The Cruelty Is The Point, But What’s The Goal?

The Trump administration isn’t cruel just for cruelty’s sake. There’s a deeper, darker purpose.

L: White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller gaggles near the West Wing in front of the White House. Photo by Annabelle Gordon for The Washington Post via Getty Images. R: US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem speaks during a tour of the Terrorist Confinement Center (CECOT). Photo by Alex Brandon / POOL / AFP.

When I write about the latest horrific policy or action by the Trump administration, often a reader will comment, “The cruelty is the point.” We all sense, and in many ways accept, this as true. How could we not, given everything we have seen and experienced for years under Trump?

But there has always been something unsatisfactory and circular about this assessment. It asserts that Trump and his lackeys are cruel just to be cruel, presumably because that is their nature and they enjoy it.

That feels correct, but also incomplete.

Cruelty serves a number of other purposes beyond the sadism of those who inflict it. We’ve witnessed this wherever atrocities occur anywhere in the world. Soldiers not only kill enemy soldiers but systematically rape, torture, and execute innocent civilians. Vulnerable minorities, whether Jews in Nazi Germany or LGBTQs in Uganda, become targets for cruelty not only because they are easy targets and people are awful, but because the state has an agenda and the cruelty is a twisted part of it.

The United States is not somehow immune to this and never has been. Throughout our history, our government, acting through our military and our courts, has repeatedly inflicted intentional cruelty upon whole populations within our borders. This has led to the worst chapters of our nation’s story: Indigenous genocide, centuries of Black slavery, and the Japanese American internment.

Today, cruelty has once again become a feature of U.S. policy, particularly as practiced against migrants to our country. Given where our policies have led in the past, it is not enough to shake our collective heads and conclude that such cruelty is the point, that they are cruel just to be cruel. We need to look behind that cruelty and ask the harder question: But what’s the goal?

Creating an enemy

Scholars of fascism will tell you that the first pillar of fascism is to create domestic enemies. As the Public Leadership Institute writes,

Fascism creates a myth of victimhood, that the majority population is in a humiliating decline from a past greatness because of singled-out minority populations. It’s an us-against-them crisis, the myth goes. The targeted racial, ethnic, religious or gender minorities, and the “liberals” who support them, are thus framed as not just opponents but enemies, demonized so the majority can feel justified in hating and repressing them.

In fact, “Make America Great Again” is the quintessential fascist slogan. It’s a myth that celebrates the good ole days of white supremacy.

This is precisely why Trump has targeted migrants and falsely labeled them all as criminals and undesirables who are “poisoning the blood of our country”—a line favored by Adolf Hitler.

Migrant communities are relatively small in size here. They are politically powerless in the face of concerted attacks. It is therefore the responsibility of those with greater social and political power to step up in their defense.

That’s why the first response of a democracy to any attack upon its most vulnerable members must be to recognize and call it out as fascist. Trump isn’t trying to make our communities safer from migrant crime, which is not a widespread thing. He is trying to divide us, to make us fear and despise other human beings who live in our communities, and to gain power from that division and fear.

Brandishing the power of the fascist state

The White House first announced that it was rendering members of “Venezuelan gang members” to a prison in El Salvador under the pretense that we were under “invasion” and Trump was justified in invoking the Alien Enemies Act. When the migrant flights began, the government of El Salvador released a deeply disturbing video depicting the operation in action.

The sheer number of armed guards and police and military vehicles, complete with an ominous Hollywood movie-style soundtrack, sent the message: We are the government, and we have the power to do whatever we want, to whomever we want.

There’s a reason that Trump wants to spend tens of millions on an unprecedented military parade, which happens to coincide with his birthday. It’s a show of force and lethal power, meant to stir awe and admiration among his followers while intimidating his enemies.

Besides military armaments, Trump’s weapons of choice are his executive orders, issued nonstop and by the score from the Oval Office. Behind these policy directives lies a sick cruelty, no doubt dreamt up by the likes of Stephen Miller, who seeks to reshape America into a fully authoritarian state.

The elimination of birthright citizenship, for example, despite clear constitutional language establishing it, cast immediate doubt upon the legal status of millions of citizens born to immigrant parents. The message from the White House was that no one and nothing is safe.

Miller pulled a similar stunt when he went before cameras and claimed that the administration was considering suspending the “privilege” of habeas corpus, even though the power to do so is reserved expressly to Congress under Article 1 of the Constitution.

The administration well understands what happens when it metes out punishment against alleged “undesirable” social elements and the perceived enemies of the administration. Corporations, law firms, media companies, and even major universities scrambled to stay on Trump’s good side so that they wouldn’t become the next target. They capitulated with little to no actual resistance, just like the entire Republican Party has done.

This erodes the traditional safeguards of our civil liberties while giving a big assist to the project of MAGA authoritarianism.

Sowing doubt and creating mass fear

Recently, the White House announced it was ending Temporary Protective Status (TPS) for hundreds of thousands of refugees from war-torn, dangerous, and stricken parts of the world, from Haiti to Afghanistan. With respect to the latter, he even turned our nation’s back upon the very people who collaborated with the U.S. during the long war we started there. These refugees now face persecution and even death should they be returned to the Taliban-controlled country.

