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.

In June 2014, ISIS fighters swept into Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, and easily defeated the Iraqi Security Forces, armed with advanced American weaponry but unready or unwilling to engage in close combat against the Salafist militants. The campaign to liberate Mosul from ISIS may be the purest expression yet of twenty-first-century warfare. It was highly politicized, ideologically charged, fought in a fractured state among civilians by a coalition of the willing, with great power involvement on all sides, exposed to the world on social media. The air war, too, represented an intensification of recent operational trends: enhanced command and control measures, universal employment of precision munitions, increased intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities, ubiquity of remotely piloted aircraft, and decreased tolerance for civilian casualties. None of these factors was new in 2016, but each of them was manifested over Mosul to a degree not previously seen.