American Wrath
The regression of American justice: Pam Bondi's promise to Maduro and a return to the ancien régime.
“The atrocity that haunted the public execution played, therefore, a double role: it was the principle of the communication between the crime and the punishment, it was also the exacerbation of the punishment in relation to the crime. It provided the spectacle with both truth and power; it was the culmination of the ritual of the investigation and the ceremony in which the sovereign triumphed.”
—Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
When U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi promised that Nicolás Maduro would soon face “the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts,” she revealed more than she intended. The word choice alone—wrath—signals a return to something the Enlightenment reformers laboured for centuries to eliminate from justice systems: the sovereign’s personal vengeance.
The Sovereign’s Personal Injury.
In pre-modern justice systems, crime was understood not primarily as harm to victims or society, but as personal offense against the ruler. As Foucault observed in analysing ancien régime punishment:
“Besides its immediate victim, the crime attacks the sovereign: it attacks him personally, since the law represents the will of the sovereign; it attacks him physically, since the force of the law is the force of the prince.”
Notice the double nature of this offense: personal and physical. The sovereign experiences crime as bodily attack, as visceral injury demanding bodily response. This is why punishment in such systems must be spectacular, must be felt—it is the sovereign’s body reasserting itself over the criminal’s.
Bondi’s formulation operates within precisely this logic. Maduro’s alleged crimes—whatever their actual victims—are framed as attacks on American sovereignty, requiring American wrath, demanding punishment on American soil. The possessive is crucial: these are crimes against the sovereign (America), not violations of law that any competent court might adjudicate.
The United States is not positioned as neutral arbiter but as injured party. As Foucault notes, this transforms the entire nature of the judicial proceeding:
“The intervention of the sovereign is not, therefore, an arbitration between two adversaries; it is much more, even, than an action to enforce respect for the rights of the individual; it is a direct reply to the person who has offended him.”
A reply. A response to personal insult. This is the language of vendetta, not jurisprudence.
The personalization is not Bondi’s invention. It reflects the unusual intensity of Trump’s animosity toward Maduro—a hostility that transcends standard U.S.-Venezuela antagonism. Maduro did not merely oppose American interests; he embarrassed American power. He survived “maximum pressure” sanctions designed to break him. He mocked Trump publicly, refused to recognize the U.S.-backed Juan Guaidó, and maintained his grip on power despite every theatrical coercive tactic deployed against him. For a president who viewed statecraft through the prism of personal dominance, this was intolerable.
Trump internalized Maduro’s defiance as bodily attack. Venezuela’s oil nationalization became, in Trump’s telling, “the greatest theft in American history”—as if Venezuela had “stolen our oil.” The sovereign possessive again: not a policy disagreement but an act of theft against the prince himself. Maduro became useful domestically as the embodiment of “failed socialism”—proof of what Democrats wanted for America. But he simultaneously became personally loathsome for refusing submission, for surviving, for turning Trump’s regime-change policy into visible failure.
This is the pre-modern logic Foucault describes. The criminal offends not just law but the sovereign’s person. The offense is therefore experienced as physical injury, as visceral wound demanding visible, excessive response. Maduro’s crime is not simply autocracy (the world contains many autocrats whom Trump praised). His crime is insubordination—the refusal to bend, the survival that makes American power look impotent, the defiance that wounds sovereign pride.
Bondi inherits this framework. Her promise of "wrath" is not prosecutor's rhetoric. It is the sovereign's reply to personal affront. But if crime is personal offense against the sovereign, then punishment cannot be merely functional, cannot be hidden away in procedural neutrality. It must be seen. It must signify. Which is why Bondi's promise emphasizes not just American justice, but American soil, American courts—the visible geography of sovereign power.
The Geography of Vengeance.
Why “on American soil”? Why specify geography at all?
If this were genuinely about justice—about determining guilt through evidence and assigning proportionate punishment through law—location would be a mere technical matter of jurisdiction. International tribunals exist precisely to adjudicate crimes that transcend national borders. The International Criminal Court, whatever its limitations, was designed to provide neutral ground for prosecuting heads of state. Even ordinary extradition treaties treat location as logistical detail, not symbolic necessity.
But Bondi’s rhetoric makes clear that location is everything. The soil itself matters. The courts must be specifically American. The entire proceeding must occur within the territorial bounds of United States sovereignty. This specificity is not procedural but theatrical.
