessly condemns others for acting disrespectfully. The ultimate obscenity is to reproach someone for behaving disrespectfully in a form which is in itself an act of extreme disrespect… The simple ChatGPT has much better manners than Trump and Vance when you engage in conversation with it. And Mike Waltz described the way Zelenskyy reacted to the news with a rather tasteless metaphor: “It’s like a, you know, a ex-girlfriend that wants to argue, you know, everything that you said nine years ago, rather than moving the relationship forward.”

So was the open conflict in the Oval Office a spontaneous outburst? The least one can say is that such an obscene outburst was lying dormant, just waiting to explode. We should bear in mind that, at the level of substantial content, nothing new happened — what just takes place is, to put it in Hegelian terms, a passage from An sich to Für sich (from In-itself to for-itself), from mere presence in the background to explicit positing of a content as such. However, this passage changes everything: once things are directly brought out, we find ourselves in a different space. Although everyone in a group knows well something that is only “in itself,” it can still be interpreted away as a misunderstanding, as something we “didn’t really mean,” but once it is directly said, it cannot be undone. 

This passage to “for itself” can be precisely located in the case of the Oval Office meeting: although tensions were palpable all the time, the meeting became tense when Vice President JD Vance pressed Zelensky for not appreciating the United States’ help in Ukraine’s war with Russia. Here is that part of the exchange:

Vance: Just say thank you.
Zelensky: I said thank you — I say thank you to the American people.
Trump: You see, I think it’s good for the American people to see what’s going on. I think it’s very important. That’s why I kept this going so long. You have to be thankful. You don’t have the cards. You’re buried there. You people are dying. You’re running low on soldiers. [. . .] Then you tell us, “I don’t want to cease fire.” If you could get a cease-fire right now, I tell you, you take it so the bullets stop flying and your men stop getting killed.

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