Despite its welcome stance on the fundamental right of due process, the Supreme Court has proven no bar to the mass deportation of millions of migrants previously under protected status here. Just yesterday, apparently agreeing that immigration decisions including TPS lie within the ambit of the executive branch’s authority, the justices permitted the Department of Homeland Security under Secretary Kristi Noem to end TPS for 300,000 Venezuelan migrants. This termination is now happening long before their statuses were set to expire. This means that all of these people, who arrived here legally after accepting an offer to come here from the Biden administration, are now subject to deportation.

The lesson to the world is that the offer and promises of a prior U.S. president mean nothing to the new one. The message is both deeply unjust and utterly lacking in humanity: You may have come here legally, but we will find a way to send you back anyway.

As a result of this ruling and Noem’s draconian order, the lives of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, along with millions of their families and friends, have suddenly been upended. Many justifiably fear what will happen to them next. Will they be seized off the street or out of their cars? Will they be held indefinitely in decrepit and dangerous ICE detention facilities? Will they be sent back to their native country or instead to a third country, perhaps even to prison there?

The U.S. has already demonstrated that its en masse mistreatment of migrants is intentional and without remorse or recourse. There are now well-documented horror stories of scores of men who are wholly innocent of any criminal activity being sent to El Salvador’s CECOT prison.

For example, CBS reviewed the files of 75 percent of the 238 men sent to CECOT and could find no evidence of any criminal record whatsoever. And just yesterday, the CATO Institute released a report that 50 of the Venezuelans now imprisoned there came to the U.S. legally and violated no immigration laws.

Will these facts even matter to this administration? The answer is no. For example, even after admitting that it sent Kilmar Abrego García to CECOT due to “administrative error,” the U.S. government continues to disclaim any authority to facilitate his return, despite a direct order from the Supreme Court.

Secretary Noem infamously filmed herself before barechested prisoners packed into the notorious El Salvador prison, bragging that the CECOT facility is “one of the tools in our toolbox” and warning that “if you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face.”

This was a violation of the Geneva Conventions because if, under Trump’s own declaration, we are at “war” with these migrants, international law prohibits the exploitation of prisoners of war.

That of course won’t faze Secretary Noem or the White House, which hasn’t encountered a convention it hasn’t immediately tried to violate. Again, the cruelty is the point—but importantly the point is to sow doubt and fear among the entire migrant community in the United States.

Making cruelty the new normal

There is a fourth, and perhaps most disturbing, reason for the administration’s cruelty: conditioning the U.S. populace to it.

For those of us who remain horrified by its actions, the White House is hoping we ultimately treat it like we now do mass shootings. That is to say, the administration hopes it becomes so commonplace that we hear about it, shake our heads in resigned hopelessness, and begin to accept it as inevitable.

For the cult followers of Trump, there is a still more dangerous goal. He wants them to absorb and appreciate the cruelty and make it part of their political identity.

When flights bearing migrants to El Salvador began, the White House put out a video depicting the preparation and use of chains and shackles upon migrants being rendered or deported. Along with the video, it used the acronym ASMR, which stands for “Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response.”

As CNBC noted, ASMR refers to a “pleasant, tingling feeling some people experience when watching videos featuring unusual sounds, like whispering or fingernails tapping on a surface.” To refer to ASMR within the context of migrants being shackled and deported is nothing short of monstrous.

The White House also released a video of migrants being actively deported, set to the popular song “Closing Time,” presumably for its line “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”

The White House’s mocking of the gravity of deportation is intended to dehumanize migrants, associate them with criminality, and underscore the callousness of the administration. But it’s also meant to entertain the MAGA masses using victims of the cruelty as punchlines for jokes.

Pushing the boundaries

Earlier in this piece, I noted that the creation of “domestic enemies” such as migrants permits the government to target not just the migrants themselves but the liberals and activists who support them as “enemies of the state.” The White House is now attempting to sow doubt and fear among its political opponents by using the power of the state to intimidate them and even lock them up, too.

Specifically, the administration has now begun to target members of other branches of government. These include Judge Hannah Dugan in Wisconsin, who was recently indicted on two federal counts of “obstructing proceedings” and “concealing a person from arrest” as ICE agents sought to detain a migrant attending a criminal proceeding in her courtroom.

Federal authorities have also targeted Rep. LaMonica McIver of New Jersey, who as of today stands charged by the Justice Department for “assault” at an ICE facility near Newark as she sought to carry out her statutorily protected right to inspect a migrant detention facility in her state.

This is a deliberate test, not just of the administration's own willingness to cross traditional boundaries and infringe upon the judicial and legislative prerogatives and immunities of the other governmental branches, but of the public’s willingness to tolerate it.

Each time the populace shifts to accept a new norm, a new level of cruelty, a new outrage, the White House is further emboldened and the rules are reset. The deportations and renditions of innocent people without due process begin with migrants, but they will not end there. The horror of a single prison in El Salvador becomes the nightmare of dozens of black site prisons around the world. The indictment and arrest of one judge and one Congressmember becomes a purge of all perceived political enemies.

This is why the fight for the rights of migrants, for basic concepts of justice and fair play, and for bedrock rights such as habeas corpus, matter so much. The cruelty the administration has unleashed upon one group is only a warm-up for something far more ambitious.

We can turn this back, force a reckoning, lock arms, and demand accountability. But the time to do so is now, rather than long after the detention camps they are building for migrants today become the prison camps for the perceived enemies of the state tomorrow.