Punishment in the sovereign model, as Foucault recognized, serves a primarily spectacular function:
“The public execution, then, has a juridico-political function. It is a ceremonial by which a momentarily injured sovereignty is reconstituted. It restores that sovereignty by manifesting it at its most spectacular...over and above the crime that has placed the sovereign in contempt, it deploys before all eyes an invincible force.”
The spectacle must be visible. It must be located. It must occur in the sovereign’s own space, where power can be “deployed before all eyes.” Maduro prosecuted in Caracas, or before an international tribunal in The Hague, or even—unthinkable—acquitted or lightly sentenced in an American court, would fail to provide the necessary “ceremonial by which injured sovereignty is reconstituted.”
The point is not conviction. The point is display.
Consider what Bondi’s formulation excludes. She does not say Maduro will face justice “wherever he can be lawfully tried.” She does not promise that “appropriate authorities will determine jurisdiction.” She certainly does not suggest that international law might govern the matter. The geography is non-negotiable because the geography is the message. American soil. American courts. American sovereignty made manifest in the very location of judgment.
This insistence on territorial display has historical precedent. When medieval and early modern sovereigns wanted to punish those who had challenged their authority, the location of execution mattered intensely. Traitors were executed at the site of their treason, or paraded through the streets they had dared to rebel in, or brought back to the capital where royal power was most concentrated. The geography taught the lesson: power extends everywhere the sovereign claims it, and rebellion will be answered here, in the heart of that power, where all can witness the restoration of order.
Bondi’s promise follows this logic exactly. Bringing Maduro to American soil—forcibly if necessary, though she leaves that mechanism politely vague—demonstrates that American power can reach anywhere, can extract anyone, can compel even heads of state to answer in American courts. The act of extraction, of physical transportation across borders and oceans to stand in an American courtroom, would itself be the punishment’s opening scene. The ceremony would begin not with the trial but with the spectacle of transfer.
But display to whom? The American public needs no convincing that Maduro is a dictator. The Venezuelan people, watching from abroad, might even welcome it. So who is the intended audience for this spectacular assertion of American sovereignty?
Foucault provides the answer:
“Its aim is not so much to re-establish a balance as to bring into play, as its extreme point, the dissymmetry between the subject who has dared to violate the law and the all-powerful sovereign who displays his strength.”
Dissymmetry. The overwhelming imbalance of forces. This is what must be demonstrated: not that Maduro is guilty (that is assumed), but that challenging American power—whether by nationalizing oil, aligning with adversaries, or simply defying Washington’s preferred outcomes—will be met with the full, crushing weight of American legal, political, and potentially coercive machinery.
The message is not primarily for Maduro. It is for Beijing, Moscow, Tehran—for every government that has calculated it might defy American pressure and survive. The spectacle says: look what we can do even to a head of state. Look at the dissymmetry. Look at what happens when you wound our pride, survive our sanctions, embarrass our power. We will reach across oceans. We will extract you from your palace. We will parade you in our courts. We will make an example of you on our soil.
This is why Bondi’s formulation is so precise. “American soil” is not redundant with “American courts.” The soil is the stage. The courts are the script. Together they constitute the theatre in which sovereign power performs its restoration. An American court operating abroad—say, a military tribunal at Guantanamo—would lack the full symbolic weight. An international court on neutral ground would dissolve the message entirely. It must be here, in the territorial heart of American sovereignty, where the dissymmetry can be most completely displayed.
The reformers of the eighteenth century understood this logic and rejected it. They argued that punishment should not be theatrical display of sovereign power but rational consequence of broken law. As Foucault describes their vision:
“The penalty must proceed from the crime; the law must appear to be a necessity of things, and power must act while concealing itself beneath the gentle force of nature.”
Power should conceal itself. The law should appear natural, inevitable, impersonal—not the spectacular assertion of sovereign will. Punishment should follow from the nature of the offense, not from the wounded pride of the powerful. Location should be functional, not symbolic.
Bondi rejects this framework entirely. Her formulation foregrounds power, celebrates its visibility, insists on its geographic specificity. The law does not conceal itself “beneath the gentle force of nature.” It announces itself in possessive terms: our soil, our courts, our wrath. The sovereign does not hide behind neutral procedure. The sovereign displays itself, names itself, claims the punishment as personal satisfaction.
