Chapter Four - The Killing of al-Baghdadi

Summary

Chapter 4 shows how the October 2019 killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi became a platform for President Trump’s visual and verbal consolidations of necropolitical law. Announcing the killing at a press conference held at the White House Diplomatic Reception Room, Trump positioned himself in front of a portrait of America’s first president, George Washington, visually asserting Trump’s lineage in an always already necropolitical state, built, as it is, on the racialized pillars of territorial appropriation, genocide, and slavery. With the many flags of the US armed forces flanking Trump like an honor guard, the visuals of Trump’s announcement encode the two bodies of president/commander-in-chief, foregrounding the military as a key actor in the state’s implementation of necropolitical law. Chapter 4 shows how Trump used the occasion, first, to deepen the necropolitical separations animating necropolitical law and, second, to stage himself as the White, male, militarized hero central to spectacles of imperialism. Chapter 4 demonstrates how normalizing the necropolitics of imperialism past and present fosters the discounting of life legitimized by necropolitical law.