Trump's Politics of Cruelty

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

The other day, Adrian Walker in The Boston Globe reported the story of Mike Slater, who survived four tours of duty as a U.S. Army infantryman in Iraq and Afghanistan. After suffering PTSD and being rehabilitated by the VA, he began working at the Veterans Center in Springfield, Massachusetts, serving other vets. Last month, as a thank you from his country, Slater was notified by email that his job was terminated, courtesy of orders from DOGE.

We can look forward to hundreds of thousands of these stories. At USAID, people who have devoted their careers to alleviating human disease and starvation are being fired by text message and asked to clean out their desks on two days' notice.

Soon, there will likely be far more cruelty and suffering, as needy people lose health coverage under a diminished Medicaid, as more families are broken up by ICE raids, and more immigrant workers stop earning a paycheck for fear of being arrested and deported.

It's not surprising that Trump's signature is cruelty. This is an entertainer, after all, who got famous with the line "You're fired!" Trump has always identified with the winners. Suffering people, in Trump's sick psyche, are losers.

But that was reality TV. This is reality.

In reality TV terms, the ultimate celebrity apprentice winner is Elon Musk, who is rivaling even Trump in the human damage he is doing.

Other Republican presidents have presided over human suffering. Ronald Reagan knocked millions of needy people off the welfare rolls and cut a host of social programs that were preserving a measure of dignity for low-income Americans.

But Reagan disguised the cruelty with his sheer niceness and bogus policy rationalizations that these cutbacks were for people's own good by compelling them to get a work ethic.

Trump, by contrast, revels in cruelty. His pleasure in sheer cruelty was on display last Friday as he did his best to humiliate Volodymyr Zelensky. The fact that Russia's invasion of Ukraine has resulted in immense human suffering was nowhere on Trump's radar. Trump's closing comment was "This is going to be great television."

When he considers Gaza, Trump doesn't see the deaths, the human displacements, and the mutilated children. He sees underdeveloped real estate.

When someone crosses Trump, that person must not only be fired, but annihilated. Trump said in a post on Truth Social that Gen. Mark Milley, Trump's former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, deserved execution.

It's not exactly news that Trump is a sociopath. The definition of a sociopath is someone who lacks any capacity for human compassion or remorse. Trump goes beyond even that, to sheer sadism.

BUT MOST AMERICANS ARE NOT SOCIOPATHS, much less sadists. Most Americans are kind to their neighbors, support charities, identify compassionately with human suffering. So why isn't there a much greater outcry against Trump's delight in cruelty?

It's a more complex question than it first seems.

For starters, as the Nazi era demonstrated, when the government relies on fear and it is others who are suffering, it's too easy to avert your eyes. To paraphrase the famous warning of Pastor Martin Niemoller, they came for the immigrants but I am not an immigrant. They are firing civil servants but I am not a civil servant.

Where is the Christian right? Jesus of Nazareth not only taught compassion but lived it. And he preached against the hypocrisy that was rampant among the religious leaders of his day. But the religions established in his name have often been citadels of hypocrisy.

Trump is purely transactional. The religious leaders and their followers who support Trump based on his views on abortion, but ignore his dissolute life, are purely transactional as well. Jesus wept.

There is also the problem of resentment and lack of solidarity. Politico interviewed Trump voters in South Texas. One woman, named Nelda Cruz, was asked about the coming cuts in Medicaid. "I don't qualify for Medicaid, so fine with me," she said. "Now they're going to feel how I feel."

A fearful, angry, and divided people can become inured to meanness. I would like to believe America is better than that. Trump may yet meet his downfall. But it would be so much more heartening if the cause were not the price of eggs but a mass revulsion against Trump's sadistic cruelty.