There is a further implication to this geographic insistence. By specifying American soil and American courts, Bondi implicitly rejects any suggestion that Maduro might have rights under international law, might be entitled to neutral jurisdiction, might claim any protection from Venezuelan sovereignty or any other legal framework. The very specificity of “American” asserts a kind of legal imperialism: American law applies where American power reaches, regardless of borders, treaties, or competing claims of jurisdiction.
This is not rule of law. This is rule by law—law as instrument of power rather than constraint upon it. The distinction matters. Rule of law suggests that law stands above all parties, that even the powerful must submit to its neutral dictates, that procedure constrains sovereign will. Rule by law treats legal forms as tools of power, to be deployed when useful and discarded when inconvenient. Bondi’s promise that Maduro will face American justice on American soil in American courts is rule by law dressed in legal language. It asserts that American power determines jurisdiction, that American injuries demand American venues, that American sovereignty trumps all competing legal claims.
The reformers feared precisely this conflation of legal form with sovereign power. They saw how monarchs had used courts to legitimize vengeance, how judicial procedure could be bent to serve political ends, how the appearance of law could mask the exercise of personal will. This is why they insisted on separating the sovereign’s person from the law’s operation, why they demanded that punishment follow from the crime’s nature rather than the ruler’s rage, why they argued that justice must be seen to be impartial rather than theatrical.
Bondi’s formulation abandons these safeguards. In specifying the geography so insistently, she reveals that this is about power’s display, not law’s operation. The location matters because the spectacle matters. And the spectacle matters because it demonstrates dissymmetry, restores wounded sovereignty, sends messages to other adversaries watching from their own capitals.
But spectacle requires certainty. Theatre cannot accommodate acquittal. The ceremony of sovereign restoration cannot be interrupted by inconvenient facts, by effective defence counsel, by evidence that fails to support the charges. Which raises the question Bondi’s rhetoric carefully avoids: what if the trial, even on American soil in American courts, does not produce the predetermined outcome? What if Maduro, granted the procedural rights that American law nominally guarantees, mounts an effective defence?
The answer is implicit in the phrase itself: he will face the wrath. Not “may,” not “if convicted,” not “should the evidence prove sufficient.” He will. The outcome is assured before the process begins. And this certainty—this presumption that American accusations guarantee American convictions—reveals perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Bondi’s pre-modern framework: the conflation of accusation with guilt, of sovereign certainty with judicial truth.
The Presumption of Guilt.
Notice what Bondi’s statement lacks: any epistemic humility. No “if convicted.” No “should the evidence prove sufficient.” Not even the prosecutor’s standard hedge of “we believe we can prove beyond reasonable doubt.”
Just: he will face the wrath.
This certainty is not mere rhetorical confidence. It reveals a fundamentally different conception of how guilt is established. In modern jurisprudence, guilt is binary and back-loaded: the accused is presumed innocent until the entire process of trial concludes with conviction beyond reasonable doubt. The burden rests entirely on the state to prove its case. The accused need prove nothing; silence itself cannot be held against him. This is the architecture of due process, built deliberately to constrain state power, to prevent precisely the kind of predetermined outcome that Bondi’s language suggests.
But Bondi’s formulation operates in a different framework entirely—one that Foucault identifies in the practices of ancien régime justice:
“The different pieces of evidence did not constitute so many neutral elements, until such time as they could be gathered together into a single body of evidence that would bring the final certainty of guilt. Each piece of evidence aroused a particular degree of abomination. Guilt did not begin when all the evidence was gathered together; piece by piece, it was constituted by each of the elements that made it possible to recognize a guilty person.”
Guilt accumulated. It was not a conclusion reached at trial’s end but a process that began with the first accusation. Each witness, each piece of evidence, each judicial examination added another degree of guilt. The accused did not stand innocent until proven guilty; he stood partially guilty from the moment of accusation, becoming progressively more guilty as the investigation proceeded.
Under such a system, as Foucault makes explicit:
“In short, penal demonstration did not obey a dualistic system: true or false; but a principle of continuous gradation; a degree reached in the demonstration already formed a degree of guilt and consequently involved a degree of punishment.”
And the logical consequence:
“A suspect, who remained a suspect, was not for all that declared innocent, but was partially punished.”
