Sadopopulism and the Fascist MAGA Ethos

Trump’s policy is to inflict pain, even upon his own voters. But why does this work, and what will stop it?

Federal agents block people protesting an ICE immigration raid. Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images.

“The cruelty is the point.”

We hear that phrase a lot, and it rings true given the horrors we see daily out of the Trump regime. But it’s also rather unsatisfying. It feels circular, and there isn’t any discussion about why cruelty is the point, or, for that matter, what the “point” really is.

Why tear hardworking, non-criminal undocumented immigrants from their communities and families, often terrorizing them in plain sight of their children?

Why post videos of migrants in shackles as you render them to third-country torture prisons?

Why create “Alligator Alcatraz” merchandise and fantasize about people being eaten by reptiles in the Everglades swamps?

Why relish in “liberal tears” and rejoice when the other side is traumatized by your lack of humanity?

For that matter, why take healthcare away from your own voters, impose huge new tariffs on them, close down their rural hospitals, and send their costs soaring on groceries, electricity and housing?

Indeed, why make your primary goal the infliction of as much pain and suffering as you can, even upon your own voters? This includes the same Latino communities that swung hard to the right in 2024 and helped put your party in power in the last election—communities you are now terrorizing daily.

None of this as policy makes any sense—until you come back to where we started: “The cruelty is the point.”

In a functioning democracy, elected politicians actually try to help their constituents, even if they disagree about how best to do so. But in today’s political climate, we now have one party that actively seeks to harm its own voters, along with everyone else.

You might think that would be a dead loser as policy options go. But it turns out, “sadopopulism”—a term first coined by University of Toronto fascism scholar Professor Timothy Snyder—can be a terrifying but winning strategy if it isn’t addressed head-on and stopped in its tracks.

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I’m going to hurt you so that you’ll want to hurt others

To understand how this policy works, we need to take a step back and assess who is pushing this bizarre and harmful notion. This is the point where oligarchic rule (into which we are fast sliding) bleeds over into populist policy.

Oligarchs have a fundamental problem when they seek to assert control over a democratic society. Their policies can’t go “right” in favor of free markets, because over time, that might create real competitors who might oust them from their positions as the richest and most powerful.

And they can’t go “left” in favor of progressive taxation and social safety nets because their own wealth might get redistributed.

So what’s an oligarch to do?

Professor Snyder argues that oligarchs like Trump often look to create a “fake” democracy using the tool of sadopopulism. That term describes itself well, but it still requires a bit of unpacking.

Trump and his ilk are often described as “populists,” but this misses a crucial distinction. Populists at least pretend to have the best interests and the future of their voters in mind. They actually do want to make things better for them, even if they manipulate the populace’s emotions and grievances to serve their own political ends.

But Trump’s brand of populism adds an important and dangerous twist. He is also sadistic, meaning he actually seeks to add to the total amount of pain of the nation, including what his own voters are feeling.

Why would he do that? According to Prof. Snyder, who published a concise 12-minute talk on sadopopulism as part of a series on fascism, it is to create a limited resource of pain and fear. From there, Trump can dole it out, inflicting that pain and fear upon others, all while making those who experience less of it feel better about themselves.

If you teach people that life is full of pain and grievance, Snyder argues, then at least Trump’s voters have the consolation that they are not suffering as badly as immigrants, minorities and queer people. And that, it turns out, is a powerful motivator.

Giving up on the future

Back when we had a functioning democracy, our two parties offered competing visions for the future. They championed policies, often at odds with each other, that they believed would best get us there.

Enter sadopopulism, which says, “Stop talking about the future. I want to talk about the past.” As Snyder points out, sadopopulism removes the future as the topic of conversation by hearkening back again and again to some imagined past.

It’s not just “Make America Great.” It’s “Make America Great Again.”

The era Trump refers to was that of our parents and grandparents, the post-war decades of the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s. Snyder notes that in those years, there were many laudable social advances. The gap between the rich and poor was closing. Unions were stronger. Our public education was the best in the world.

