The Cruelty Is the Point
President Trump and his supporters
find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear.
By Adam Serwer
Jonathan Ernst / Reuters
October 3, 2018
The Museum of African-American History
and Culture is in part a catalog of cruelty. Amid all the stories of
perseverance, tragedy, and unlikely triumph are the artifacts of inhumanity and
barbarism: the child-size slave shackles, the bright red robes of the wizards
of the Ku Klux Klan, the recordings of civil-rights protesters being brutalized
by police.
The artifacts that persist in my
memory, the way a bright flash does when you close your eyes, are the
photographs of lynchings. But it’s not the burned, mutilated bodies that stick
with me. It’s the faces of the white men in the crowd. There’s the photo of the
lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana in 1930, in which a white
man can be seen grinning at the camera as he tenderly holds the hand of his
wife or girlfriend. There’s the undated photo from Duluth, Minnesota, in which
grinning white men stand next to the mutilated, half-naked bodies of two men
lashed to a post in the street—one of the white men is straining to get into
the picture, his smile cutting from ear to ear. There’s the photo of a crowd of
white men huddled behind the smoldering corpse of a man burned to death; one of
them is wearing a smart suit, a fedora hat, and a bright smile.
Read Adam Serwer on why
the Supreme Court is headed back to the 19th century
Their names have mostly been lost to
time. But these grinning men were someone’s brother, son, husband, father. They
were human beings, people who took immense pleasure in the utter cruelty of
torturing others to death—and were so proud of doing so that they posed for
photographs with their handiwork, jostling to ensure they caught the eye of the
lens, so that the world would know they’d been there. Their cruelty made them
feel good, it made them feel proud, it made them feel happy. And it made them
feel closer to one another.
The Trump era is such a whirlwind of
cruelty that it can be hard to keep track. This week alone, the news broke that
the Trump administration was seeking to ethnically cleanse more than 193,000 American
children of immigrants whose temporary protected status had been revoked by the
administration, that the Department of Homeland Security had lied about
creating a database of children that would make it possible to unite them with the families the Trump
administration had arbitrarily destroyed, that the White House was considering a blanket ban on visas for Chinese students,
and that it would deny visas to the same-sex partners of foreign officials. At a rally
in Mississippi, a crowd of Trump supporters cheered as the president mocked
Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor who has said that Brett
Kavanaugh, whom Trump has nominated to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme
Court, attempted to rape her when she was a teenager. “Lock her up!” they shouted.
Ford testified to the Senate,
utilizing her professional expertise to describe the encounter, that one of the
parts of the incident she remembered most was Kavanaugh and his friend Mark
Judge laughing at her as Kavanaugh fumbled at her clothing. “Indelible in the
hippocampus is the laughter,” Ford said, referring to the part of the brain
that processes emotion and memory, “the uproarious laughter between the two,
and their having fun at my expense.” And then at Tuesday’s rally, the president
made his supporters laugh at her.
Further reading: The most
striking thing about Trump’s mockery of Christine Blasey Ford
Even those who believe that Ford
fabricated her account, or was mistaken in its details, can see that the
president’s mocking of her testimony renders all sexual-assault survivors
collateral damage. Anyone afraid of coming forward, afraid that she would not
be believed, can now look to the president to see her fears realized. Once
malice is embraced as a virtue, it is impossible to contain.
The cruelty of the Trump
administration’s policies, and the ritual rhetorical flaying of his targets
before his supporters, are intimately connected. As Lili Loofbourow wrote of the Kavanaugh incident
in Slate, adolescent male cruelty
toward women is a bonding mechanism, a vehicle for intimacy through contempt.
The white men in the lynching photos are smiling not merely because of what
they have done, but because they have done it together.
We can hear the spectacle of cruel
laughter throughout the Trump era. There were the border-patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant
children separated from their
families, and the Trump adviser who delighted white supremacists when he mocked a child with Down syndrome who was separated from her
mother. There were the police who laughed uproariously when the president encouraged them to abuse suspects, and the Fox News
hosts mocking a survivor of the Pulse
Nightclub massacre (and in the process
inundating him with threats), the survivors of sexual assault protesting to Senator Jeff Flake, the women who said the president had sexually assaulted them, and the teen survivors of the Parkland school
shooting. There was the
president mocking Puerto Rican accents shortly after thousands were
killed and tens of thousands displaced by Hurricane Maria, the black athletes protesting unjustified killings by the
police, the women of the #MeToo movement who have come forward
with stories of sexual abuse, and the disabled reporter whose crime was
reporting on Trump truthfully. It is not just that the perpetrators of this
cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared
laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one
another, and to Trump.
Read Adam Serwer on why
the white nationalists are winning
Taking joy in that suffering is more
human than most would like to admit. Somewhere on the wide spectrum between
adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are
the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of
those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer
to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.
The laughter undergirds the daily
spectacle of insincerity, as the president and his aides pledge fealty to
bedrock democratic principles they have no intention of respecting. The
president who demanded the execution of five black and Latino teenagers for a crime they didn’t commit decrying “false accusations,” when his
Supreme Court nominee stands accused; his supporters who fancy themselves
champions of free speech meet references to Hillary Clinton or a woman whose
only crime was coming forward to offer her own story of abuse with screams of
“Lock her up!” The political movement that elected a president who wanted to
ban immigration by adherents of an entire religion, who encourages police to
brutalize suspects, and who has destroyed thousands of immigrant families for
violations of the law less serious than those of which he and his coterie stand
accused, now laments the state of due process.
This isn’t incoherent. It reflects a
clear principle: Only the president and his allies, his supporters, and their
anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if
necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty, by
their whim. This is how the powerful have ever kept the powerless divided and
in their place, and enriched themselves in the process.
Further reading: I know
Brett Kavanaugh, but I wouldn’t confirm him
A blockbuster New York Times investigation on Tuesday reported that
President Trump’s wealth was largely inherited through fraudulent schemes, that
he became a millionaire while still a child, and that his fortune persists in
spite of his fumbling entrepreneurship, not because of it. The stories are not
unconnected. The president and his advisers have sought to enrich themselves at
taxpayer expense; they have attempted to corrupt federal law-enforcement
agencies to protect themselves and their cohorts, and they have exploited the
nation’s darkest impulses in the pursuit of profit. But their ability to get
away with this fraud is tied to cruelty.
Trump’s only true skill is the con;
his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of
straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in
cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his
most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear:
immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize
with any of those who would steal their birthright. The president’s ability to
execute that cruelty through word and deed makes them euphoric. It makes them
feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them
feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get
away with anything, no matter what it costs them.
About the Author
Adam Serwer is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
