WHEN CRUELTY WEARS A RED TIE
WEAPONIZATION OF PAIN AS POLITICAL STRATEGY
There's a particular kind of evil that doesn't hide in shadows or operate under cover of night. It announces itself proudly, tweets about itself at 3 a.m., holds press conferences to celebrate its own brutality. This is the evil of cruelty as policy—not cruelty as an unfortunate side effect, not cruelty as collateral damage, but cruelty as the entire goddamn point. And if you want to understand the Trump administration—both the first act and the promised sequel—you need to understand this fundamental truth: the suffering isn't a bug in the system. It's the feature they're most proud of.
Adam Serwer crystallized this concept in his now-famous Atlantic essay: "The cruelty is the point." Not a means to an end, not an unfortunate necessity, but the actual objective. When ICE agents snatch parents from their children at school drop-offs, when healthcare is stripped from millions who depend on it to survive, when food assistance is cut from families already choosing between rent and groceries, when voting becomes an obstacle course designed to exhaust and exclude—these aren't policy failures. They're policy successes, measured not by outcomes but by the volume of human suffering they produce.
The Architects of Agony: Miller, Homan, and Vought
Every authoritarian regime needs its true believers, its ideological enforcers who don't just follow orders but relish giving them. In Trump's universe, that unholy trinity consists of Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, and Russell Vought—men who've turned the infliction of pain into a career path, who've studied at the feet of cruelty and graduated with honors in human misery.
Stephen Miller, the dead-eyed architect of family separation, didn't stumble into that policy. He crafted it with the precision of a watchmaker and the empathy of a sociopath. Internal emails revealed his obsession with restricting immigration by any means necessary, his eagerness to cite white nationalist websites, his frustration when courts or human decency got in the way. Miller understood something fundamental: if you make the process of seeking asylum horrifying enough—if you literally tear screaming children from their parents' arms and scatter them across the country with no tracking system—you don't just deter that family. You deter thousands who hear about it. The trauma is the message. The cruelty is the deterrent. The point is the point.
Tom Homan, the former ICE director who returned with a vengeance in Trump 2.0, speaks about immigration enforcement with the enthusiasm of someone describing their favorite hobby. He's promised mass deportations on a scale never before attempted, workplace raids designed to terrorize entire communities, detention camps that would make previous administrations blush. When asked about the human cost, about families destroyed and communities traumatized, Homan doesn't offer regrets or even justifications. He offers pride. The cruelty isn't something he has to defend—it's something he campaigns on.
Russell Vought, the Project 2025 mastermind and former OMB director, represents the bureaucratic face of authoritarianism—the guy who figures out how to make the trains run on time to the concentration camps. His vision for a second Trump term involves weaponizing every federal agency, purging civil servants who might object to illegal orders, and restructuring government to serve not the people but the autocrat. Vought understands that sustainable cruelty requires infrastructure, that to truly inflict suffering at scale you need spreadsheets and organizational charts and budget line items. He's the accountant of atrocity.
Together, these men represent something more dangerous than simple malice. They represent *systematic* malice, *organized* cruelty, *bureaucratized* brutality. They've read the fascist handbook—and yes, there is one, written in the ashes of history's darkest chapters—and they're implementing it page by page.
The Fascist Playbook: Target the Vulnerable, Terrorize the Rest
Fascism doesn't announce itself with that label. It arrives wrapped in flags and carrying crosses, promising to restore greatness and protect "real" citizens from manufactured threats. But look past the rhetoric and you'll find the same pattern repeating across history: identify the vulnerable, scapegoat them for society's problems, then unleash state power against them as both punishment and warning.
Trump's policies follow this script with disturbing fidelity:
The Poor: Cut food assistance (SNAP benefits) that keeps 40 million Americans from hunger. Gut Medicaid that provides healthcare to 80 million low-income people. Eliminate housing assistance that prevents homelessness. The message isn't subtle: if you're poor, you deserve to suffer. Your poverty is moral failure, and the state's job is to punish, not support you. Never mind that many SNAP recipients work full-time at jobs that don't pay living wages. Never mind that medical bankruptcy is uniquely American among developed nations. Never mind that housing costs have exploded while wages stagnated. The poor are targeted not despite their vulnerability but because of it.
