Trump Hardened MAGA Hearts With His Cruelty—It’s Finally Backfiring
Trump has trained MAGA to revel in his cruelty, but it may finally be going too far
There is something disturbing afoot on the political right.
For 10 years, we have witnessed Donald Trump poison the discourse in this country. It seems quaint now, but back in 2015 it was actually jarring to hear Trump declare that John McCain was “not a war hero” because he was captured. “I like people who weren’t captured,” he said to a gathering of Christian conservatives during a Republican primary event that year.
Trump’s opponents for the Republican presidential nomination uniformly denounced Trump’s remarks, including Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio.
As Politico optimistically posited at the time,
Donald Trump might finally have crossed the line.
But he hadn’t “crossed the line,” at least not with the Republican electorate. Instead, he won the nomination and the presidency. During that campaign and his first term in office, he encouraged his supporters to be the worst versions of themselves, to let their hate flags fly. And they did, without condemnation, at least from within the insular MAGA universe.
But now things feel different, and not in a good way. Without another election to win, and having surrounded himself with sycophants and cultists, Trump is more emboldened and unconstrained than ever. His cabinet no longer tries to rein him as they did in Trump 1.0. Now they praise “Dear Leader” at fawning cabinet meetings, including erstwhile critic Marco Rubio.
Almost more disturbing than the shift in Trump himself is how his supporters have followed him off the cliff. He has taught them to despise and dehumanize their political “enemies,” and now in Trump 2.0, their cruelty and lack of empathy rival his.
But is this really sustainable as a political strategy? Looking at the November 4th results and Trump’s plummeting poll numbers, perhaps not. Today, there are clear signs that all the cruelty and dehumanization is beginning to backfire.
A Campaign of Dehumanization
We all knew what Trump meant during his first term when he called them “shit hole countries.” This past week, we saw it again as he railed against immigrants from Somalia—including a sitting member of Congress—as “garbage.”
“I don’t want them in our country,” he declared, expressing explicitly what he’s been telegraphing to his base for years but never quite said in this way before.
But this time, MAGA voices like Meghan McCain were on board with the hate. She remarked on her podcast that Trump’s rant about Somalis in the U.S. represents how she feels; while she may have worded it a bit differently, she confirmed,
“I agree with him.”
Likewise, in his first term, Trump declared migrant caravans coming up through Mexico to be an “invasion.” He was laying the foundation for what would become a central message of his 2024 campaign and then a central policy of his second term: a deportation program that isn’t limited to criminals or violent offenders but rather uses skin color and native language as grounds for removal. Through this, the Trump regime has proceeded to detain and remove law-abiding members of society who happen to be undocumented.
Or not. ICE regularly sweeps up citizens as well. Indeed, for Trump and MAGA, citizenship is no longer the baseline. Even U.S. citizens who don’t look or sound “right” are suspect.
This has led to a messaging campaign by DHS and the White House that has used fear…
And mockery…
…to portray immigrants as at best dispensable, and at worst a dangerous threat.
Trump supporters now openly declare that videos like these are exactly what they voted for, even likening “illegals” to “cockroaches.”
This is the logical, horrific result of Trump’s dehumanization campaign.
As The New Republic’s Greg Sargent smartly observed, both Trump’s comments about Somali Americans and these ICE videos are of a piece.
“Right now, it’s being reported that Trump’s stormtroopers are going to start arresting Somalis in Minnesota. So I think with this he’s kind of priming the MAGA masses, ginning up their bloodlust, letting them know that the spectacle of arrests is coming and they should get their popcorn ready. Again, the through line with that White House video where they were celebrating people getting pinned to the ground and handcuffed—the spectacle of suffering is the oxygen that they breathe, basically.”
MAGA seems to revel in it. A Google search of “ICE raid this is what I voted for” brings up result after result of Trump supporters celebrating the cruelty of Trump’s deportation regime.
Sargent notes:
“I think maybe the through line here is what you might call the joy of dehumanization. For MAGA, that’s a great, joyous occasion. Anytime that they can dehumanize whoever is the subject of the two-minute ‘hate of the moment,’ it’s time for a party.”
From Deportation To Murder
Trump’s deportation program has led to months of cruel results, including the deportation and detention of innocent immigrants like Andry Hernandez Romero, a gay makeup artist who fled Venezuela to seek asylum in the United States, and Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was wrongfully deported through a so-called “administrative error.”
As if that weren’t bad enough, just this week, an ICE raid resulted in a child not just being separated from his family, but actually missing, in an undisclosed detention center.
A 6-year-old Chinese boy has been separated from his father after federal agents arrested the family following a routine immigration appointment in New York City.
The boy’s father, Fei Zheng, is detained inside Orange County Correctional Facility in upstate New York, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s custody records.
But “nobody knows” where Yuanxin is being held, according to immigrants’ rights advocates. Homeland Security officials have not disclosed his location.
Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani called it out this week for the cruelty that it is.
But MAGA, well-trained by Trump, had little sympathy.
And, of course…
The label of “terrorist” in the example above is a central element of the Trump regime’s messaging, which now encompasses the murder of supposed “narco-terrorists” by the U.S. military firing upon their vessels in international waters.
