Skip to content
Art by Matheus Pigozzi/Agência Pública, used with permission.
This text, written by Guilherme Cavalcanti and Wanessa Celina, was originally published on January 12, 2026, on Agência Pública’s website. It is republished here, with edits, under a partnership agreement with Global Voices.
After the US attack on Venezuela and the capture of dictator Nicolás Maduro on January 3, 2026, the images released of the action, mainly on social media, fixed themselves in the public’s imagination. Online, US President Donald Trump has shown that he knows the importance of these messages to his political narrative, according to experts Pública spoke to.
For Bruno Pompeu, professor of the Advertising Course at the School of Communication and Arts of the University of São Paulo (ECA-USP), they do not function as a simple record of the facts, but as a set of symbols that shape public perception about events.
Among this collection of symbolic images, a blindfolded, handcuffed, and faltering Maduro contrasts with the organized American rooms, full of screens and authorities in action. What is shown is less the operation itself and more a visual narrative of victory, control, and legitimization of power.
In a semiotic analysis of the White House posts, Pompeu assesses the photographs not as neutral facts, but as a “set of symbols” that builds meanings and highlights the unequal treatment between them.
The images of US personnel show greater sharpness, contrast, and “warmer” lighting, associated with cinematic drama. Maduro’s images, on the other hand, appear simpler, with a “rougher” finish, which reinforces the sense of precariousness and defeat.
Pompeu said:
Maduro appears blindfolded, [being] taken somewhere, transported without knowing where he was going. Without any visibility of the future, without having any control over what will come, without the ability to understand what is happening. Donald Trump, though, appears in several images surrounded by signs of power.
Agência Pública’s reporters analyzed all the images published by the White House on X between October 20, 2025 and January 8, 2026. In this period, there were 639 posts with images, which had, on average, 19,200 likes and 3,700 shares per publication.
The post with the highest number of interactions was precisely the one that used the image of Nicolás Maduro’s arrest — a repost from Donald Trump’s account on the platform Truth Social. It had more than 416,000 likes, more than 21 times the average in the period analyzed. It also had 81,000 shares, practically 22 times the average on the channel.
“Those shared photos were aiming at that. You take away his sight, you take away his hearing, he has difficulty walking because he’s handcuffed. All the sensory part [of the human being] is removed,” observed the professor and researcher of semiotics in the Department of Public Relations of ECA-USP, Clotilde Perez.
Júlio Pinto, visiting professor at the Federal University of Paraíba (UFPB), highlighted another important element: the visual depiction of the logic of police and criminal. He recalled that in the US, the wide range of popular crime series and films has become a common set of cultural references.
The White House’s official communications, according to Pinto, systematically associate the Venezuelan president with the figure of the “narco-terrorist,” mixing together crime and terrorism and legitimizing exceptional responses.
For Pinto, the image of Maduro’s hunched body, “a tall man measuring almost 1.9 m,” enhances the contrast between “winner and loser,” categories rooted in American political culture. The message is twofold: the US appears as a winner and enforcer, while Latin America is repositioned in the old role of a space under tutelage.
Another post published by the White House, with Trump alongside Secretary of State Marco Rubio during the operation in Venezuela, reached 138,000 likes and 18,000 shares. This is seven times more than the average number of likes on the account’s posts and almost five times more than the average number of shares.
According to Perez, when the US president appears surrounded by his team — “white, likely heterosexual men, in blue suits at black tables, where there is technology, the mobile phone, the computer screen” — the framing reinforces a logic of power and command and constructs the image of a “war situation” in which Trump always occupies the central position.
The professor argued that contemporary geopolitics has become “media-performative,” an environment in which no image is neutral. This intentionality, according to her, is based on a simplifying morality, typical of the logic adopted by Trump, which organizes politics on the basis of dichotomies, “such as good and evil, right, and wrong.”
Sending out the message is key
The numbers show that there are peaks of attention around specific moments, when this visual, dramatized language is used to narrate episodes of confrontation, capture, or symbolic victory.
The black and white photo published soon after Maduro’s capture, showing Trump and the slang term FAFO (“fuck around and find out”), had approximately 10 times more likes than the average on the channel and eight times more shares. This is another example where iconographic analysis shows a superior Trump, as well as reinforcing the US’s expansionist vision of international relations.
On December 31, 2025, the White House posted on X a retrospective look at the phrases from the year, and highlighted “Peace Through Strength.” The expression became well-known when former Republican president Ronald Reagan adopted it in the 1980s.
According to Bruno Pompeu, the pattern — of the figure of Trump almost always occupying the centre of the visual narrative — reveals a personification of the institution, where he becomes as or more important than the White House itself. Photographed in the foreground, often from the bottom up or with the background out of focus, the president appears larger than the others, with a rigid posture, angular shoulders, and surrounded by national symbols such as the flag and the eagle.
Trump’s political message
The imagery of Maduro’s capture also reinforces Trump’s political position on the American continent, according to Arthur Murto, PhD in International Relations from USP and professor at PUC-SP (Pontifical Catholic University). “It is a foreign policy which uses fast, direct, deeply explicit communications,” according to him. “This is a novelty, made to shock and go viral.”
Associate professor of Advertising and Publicity at the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), Ary Azevedo Jr., highlighted that the fusion between public communications and government propaganda has been apparent since the first Trump administration, but has been taken to the extreme in this second term.
After the news of Maduro’s capture, the White House’s official account posted a video putting the United States’s military power on display. The video uses a speech by Maduro calling Trump a “coward.”
For Azevedo Jr., the video, made to the rhythm of a music video, deliberately approximates foreign policy and entertainment. The style is that of emotional engagement: fast cuts, imposing soundtracks, scenes showing night vision that evoke the military “front line,” and alternating between images of bravado and capture.
It is no coincidence that Trump, in an interview with Fox News, hours after the invasion of Venezuela, said that he had followed the capture of Nicolás Maduro “live” as if he were watching a “television program.”
“Trump’s logic of domination is also linked to reviving old doctrines. Peter Hegseth, US Secretary of Defense, even retweeted a caricature where Trump is standing on top of Latin America with a staff bearing the words “Donroe Doctrine,” which merges the term “Monroe Doctrine” with the name Donald.
For Arthur Murta, this type of messaging is used to narratively legitimize US interventions, suggesting that there are groups in Latin America that actively want such US presence and reject the influence of China, Russia, and left-wing governments.
