For Trump, Cruelty Is the Point
He embodies a “survival-of-the fittest ethos.”
Journalism is too opaque and misunderstood. Chills gives a behind-the-scenes look at how dangerous investigative journalism gets made.
For some reason, the day that President Trump announced that he was taking over the Kennedy Center was the day I lost it. He’d already done so many terrible, damaging things to this country in his few weeks in office, things so cruel they were hard to fathom, but this move hurt. Going after the arts felt like a critical blow — if Trump could co-opt not only how we teach history, hire employees and fund life-saving health research, but also regulate something as un-regulateable as creativity, we were all certainly doomed.
Nothing would be safe from here.
And the following months would bear this out. Higher education. Legal visa holders. PBS. Underlining all of this targeting is, of course, the massive number of layoffs across federal agencies, including USAID, which has left millions of people around the world suffering without American funding. Then there are the people being swept off the streets by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in masks, and the people who are being sent to a violent maximum-security prison in El Salvador, including one in an “administrative error.” There is the blatant racism, white supremacy and xenophobia infused within nearly every policy of the administration.
Under Trump, every day has become an exercise in cruelty. It feels surreal to read headline after headline after headline of quintessentially punishing acts by the White House. Why? Why are they so callous? And why are they so afraid of anyone that is different from them?
I know the malice is not new — the U.S. government has long been cruel. But what’s become more evident under Trump, argues cultural critic Henry Giroux, “is that the culture of cruelty has taken on a sharper edge as it has moved to the center of political power, adopting an unapologetic embrace of nativism, xenophobia and white nationalist ideology, as well as an in-your-face form of racist demagoguery.”
Giroux posits that as America has “moved from a welfare to a warfare state, the institutions that were once meant to limit human suffering and misfortune and protect the public from the excesses of the market have been either weakened or abolished.” Democratic principles, he writes, now wither “under a social order marked by a hardening of the culture and the emergence of an unprecedented survival-of-the fittest ethos. This is a mean-spirited ethos that rails against any notion of solidarity and compassion that embraces a respect for others.”
With the unelected Elon Musk wielding his chainsaw as part of the administration’s efforts to sever our democracy, it’s clear that the billionaires are in control, and that they just don’t give a shit about the rest of us. As Giroux put it in 2015: “The financial elite now float beyond national borders and no longer care about the welfare state, the common good, or for that matter any institution not subordinated to the dictates of finance capitalism.”
The most frightening part of all this is how invisible its internal workings are. The right talks about a left-wing “deep state,” but Giroux talks about one of capitalism:
“A world of shadows, secrecy, and lawlessness now characterizes a deep state that is ruthless in its pursuit of wealth and power and indifferent to its plundering of both humanity and the planet. Terror is nearly all-encompassing and disguises itself in the normalization of greed, the exaltation of the spectacle of violence, and corporate controlled consumer-soma machine that inoculates the public with an addiction to instant gratification. We don’t see the work camps or death camps that characterized the catastrophes of mid-century totalitarian regimes. But as a generation of black youth can attest, you don’t have to be in jail to feel imprisoned, especially when it is increasingly difficult to take control of one’s life and means in a meaningful way.”
To address my second question — Why are they so afraid of people who are different from them? — I don’t need to, right? Big white men don’t like being told they’re not in charge of everything all the time anymore. But I do think it’s important to look at one way this fear is playing out on the national stage.
With the administration’s latest domestic war, this one on private universities like Columbia and Harvard, the white men in charge are showing their fear of the educated, of people with critical thinking skills. The liars don’t win elections if too many people can think analytically and pick apart their lies. As Trump said in a victory speech in 2016: “I love the poorly educated.” It’s the same reason the administration has been so adamant about banning certain books and erasing public school curriculum that teaches the concept of structural racism — well, that and because of actual racism, bigotry and misogyny.
Giroux points to the “educators, artists, youth, intellectuals to make sure that they do not succumb to the authoritarian forces circling American society.” The classroom, he writes, “should be a space of grace — a place to think critically, ask troubling questions, and take risks.”
With about a dozen states refusing to comply with the administration’s demands to end their diversity programs and with Harvard taking a strong stance against Trump’s substantial financial bullying, there is significant pushback in this arena, as there is in so many others right now. I’m not feeling all that positive about the state of our nation these days, but what the hell. I’ll end on a positive note. Here’s a slogan I’ve seen on a T-shirt being sold by the (nonprofit) American Civil Liberties Union: “The power of the people is greater than people in power.”
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Some very forward-thinking nearby country (are you listening Canada and Mexico?) needs to quickly form institutes for the brain and creativity drains that are likely already happening. And the immigration problem will solve itself because who would choose to come here? Hopefully when this abomination combusts and is exposed as the shame of our lifetime, there will be enough of us left to rebuild. Dark days.
There is so much to unpack here that I am not sure where to begin. It is fairly well established that Donald Trump is extremely narcissistic. He is completely convinced that he has never made a mistake in his life. When something goes wrong, it is always someone else to blame. Saying that, it is very apparent that he is overtly racist and his cult following (yes, no other description fits) is very much in lock step. Virtually every racist (& Anti-Semitic) group is in his camp an, very importantly, he has never disavowed their following. Hatred is the key here. Hatred of anyone or anything that goes against his closed mind has become the hallmark of him and those around him. A number of Republican Congress people have privately said that they fear for their lives and the lives of their families if they were to stand against him. Behind all of this are two driving forces. The consummate and overt money and power grab.