This is a distinct escalation from Trump’s first term. By merely declaring human targets to be “terrorists,” Trump 2.0 has decided it can kill them as a matter of “self-defense” because, as Karoline Leavitt recently claimed, the drugs supposedly on board these boats were supposedly deadly and supposedly destined for American shores.
Trump’s and MAGA’s calls for violence aren’t limited to international enemies, of course. Trump and MAGA now routinely call for the death of their proclaimed political enemies, as Trump did recently when he declared members of Congress “seditious” “traitors” simply for reminding the military that they are duty-bound to disobey unlawful orders.
And after it was revealed that a second strike was ordered to kill survivors of the initial strike on an alleged “drug smuggling vessel,” the “pro-life” folks were decidedly not very.
Megyn Kelly again said the quiet part out loud—no doubt reflecting what many MAGA were thinking:
“I really do kind of not only wanna see them killed in the water, whether they’re on the boat or in the water, but I’d really like to see them suffer. I would like Trump and Hegseth to make it last a long time so they lose a limb and bleed out.”
Backfiring In Real Time
By stripping his supporters of basic human empathy and dehumanizing his declared enemies, Trump risks overpromising on the consequences.
This was what happened with the Epstein files. Trump campaigned by portraying the “deep state”—read: Democratic bureaucrats—as a cabal of pedophiles who would be exposed once he released the “Epstein files.” After promising the files’ release—and, implicitly, dire consequences for these sexual criminals—he did everything in his power to block their release, presumably because he is all over those files. MAGA responded with fury at being led to a frenzy for which there was no feeding.
Trump is now venturing into the same mistake by declaring Biden’s pardons “null and void” because—so the MAGA fever dream goes—they were signed with an auto-pen without any input from Biden himself. Last week, Trump posted to Truth Social that he has invalidated “any document signed by Sleepy Joe Biden with the Autopen,” which he declared “is hereby terminated and of no further force or effect.” The message was amplified by The White House.
In a separate post, Trump made clear he was including Biden’s pardons in this list of presidential documents that are supposedly “null and void” now.
Trump’s supporters are beginning to suspect this is another wild but broken promise, just like the Epstein files revelations he never delivered.
MAGA’s growing cynicism about Trump is palpable.
And…womp.
But as political backfires go, there’s nothing quite like Trump’s attacks upon the very community he boasted about winning over in last year’s election. In 2024, the shift of Hispanic voters toward Trump was the big story out of election night. It explained the coalition shift that won him the popular vote outright.
But now? That support has collapsed, and it’s not hard to understand why.
As Pew Research lays out,
70% of Latinos disapprove of the way Trump is handling his job as president.
65% disapprove of the administration’s approach to immigration.
But the real lesson may run deeper. The end result of all this cruelty, all this dehumanization, is not just a loss of support among certain targeted groups. A recent Gallup poll found Trump’s approval in the toilet at 36 percent. Trump’s support among independents in that same poll? A new low of 25 percent.
Trump’s loss of support among independents can be attributed to a variety of issues. As Real Clear Politics noted last month:
According to the Quinnipiac survey, the president has hemorrhaged support among independents over his handling of an array of matters ranging from the economy and the deployment of ICE and the National Guard in U.S. cities to tariffs and Russian aggression in the Russia-Ukraine war. On each of those issues, independents disapprove of the job the president is doing by more than a 2-1 margin.
But the story of Trump’s collapse is about something larger.
American Prospect columnist Paul Waldman described Trump’s longtime MO in his discussion of the consequences of Trump’s campaign of cruelty and dehumanization with Greg Sargent:
The theory at the heart of what the administration is doing, and what Trump’s entire career is based on, is that we should all be our worst selves, that our darkest impulses should be the ones that reign. We should be the most bigoted, the most corrupt, the most angry and hateful—our truest self is our worst self. And if you look at who is in this administration, it is a collection of the worst people from top to bottom. And the implicit argument is that we should all be that way. And we should cheer when people get brutalized. And we should laugh when we see corruption because everybody is corrupt and everybody is sadistic. And that’s who we ought to be.
But as Waldman concludes, the reason Trump’s cruelty and dehumanization are not political winners for him as president now, nor for the GOP on November 4th—or, presumably, next November—is pretty simple:
[T]he truth is that that’s not who most people want to be.
Ah, yes, Meghan McCain. The child of a renowned politician and an heiress who never had to work a day in her life and still doesn’t. Without knowing virtually anything, about anything, she has parlayed her privilege and entitlement into a pallid media presence. Note the married McCain still hangs onto the only thing that ever opened doors for her, her name. Now having never visited with the Somali community, had conversations with them, and I would bet unable to find Somalia on a map, she asserts her white supremacy and racism in an attempt to have a podcast career among the racist and ignorant. What a disgrace to the country and her father.
The one good thing about having Trump in power is that it has exposed people for who they really are. The thin veneer of civilization has been stripped. Friends, family members, neighbors, public figures, etc., have shown us their true colors. Trump will soon lose his power, but we'll remember those who enthusiastically supported him long after he is gone. There is a dark side to America, and Trump tapped into that hate and fear.