This is the logic that Bondi’s rhetoric embodies. Maduro, having been accused by the United States government, having been sanctioned, having been declared illegitimate, has already accumulated substantial “degrees of guilt” sufficient to warrant the certainty of punishment. The trial—should it occur—would be the final ceremony in a process whose conclusion was determined long before the first witness took the stand.
The reformers of the eighteenth century found this system intellectually and morally intolerable. They recognized its fundamental incompatibility with any coherent theory of justice. As Foucault notes, they saw its essential absurdity:
“The day will come when the singularity of this judicial truth will appear scandalous: as if the law did not have to obey the rules of common truth. ‘What would be said of a semi-proof in the sciences capable of demonstration? What would a geometrical or algebraic semi-proof amount to?’”
What indeed would we say of a prosecutor who announced conviction before trial? Of an Attorney General who declared that an accused “will face wrath” before evidence was tested, before witnesses were cross-examined, before a jury deliberated?
We would say—we should say—that such statements are incompatible with the presumption of innocence, that they demonstrate such obvious bias as to make fair proceedings impossible, that they violate the foundational principle that the state must prove its case rather than simply assert it.
Yet that is precisely what Bondi has done. Her promise that Maduro will face American wrath assumes not just probable cause for arrest, not just sufficient evidence for indictment, but certain conviction. The only uncertainty in her formulation concerns timing (”soon”) and logistics (how to get him to American soil). The outcome itself is presented as inevitable.
This predetermination is particularly troubling because it inverts the proper relationship between accusation and proof. In modern legal systems, accusation triggers investigation, which produces evidence, which is tested at trial, which yields conviction or acquittal. The process is sequential, with each stage serving as a check on the previous one. Accusation does not equal proof; proof does not equal conviction; conviction requires the full machinery of adversarial process.
But in Bondi’s framework—as in ancien régime practice—the accusation itself carries evidentiary weight. The sovereign’s declaration that Maduro is guilty constitutes a degree of proof. The United States government’s judgment that he deserves punishment is treated as partially validating that punishment. The distinction between allegation and evidence, between charge and conviction, collapses into a continuous gradation of accumulating certainty.
Imagine this principle applied domestically. Imagine an American prosecutor announcing that a defendant “will face the full wrath of justice” before trial. The defence would immediately move for dismissal based on prosecutorial prejudgment. The statement would be cited as evidence of vindictiveness, of predetermined outcome, of proceedings that could not possibly be fair. No American court would tolerate such naked presumption of guilt from a prosecutor.
Yet what Bondi has said about Maduro is functionally identical—merely relocated from courtroom to press conference, from domestic to international context. The principle is the same: guilt announced before proof, conviction declared before trial, punishment promised before evidence tested. The only difference is one that Foucault would recognize as essential to pre-modern justice: the sovereign’s certainty is treated as self-validating, requiring no external verification.
This becomes clearer when we consider what Bondi’s statement excludes. There is no acknowledgment that evidence might be challenged, that witnesses might be impeached, that legal defences might prove effective. There is no recognition that American courts, whatever their flaws, do sometimes acquit defendants whom prosecutors confidently expected to convict. There is no consideration that Maduro might have—legally, procedurally, factually—any ground to stand on.
The absence of these considerations is not oversight. It reflects a framework in which the accused’s participation in the process of truth-determination is unnecessary. As Foucault describes:
“Written, secret, subjected, in order to construct its proofs, to rigorous rules, the penal investigation was a machine that might produce the truth in the absence of the accused.”
A machine for producing truth. Not discovering it through adversarial testing—producing it through the sovereign’s investigative apparatus. The accused’s role was not to contest this production but to confirm it, ideally through confession, but if necessary through his mere presence at the final ceremony.
Modern procedure nominally rejects this. The accused is not passive recipient of predetermined judgment but active participant in truth-determination. He has counsel to challenge evidence, to cross-examine witnesses, to present alternative narratives, to exploit reasonable doubt. These rights are not courtesies extended by gracious prosecutors; they are constitutional requirements precisely because we recognize that the state’s accusations can be wrong, that investigative machinery can malfunction, that even confident certainty can be mistaken.
Yet Bondi’s promise that Maduro “will face wrath” acknowledges none of this. It speaks with the certainty of the ancien régime investigator whose secret examination has produced truth that requires only ceremonial validation. The trial, should it occur, would not be a genuine test of the state’s case but a public ratification of conclusions already reached.