The Sick: Attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act would have stripped healthcare from 20+ million Americans, eliminated protections for pre-existing conditions, and allowed insurance companies to return to the bad old days of lifetime caps and coverage denials. When John McCain's thumbs-down vote saved the ACA, Trump didn't pivot to improving healthcare—he spent years trying to sabotage it through executive action, cutting enrollment periods, eliminating outreach, refusing to defend it in court. The goal was never "better healthcare." It was punishment for those who needed help staying alive.
The Old: Proposals to privatize Social Security and voucherize Medicare would transform guaranteed benefits into market gambles, shifting risk from society to individuals least able to bear it. This isn't about fiscal responsibility—it's about dismantling the social contract, returning to a world where old age without wealth means poverty and death. The cruelty is in the abandonment, in telling people who worked their entire lives that society owes them nothing.
The Young: Separating children from parents at the border created a generation of traumatized kids, some of whom may never be reunited with their families because the Trump administration didn't bother tracking who went where. This wasn't incompetence—it was policy. The trauma was intentional. The lifelong psychological damage was the deterrent. And when Americans expressed horror, when pediatricians explained the permanent harm being inflicted, the administration's response was essentially: "Good. That's what we want. Maybe their parents shouldn't have come here." Using children as weapons against their parents—could anything be more purely evil?
Immigrants: Beyond family separation, the full scope of immigration cruelty is staggering. Workplace raids timed for maximum terror. "Remain in Mexico" policies forcing asylum seekers to wait in dangerous border towns where they're preyed upon by cartels. Elimination of Temporary Protected Status for people from countries devastated by natural disasters or violence, forcing them to return to places where they face death. Reduction of refugee admissions to historic lows. The Muslim Ban. The wall—that stupid, expensive, ineffective wall that was never about border security and always about humiliation and exclusion.
Voters: When you can't win democratically, you change democracy. Voter ID laws that sound reasonable until you realize they're precisely calibrated to exclude people without driver's licenses, disproportionately affecting the poor, elderly, and minorities. Purging voter rolls using faulty data. Eliminating polling places in minority neighborhoods, creating hours-long waits. Restricting early voting and mail-in ballots. Spreading lies about fraud to justify restrictions. The cruelty here is in the theft of voice, the message that your participation isn't wanted, that democracy is for "us" not "you."
This is the fascist playbook: target those with the least power to fight back, inflict maximum suffering, and dare anyone to stop you. The goal is to create a hierarchy of human worth, with white, wealthy, straight, Christian, native-born men at the top and everyone else arranged below in descending order of deserved cruelty.
Make America Great Again"—For Whom?
Trump's promise to return America to a "better time" always begged the question: better for whom? Because for Native Americans, that better time was genocide and forced assimilation. For Black Americans, it was slavery and Jim Crow. For Chinese immigrants, it was exclusion acts and massacres. For Japanese Americans, it was internment camps. For women, it was legal subordination. For LGBTQ+ people, it was criminalization and persecution.
The "greatness" Trump promises isn't about restoring prosperity or opportunity—it's about restoring hierarchy, putting everyone "back in their place." It's nostalgia for a time when white men didn't have to compete with women and minorities, when you could say the slurs out loud, when power was explicitly rather than implicitly racialized.
This is why Trump's base responds so enthusiastically to his cruelty. It's not despite the suffering but because of it. Every act of cruelty against the "other" is a reaffirmation of their place in the hierarchy, a promise that they matter more, that their grievances will be avenged through the suffering of those they resent. The cruelty creates community among his supporters, a shared identity built on shared enemies.
This is the dark genius of authoritarian populism: it offers people who feel left behind not solutions to their problems but targets for their rage. It doesn't improve their lives—it just makes others' lives worse, which creates the illusion of relative gain. You're not actually climbing the ladder, but watching others get pushed off it feels like elevation.