A policy that truly wants to Make America Great Again based on those decades would presumably focus on wealth redistribution, strengthen labor protections and unions, and improve educational opportunities.

But sadopopulists look at the past and ask a very different question. They want to know how to revive ancient divisions, enmities and pain. Those same decades, after all, were years of extreme racial discrimination, voter suppression and segregation. Women and gay people, too, were second-class citizens in a hierarchical, patriarchal system.

If Trump can successfully make people ignore what is actually happening and focus instead on long-held divisions and resentments, then his voters could find solace knowing that at least they are better off than them.

And the government? Trump wants people to understand that it inflicts pain. It makes you hurt. It’s all encompassing and all powerful, and you just want so badly for it to harm others more than you. So instead of thinking about how we all might prosper together in the future, Trump would see us cast into different competing groups, fighting over scraps, trying to feel less relative pain.

And when you zoom out a bit, you see that the entire Confederacy, and even the post-Civil War era of Jim Crow in the South, was built upon sadopopulism. It explains the public torture and lynchings of Black citizens while whites looked on with their children in tow, as if attending a happy social gathering. It explains how rich property owners in the South could continue to justify massive wealth inequality while dire poverty persisted in those states. The problem wasn’t the oligarchs; it was the Blacks, so the narrative went.

Today, this explains why red state legislators can continue to focus on oppressing women and LGBTQ+ people instead of improving conditions for their states’ residents, while the poorest whites among them continue to re-elect them.

An ethos of pain

Beyond the infliction of pain itself, which, as discussed above, creates a limited social resource that Trump and his regime can then dole out, there is also a strong push today to establish an entire culture of pain, this time for the entire nation. We “liberals” who are normally outside that pain bubble find ourselves suddenly within it, and it is a stomach-churning experience.

The push has started from within MAGA, and the regime is hoping it will spread. The Trump White House, for example, actively propagates images and memes about brutal detention and deportation, inviting the public to wallow in torture and cruelty. As Professor Jason Stanley of the University of Toronto explained, “What you have is this desire to get people to buy into the fun of sadism.” It’s the U.S. government itself saying, “This is something we’re doing together, we’re having a blast, we’re laughing and those wimpy liberals are saying it’s scandalous. We’re going to show our power over them by having as much fun as possible.”

Culture has often been used by fascist regimes to prepare the ground for later atrocities. Anna Merlin, who interviewed Prof. Stanley in Mother Jones, noted that the Nazis used cartoons depicting Jews as rats to provoke visceral loathing and disgust, associating them with disease and contagion, something that the social body must reject.

As I wrote in a piece entitled “A Code Red for Our Democracy” back in November of 2023, when Trump first made similar statements, it was clear where he was headed. By calling his enemies on the left “vermin” and claiming that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our nation,” he drew a direct and terrifying historical line straight from him to Hitler.

Merlin also pointed out how other dictators have deployed meme-driven campaigns to lay a social foundation for their political goals:

Supporters of Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippines’ past president, helped popularize his brutal and deadly drug war through what BuzzFeed News called “a never-ending meme-driven propaganda campaign.” Researchers at the University of Notre Dame found that Russian milbloggers—ultranationalist and often explicitly pro-war accounts—hugely increased the number of propagandistic, and often manipulated, images they were posting on Telegram in the two weeks leading up to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It’s an example of another government deploying what the researchers call “Politically Salient Image Patterns,” which, as they put it, “serve to influence, demean, manipulate, and motivate various audience segments.”

Hate masquerading as humor is also a key component. The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website, laid bare its own game plan on how to deploy “humor” to spread violent hate. Reporter Ashley Feinberg, then writing for Gawker, got a copy of its style guide. It advised, “The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not,” while admitting his real objective was to “gas” Jews. The author further counseled that “whenever someone does something violent, it should be made light of.”