This predetermined certainty raises an uncomfortable question: what happens if the machinery fails? What if Maduro, granted the procedural protections that American law nominally provides, successfully challenges key evidence? What if witnesses prove unreliable, or documents prove forged, or the charges prove legally insufficient?
The question is not hypothetical. American courts have dismissed cases against foreign officials when evidence proved inadequate or procedures proved flawed. Prosecutorial certainty does not guarantee conviction. Yet Bondi’s language leaves no room for such failure. The wrath will fall. The conviction will occur. The geography of American soil and American courts supposedly guarantees this outcome.
Which reveals yet another dimension of Bondi’s pre-modern framework: not just the presumption of guilt, but the presumption of institutional inerrancy.
The Inerrancy of American Justice.
Bondi’s promise that Maduro will face justice “in American courts” contains an unspoken but essential assumption: that American courts will inevitably produce the correct verdict. The phrase does double work—it specifies location but implies outcome. American courts, in this formulation, are not merely venues for adjudication but guarantors of conviction.
This reveals an almost theological faith in the self-validating machinery of American justice. The process itself ensures the result. Bring Maduro to American soil, process him through American courts, and justice—meaning conviction, meaning wrath—will inevitably follow. The machinery cannot fail because the machinery is American.
This confidence has deep roots in pre-modern judicial practice. Foucault describes how the ancien régime investigation operated:
“Written, secret, subjected, in order to construct its proofs, to rigorous rules, the penal investigation was a machine that might produce the truth in the absence of the accused.”
A machine for producing truth. Not discovering truth through adversarial contest, not testing competing claims against evidence, but producing truth through the operation of sovereign investigative apparatus. The mechanism’s functioning was its own justification. Truth emerged from the proper application of procedure, and proper procedure—being the sovereign’s procedure—could not produce falsehood.
Bondi’s formulation suggests a similar conflation of process with truth. American investigative agencies have determined Maduro is guilty. American prosecutors have prepared charges. American courts will hear the case. Therefore conviction is certain. The machinery has been set in motion, and the machinery, being American, being sovereign, produces only correct outcomes.
Notice what is absent from this framework: any acknowledgment that procedural rights might actually function, that adversarial testing might reveal evidentiary weaknesses, that constitutional protections might constrain prosecutorial power. In modern justice, these safeguards exist precisely because we recognize that investigative machinery can malfunction, that prosecutorial certainty can be mistaken, that even honest officials can be wrong.
But Bondi’s rhetoric allows no space for such failure. American courts will process Maduro, yes—but process him toward a predetermined destination. The trial is inevitable, but so is the verdict. The machinery will operate, and the operation itself guarantees truth.
This presumption of institutional inerrancy is particularly troubling because it operates invisibly. Bondi does not explicitly claim that American courts cannot err. She does not need to. The claim is embedded in the structure of her promise: Maduro will face wrath in American courts. The certainty of outcome is inseparable from the specification of venue. American courts are where guilty verdicts happen—at least when the sovereign’s injured pride demands them.
Compare this to the vision of justice that the Enlightenment reformers fought for. They argued that legal procedure should be transparent precisely so that error could be identified and corrected. That judges should be bound by evidence precisely so that prejudgment could not masquerade as adjudication. That the accused should have robust rights precisely because state power, unchecked, produces injustice regardless of how confident it feels.
The reformers did not assume that proper procedure automatically produced truth. They designed procedure to test claims of truth, to subject state accusations to adversarial challenge, to create multiple opportunities for error to be caught and corrected. The system’s legitimacy came not from institutional inerrancy but from institutional humility—from the recognition that any human apparatus can fail and therefore must be subjected to checks.
Bondi’s framework inverts this entirely. The legitimacy comes from the institution itself, from its American character, from its sovereign authority. The possibility of error is unthinkable because American justice, by definition, produces correct outcomes. To question this is to question American sovereignty itself.
This presumption has practical implications. If American courts will inevitably convict Maduro—if the outcome is certain before proceedings begin—then what function do the proceedings actually serve? They cannot be genuine truth-seeking, because truth has already been determined. They cannot be adversarial testing of evidence, because the test’s outcome is predetermined. They can only be theatrical: the public performance of conviction to satisfy the sovereign’s need for visible vindication.