American Exceptionalism and the Myth of Inevitable Progress
We Americans like to tell ourselves a comforting story: that our history is one of inevitable moral progress, that we're always moving toward "a more perfect union," that injustice is something we overcame in the past rather than something we're perpetrating in the present. We teach the Civil Rights Movement as history, not as ongoing struggle. We frame slavery as a distant sin, not as the foundation of generational wealth inequality that persists today.
This mythology makes us vulnerable to authoritarianism because it blinds us to the warning signs. "It can't happen here," we say, even as it's happening. We think fascism requires jackboots and swastikas, not red hats and rallies. We imagine authoritarians as foreign and exotic, not as former reality TV stars who tweet in all caps.
But American history is not a story of steady progress. It's a story of progress fought for, won temporarily, then rolled back when vigilance waned. Reconstruction gave way to Jim Crow. The civil rights gains of the 1960s have been steadily eroded by voter suppression and mass incarceration. Every advance toward justice has been met with backlash, with efforts to restore the previous hierarchy.
Trump represents the latest—and perhaps most dangerous—iteration of this backlash. His rise was fueled by white resentment of Obama's presidency, by panic over demographic changes that threaten white majority status, by rage at social movements demanding equality. The cruelty is the backlash made policy.
The Historical Precedents: We've Done This Before
The uncomfortable truth is that cruelty as government policy is deeply American. We didn't invent it—authoritarians throughout history have understood its utility—but we've practiced it with particular enthusiasm against particular groups:
Native Americans faced systematic genocide, forced removal (the Trail of Tears killed thousands), cultural destruction (boarding schools that tortured children for speaking their languages), broken treaties, and ongoing marginalization. The cruelty was policy from the founding through the 20th century. "Kill the Indian, save the man" wasn't a fringe position—it was official government strategy.
Enslaved Americans endured 250 years of chattel slavery, where human beings were property, where families were deliberately destroyed through sales, where rape was routine, where torture was legal, where reading was a crime. After slavery, we invented Jim Crow—a system of legal apartheid enforced through terrorism (lynching), disenfranchisement, economic exploitation (sharecropping, convict leasing), and segregation. The cruelty was the point: to maintain white supremacy through black suffering.
Chinese immigrants faced the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first law banning an entire ethnic group from immigration. They faced massacres (Rock Springs, Los Angeles), discriminatory taxes, prohibitions on property ownership, and systematic violence. The cruelty was designed to drive them out and prevent others from coming.
Japanese Americans were rounded up and imprisoned during WWII—120,000 people, two-thirds of them U.S. citizens, incarcerated without trial, without evidence, solely because of their ancestry. They lost homes, businesses, communities. The cruelty was collective punishment for the crime of looking like the enemy.
LGBTQ+ Americans faced criminalization (sodomy laws), forced institutionalization, electroshock "therapy," chemical castration, exclusion from employment, denial of family rights, and violence both private and state-sanctioned. The cruelty was designed to force them into hiding or "cure" them through suffering.
We did all of this. Not ancient history, not other countries—us. And we did it through official government policy, through laws passed by elected representatives, through Supreme Court decisions, through executive orders. The cruelty was legal. It was organized. It was systematic.
Understanding this history doesn't mean wallowing in guilt—it means recognizing patterns so we can break them. Trump's cruelty isn't an aberration from American values; it's a reversion to some of our worst traditions. The question is whether we'll allow that reversion or continue the harder work of actually living up to our stated ideals.
Cruelty Is Not an American Value—But Kindness Must Be Fought For
Here's what gives me hope, what keeps me from complete despair: cruelty is not inevitable, and it's not what most Americans want. Poll after poll shows majorities supporting healthcare access, immigration reform with pathways to citizenship, voting rights, social safety nets. The cruel policies don't reflect popular will—they reflect the success of minority rule through voter suppression, gerrymandering, and the anti-democratic structures of the Senate and Electoral College.