ICE as the new SA

By now, it’s well known that Trump and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), with the help of billions in funding from the “One Big, Beautiful Bill,” are building a shock force of ICE agents. They are hoping to double the ranks of that force over the next four years from 10,000 to 20,000 agents. The new recruits are largely untrained militia types who often skew far-right in their politics.

Their historical analogue is the Sturmabteilung, commonly known as the SA. That was a Nazi paramilitary group organized under Hitler in the 1930s whose principal responsibility was to use street violence against Jews and to intimidate the Nazi Party’s opponents, particularly voters in local and national elections.

The Trump regime already deploys ICE in a similar manner. It sends ICE agents into immigrant communities, with their faces covered and bearing no official identification. There, they kidnap people off the streets and out of their workplaces and homes. They openly assault political activists who monitor them, such as Amanda Trebach, a member of the immigrant rights group Unión del Barrio and an ICU nurse. And the current regime intentionally deploys them to intimidate its political opponents, including recently outside a political rally held by Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Trump promised that his deportation efforts would focus on criminals, but the majority being detained and sent to ICE centers are hardworking people who may be undocumented but have no criminal record. ICE is disrupting communities, terrorizing and separating families and being forced to “just follow orders” in a quest to meet Stephen Miller’s quota of detaining 3,000 people per day.

That carries some significant moral costs, even for ICE agents. They know what they are doing is despised and shameful, and over time, that could create a moral crisis for their force.

Enter the greater mission.

A Nazi-era MAGA ethos

On a recent podcast appearance on Fast Politics with pundit Molly Jong-Fast, Prof. Stanley explained why the Trump regime needs to indoctrinate its shock ICE troops into a Nazi-era ethos.

“You need some kind of governing ideology….And here we can also look to history like Himmler's Posen speeches. (Heinrich Himmler was a leader of the SS, a fanatically loyal group within the SA.)

“He’s speaking to the SS and saying, you know that, you know, it’s terrible the job you do, and you are the best of humans, so you feel terribly when you do this job.

“Since you’re super humans, you know that it’s necessary. You can overcome the first-order feeling of pain at killing people and brutalizing them, because you know that it’s for this higher purpose, preventing the poisoning of the blood of our people.

“So that’s going to be what they need to do. They need to instill this idea that this is for a greater purpose. And you understand this greater purpose, and that makes you smarter and better.”

Seen within this dark context, the cruelty and pain ICE is currently inflicting are necessary to achieve the “higher goal” of white supremacy and racial purity in America. At least, that is how the White House justifies it. The regime needs its governing ideology to overcome whatever remaining moral issues ICE agents have with their jobs.

DHS itself understands well that it is asking ICE to do things that morally centered and good people would not do. That is precisely why it is offering new recruits huge sign-on bonuses of $50,000 and is permitting them to operate without revealing their identities.

Open calls to white supremacy

The need to instill a governing ideology to overcome personal morality explains the Department’s recent overt support of white supremacy, Nazi ideology and the days of racial segregation from decades past. These are now present everywhere in the Department’s public statements.

Viewed in this context, and as I laid out in my earlier piece on ICE recruiting, these posts make highly disturbing sense. For example, there was this post celebrating Manifest Destiny:

What does manifest destiny have to do with ICE? As Zeeshan Aleem noted in an OpEd,

The agency is promoting the idea that America’s most authentic heritage can be traced back to its history of ethnic cleansing, racist social hierarchies and racial domination. The “homeland” is to be expropriated and protected from savages, and the people who most belong are the European settler class.

And as Prof. Heather Cox Richardson pointed out, the double capital Hs in “Heritage” and “Homeland” are no accident. They are a not-so-subtle reference to the HH of the Nazi era, for “Heil Hitler.”

There’s another dog whistle in the caption that I wrote about earlier, consisting of the 14 words utilized once you include the title and the artist’s name. Alt-right and white supremacists often signal to each other by using 14 words. As the Anti-Defamation League notes,

“14 Words” is a reference to the most popular white supremacist slogan in the world: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” The slogan was coined by David Lane, a member of the white supremacist terrorist group known as The Order (Lane died in prison in 2007). The term reflects the primary white supremacist worldview in the late 20th and early 21st centuries: that unless immediate action is taken, the white race is doomed to extinction by an alleged ‘rising tide of color’ purportedly controlled and manipulated by Jews.