Which returns us to the fundamental contradiction in Bondi’s formulation. She promises that Maduro will face justice in American courts—invoking the legitimacy of legal process, the authority of judicial procedure, the gravitas of constitutional adjudication. But simultaneously she promises that he will face wrath—the sovereign’s personal vengeance, predetermined and inevitable. These cannot coexist. Either the courts will genuinely adjudicate, in which case the outcome cannot be certain, or the outcome is certain, in which case the courts are merely ceremonial.
Bondi has chosen certainty over process, sovereign wrath over judicial impartiality. And in making that choice, she has revealed that “American courts” in her formulation means not institutions bound by constitutional constraints but instruments of sovereign will. The courts will produce conviction because conviction is what sovereignty demands. The machinery will function correctly because correct functioning is defined by sovereign satisfaction.
This is not rule of law. This is rule by law—legal procedure deployed to legitimize predetermined outcomes, judicial forms used to dress sovereign vengeance in constitutional clothing. And it represents a fundamental rejection of the principle that animated the Enlightenment reformers: that justice requires constraint on power, that procedure must bind even the powerful, that outcomes cannot be predetermined by those who control the process.
The Return to Vengeance
Return to that word: wrath.
It appears nowhere in modern legal discourse. Prosecutors speak of “justice,” of “accountability,” of “the rule of law.” They promise that evidence will be presented, that cases will be proven, that law will be enforced. They do not speak of wrath. Wrath is personal. Wrath is emotional. Wrath is, above all, vengeful.
And vengeance is precisely what Enlightenment reformers sought to eliminate from state punishment. As Foucault documents, the ancien régime made no distinction between judicial punishment and sovereign revenge:
“In punishment, there must always be a portion that belongs to the prince, and, even when it is combined with the redress laid down, it constitutes the most important element in the penal liquidation of the crime. Now, this portion belonging to the prince is not in itself simple: on the one hand, it requires redress for the injury that has been done to his kingdom...but it also requires that the king take revenge for an affront to his very person.”
A “portion that belongs to the prince”—personal satisfaction, separate from and exceeding any redress to victims or society. The punishment must satisfy the sovereign’s wounded pride, must answer personal affront with personal vengeance. This was understood not as aberration but as essential: the sovereign’s honour demanded satisfaction, and the criminal’s punishment provided it.
The reformers argued that this “portion belonging to the prince” had no legitimate place in justice. Punishment should serve social purposes: deterrence, protection, reform. It should be measured according to the harm done and the danger posed. It should be proportionate, rational, impersonal. As one reformer put it, punishment should be carried out “not by way of atonement or expiation for the crime committed”—for that was God’s business—but solely for the prevention of future crimes and the protection of society.
The sovereign’s personal satisfaction was to be eliminated from this calculus. Justice should not gratify power’s wounded pride. Law should not serve as instrument of royal revenge. The transformation from monarchical to republican government required this separation: power would be constrained by law rather than expressed through it, and punishment would answer to social necessity rather than sovereign desire.
Yet Bondi explicitly invokes wrath—the sovereign’s personal emotional satisfaction—as the very content of American justice. Not law’s impartial operation. Not society’s protection. Not proportionate response to proven harm. Wrath. The word choice is not accidental. It announces that Maduro will face not merely legal consequences but personal vengeance, that American power seeks not just conviction but satisfaction, that the punishment will answer the sovereign’s rage.
This represents a fundamental category error—or rather, a deliberate category confusion. Bondi is speaking as Attorney General, the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, the person constitutionally responsible for ensuring that justice is administered impartially, that prosecutions follow evidence rather than animus, that the government’s vast coercive power is wielded according to law rather than whim.
But she is speaking the language of the sovereign, of personal affront requiring personal satisfaction. She is promising that American power—embodied in courts, prosecutors, the full apparatus of federal law enforcement—will serve the function that medieval executioners served: the visible, excessive assertion of wounded sovereignty restored through the criminal’s suffering.
The reformers recognized that this conflation was incompatible with legitimate government. As Foucault describes their vision:
“The reforming jurists...saw punishment as a procedure for requalifying individuals as subjects, as juridical subjects; it uses not marks, but signs, coded sets of representations.”