The American story includes cruelty, yes, but it also includes the people who fought against it: the abolitionists, the suffragettes, the labor organizers, the civil rights activists, the LGBTQ+ pioneers, the disability rights advocates, the immigrant rights defenders. Every generation has produced Americans who looked at cruelty and said "no more," who organized and marched and sacrificed to bend that moral arc toward justice.
We have values worth fighting for, found in our founding documents (however imperfectly realized), in our religious traditions (when actually practiced rather than weaponized), in the simple human recognition that suffering is bad and we should minimize it rather than maximize it. "We the People" is a promise we've never fully kept, but it remains a promise worth keeping. "All men are created equal" was a lie when written by slaveholders, but it became a truth that people fought and died to make real.
The Constitution, for all its flaws, enshrines values antithetical to authoritarian cruelty: equal protection, due process, freedom from cruel and unusual punishment, the right to vote, freedom of speech and assembly. When we actually follow these principles, when we extend them to everyone rather than just the privileged few, we create a society that's kinder, more just, more humane.
Our religious traditions—Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and others—all contain teachings about compassion, about caring for the vulnerable, about seeing the divine in every person. "Love your neighbor as yourself." "Welcome the stranger." "The least of these." These aren't partisan values—they're human values. The cruelty of Trump's policies violates every major religious and ethical tradition.
The Resistance: Kindness as Rebellion
What gives me even more hope is that Americans are resisting. The ACLU is fighting in courts. Sanctuary cities are refusing to cooperate with mass deportation. Healthcare providers are finding ways to serve patients despite policy obstacles. Teachers are feeding hungry students out of their own pockets. Communities are organizing mutual aid networks. Voters are showing up despite suppression efforts.
And yes, in recent elections, we've seen the backlash to cruelty. Candidates who campaign on kindness, on expanding healthcare, on protecting voting rights, on humane immigration policy—they're winning. Not everywhere, not always, but enough to show that cruelty is not what America wants.
The 2018 midterms were a rebuke to cruelty. The 2020 election was a rejection of it. And even in difficult electoral environments, candidates who lead with compassion rather than fear are finding success. The winners talk about a kinder America because that's what Americans actually want—not the America of ICE raids and healthcare cuts, but the America of opportunity and dignity for all.
This is the fight of our time: between those who see cruelty as strength and those who see it as moral failure, between those who want to restore hierarchy and those who want to fulfill equality, between those who govern through fear and those who lead through hope.
Conclusion: The Choice Before Us
Trump 2.0 promises to be even crueler than the first iteration, unrestrained by any pretense of norms or guardrails. Miller, Homan, and Vought are preparing their plans, drawing up their lists, sharpening their knives. They've learned from the first term—learned not to be more humane, but to be more efficient in their inhumanity.
But they can only succeed if we let them. If we become numb to the cruelty, if we accept it as normal, if we stop fighting.
The antidote to cruelty is not just opposition but active kindness—policies that expand rather than restrict, that include rather than exclude, that lift up rather than push down. It's healthcare for all, not just the wealthy. It's immigration reform that treats people as people, not invaders. It's voting rights that make democracy accessible, not restricted. It's a social safety net that catches people when they fall, not a system that punishes them for falling.
Cruelty is not an American value, but neither is kindness automatic. It must be chosen, fought for, defended, expanded. Every generation faces this choice: whether to extend the circle of human dignity or to contract it, whether to increase justice or to increase suffering.
We know what Trump chooses. We know what his enablers choose. The question is: what will we choose? Will we accept cruelty as the price of politics, or will we demand better?
The answer to that question will determine not just the next election, but the kind of country we become—and whether we deserve the values we claim to hold.
The cruelty is the point. But kindness can be our response. And in the end, that's the only response that's ever mattered.
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." —Martin Luther King Jr.
It bends—but only if we bend it. Only if we refuse to accept cruelty as inevitable. Only if we fight like hell for the America we claim to believe in.
The work continues.