Punishment should address the juridical subject—the individual as bearer of rights and obligations within a legal order. It should not mark the body with sovereign power but should reintegrate the individual into the social compact. It should educate rather than terrorize, reform rather than destroy, restore rather than eliminate.
Wrath does the opposite. It disqualifies the individual as juridical subject, reduces him to object of sovereign rage. It marks rather than requalifies. It excludes rather than reintegrating. It serves not social purposes but sovereign satisfaction.
This is the choice Bondi has made, perhaps without fully recognizing its implications. By promising wrath rather than justice, vengeance rather than due process, sovereign satisfaction rather than legal adjudication, she has abandoned the framework that two centuries of reform struggled to establish. She has returned to the logic of personal monarchy, where the sovereign’s emotions determine punishment, where wounded pride demands excessive response, where the criminal serves primarily as instrument for demonstrating royal power.
The danger here extends beyond Maduro. Once wrath is reintroduced as legitimate prosecutorial purpose, once sovereign satisfaction is recognized as valid governmental aim, once personal vengeance is accepted as appropriate use of state power, the framework applies universally. If American courts can serve American wrath against foreign enemies, why not against domestic opponents? If prosecutors can promise predetermined outcomes against those who wound sovereign pride, what constrains them from doing so against anyone who challenges power?
The reformers understood this slippery slope. They saw how monarchs used legal procedure to destroy personal enemies, how courts became instruments of political revenge, how the apparatus of justice was bent to serve the purposes of power. This is why they insisted that punishment must be separated from sovereign will, that procedure must constrain even the powerful, that personal animus must be excluded from prosecutorial decision-making.
Bondi’s invocation of wrath abandons these safeguards. It announces that American legal power will serve American sovereign rage, that courts will function as instruments of national vengeance, that the outcome is predetermined by power’s need for satisfaction. This is not justice under law. This is law as weapon of the powerful, procedure as mask for predetermined punishment, courts as theatre for sovereign restoration.
And it reveals something troubling about contemporary American power: that even after two centuries of republican government, even with constitutional constraints explicitly designed to prevent sovereign excess, even with formal separation of powers and procedural safeguards, the language of monarchical revenge remains available, remains attractive, remains deployable by the nation’s chief law enforcement officer without apparent recognition that she is repudiating the very foundations of modern legal legitimacy.
The Choice Before Us.
Foucault offers us a stark categorization of punitive systems:
“We have, then, the sovereign and his force, the social body and the administrative apparatus; mark, sign, trace; ceremony, representation, exercise; the vanquished enemy, the juridical subject in the process of requalification, the individual subjected to immediate coercion.”
These are the choices. In each pairing, Bondi has selected the first option:
The sovereign’s force over the administrative apparatus
Ceremony over representation
The vanquished enemy over the juridical subject
The mark of power over the sign of law
This is not accidental selection. These choices form a coherent system, one with centuries of practice behind it, one that Foucault documented in meticulous detail. It is a system where crime offends the sovereign personally, where punishment satisfies sovereign rage, where legal procedure serves primarily theatrical purposes, where the accused is enemy rather than rights-bearer, where geography matters because spectacle requires visibility, where conviction is certain because sovereign accusation is self-validating.
It is, in short, the system that existed before the Enlightenment reformers fought to transform it.
The reformers understood what was at stake. They had seen how sovereign vengeance corrupted justice, how personal animus drove punishment, how wounded royal pride demanded excessive response. They recognized that no legitimate government could rest on such foundations, that republican government required the elimination of personal monarchy’s logic from legal procedure.
And so they worked, over decades, to establish different principles: that punishment should serve social rather than sovereign purposes, that procedure should constrain rather than serve power, that the accused should be treated as juridical subject rather than vanquished enemy, that conviction should emerge from evidence rather than from accusation, that courts should discover truth rather than validate predetermined outcomes.
These principles did not emerge from abstract philosophy alone. They emerged from recognition of what happens when they are absent. When sovereign wrath drives punishment, when personal vengeance masquerades as justice, when power determines outcome, when courts serve theatrical rather than adjudicative functions—the result is tyranny dressed in legal clothing.
Bondi’s promise that Maduro will face “the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts” repudiates every one of these hard-won principles. It returns to the logic of personal monarchy. It conflates sovereign rage with legal justice. It treats accusation as proof, power as legitimacy, predetermined outcome as due process. It announces that American legal apparatus will serve American sovereign satisfaction, that courts will produce the convictions that power demands, that procedure is ceremonial validation rather than genuine testing.
This is not merely troubling rhetoric. It is the abandonment of constitutional principle in favour of monarchical logic. And the abandonment is particularly dangerous because it occurs not in obvious autocracy but within the forms of constitutional government, not through the elimination of legal procedure but through its subordination to sovereign will, not by rejecting courts but by transforming them into instruments of predetermined punishment.
The reformers recognized that this kind of transformation was possible, that legal forms could be preserved while their substance was hollowed out, that procedure could continue while becoming mere ceremony. This is why they insisted not just on formal rights but on principles that animated those rights: the presumption of innocence, the burden of proof on the state, the separation of accusation from conviction, the constraint of power by procedure.
When an Attorney General promises wrath before trial, when she specifies geography to emphasize spectacle, when she speaks with certainty that allows no possibility of acquittal, when she positions the accused as vanquished enemy rather than juridical subject—she has abandoned those principles. The forms may remain: there may still be a trial, still be judges and lawyers and procedural motions. But the substance has been transformed. The trial becomes ceremony, the verdict becomes foregone conclusion, the process becomes theatre for sovereign restoration.
This matters beyond Maduro’s case. Principles do not operate selectively. Once wrath is legitimate prosecutorial purpose against foreign enemies, it becomes available against domestic opponents. Once courts can serve sovereign rage in high-profile international cases, they can serve it in ordinary domestic ones. Once predetermined outcomes are acceptable when power demands them, procedure loses its constraining force entirely.
The reformers understood this. They saw that legitimacy required consistency, that constitutional government could not rest on principles that operated only when convenient, that rights meant nothing if they protected only the powerful or the popular. This is why they insisted that even the guilty, even the despised, even the enemy must be treated as juridical subject with rights that constrain state power.
Bondi’s rhetoric suggests that such constraints are inconvenient, perhaps even dangerous, when sovereign pride demands satisfaction. But constraints are most essential precisely when they are most inconvenient. That is their purpose: to prevent power from doing what it wants when it wants. To require proof even when accusation seems sufficient. To demand process even when outcome seems obvious. To insist on rights even for those who least deserve them.
When the Attorney General promises wrath, she promises to eliminate those constraints in favour of sovereign satisfaction. When she speaks with certainty before trial, she announces that process is ceremonial rather than substantive. When she specifies American soil and American courts, she reveals that spectacle matters more than justice. When she treats Maduro as vanquished enemy rather than accused defendant, she repudiates the principle that even the despised have rights.
These are not minor rhetorical choices. They are the systematic abandonment of modern legal legitimacy in favour of pre-modern sovereign vengeance. They mark a return to the logic that the Enlightenment fought to eliminate: that the sovereign’s wounded pride demands satisfaction, that power’s rage justifies punishment, that accusation implies guilt, that procedure serves theatre rather than truth.
The reformers believed we had moved beyond this. They believed that constitutional government had permanently separated sovereign vengeance from legal justice, that procedure had become genuine constraint on power, that rights had become real protections rather than ceremonial gestures.
Bondi’s promise suggests that this transformation was less complete than we imagined, that the old logic remains available beneath the surface of constitutional forms, that wrath still drives American power even when disguised as justice.
This should trouble us. Not because Maduro deserves sympathy—he does not. But because principles that fail to protect the despised fail to protect anyone. Because wrath that is legitimate against foreign enemies becomes legitimate against domestic opponents. Because predetermined outcomes that are acceptable in high-profile cases become acceptable in ordinary ones. Because spectacle that serves sovereign satisfaction in international theatre serves it in courtrooms everywhere.
The choice, finally, is Foucault’s: sovereign force or administrative apparatus, ceremony or representation, vanquished enemy or juridical subject. We can have courts that serve wrath or courts that serve justice, procedure that validates power or procedure that constrains it, predetermined outcomes or genuine adjudication.
We cannot have both.
When the Attorney General promises wrath on American soil in American courts, she has made the choice. The question is whether we will accept it.
Dean M Thomson is currently a lecturer with Beijing Normal - Baptist University (BNBU), formerly known as Beijing Normal - Hong Kong Baptist University, United International College (UIC).
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