DHS’s recruitment poster iconography and imagery now also project a fascist aesthetic:

All of its portrayed agents are white and male.

Yet the entirety of the White House’s deplorable public list of alleged “criminals” arrested as part of “OPERATION MAKING D.C. SAFE AND BEAUTIFUL” are racial minorities, as is nearly every image of a person under detention or arrest on DHS’s Twitter feed.

Even its posted images of Washington D.C. don’t celebrate the capital of today but look back 80 years, to a time before racial integration.

DHS reminds the public that “Greatness is a choice”—as was segregation, impliedly.

The Department is even calling on new recruits to “Defend your culture!” while appealing to the less educated to fill its ranks:

The recruiting unsurprisingly has attracted members of far-right white supremacist groups. One federal agent in Martha’s Vineyard, for example, displayed a white nationalist “Valknot” tattoo on his arm, stoking fears among residents.

The importance of public opinion

The Trump regime wants the U.S. public to buy into and even delight in the horrors inflicted by ICE, as many MAGA cultists currently do. It wants its program of mass deportation to become more popular, for citizens to sport “Alligator Alcatraz” merch proudly, and for “woke culture” celebrating the broad diversity of our nation to be stamped out completely.

In such a culture, sadopopulism can thrive. Trump can dole out pain to all, yet still maintain a sick hold on his base, just so long as the rest of us are even more miserable.

That’s why the question of Trump’s popularity, and specifically the popularity of his key fascist programs, matters so much, even long before any big elections. It’s also why stories about the horrors ICE is inflicting on innocent undocumented immigrants are key to diminishing Trump’s political power.

Whenever I write about public opinion polls, a common and understandable reaction is, “It doesn’t matter, Trump doesn’t care, his base doesn’t care.” This, in my view, misses the point. Public opinion is a barometer of whether Trump’s policies, including sadopopulism, are working or failing. It tells us whether the American people are going along with his vision of cruelty and pain, or whether empathy, compassion and kindness—three notoriously “liberal” forces—are winning the day.

Take his policy on immigration. At the start of Trump’s second term, the U.S. public backed his vision for an immigration crackdown, with most believing that he would focus, as he’d promised, on criminals. It was one of the reasons he prevailed in the election. It was also how he was able to convince so many Latino voters that their communities weren’t in danger from his policies.

Support for immigration reached a low, particularly among Republicans and independents, around the time of the 2024 election. But since the ICE raids began, and stories began to circulate about the detention and deportation of hardworking immigrants with deep roots in their communities, the public’s perception of immigrants changed dramatically. This included a profound shift among those who were skeptical of immigration earlier. Here’s Gallup’s astonishing chart:

The number of Americans saying that immigration is a “good thing” is now at a record high of 79 percent. And 78 percent of those surveyed support a pathway to citizenship (up 8 points from 2024) while only 38 percent support mass deportation (down 9 points from 2024).

As Prof. Stanley noted in his interview on Fast Politics, the role of empathy plays a major part in resisting fascist, racist policies. During the Civil Rights Era, Prof. Stanley observed, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. deliberately sought out the worst sheriffs in the South, whom he knew would crack down on peaceful supporters of voting rights. Dr. King understood that this would bring the violence and racism of the segregationists and white supremacists into the living rooms of Americans across the country.

Today, DHS is doing this first part for us by busily assembling the worst of the worst among its ICE agents. Now, stories of their brutality are also circulating widely and daily on social media. And images of ordinary citizens standing up to ICE are receiving millions of views and likes. Meanwhile, the regime’s clumsy, overt attempts to appeal to white supremacist and Nazi ideology are being laid bare and condemned in real time.

In the 1930s, the ranks of the Nazi’s SA grew at an astonishing rate, swelling from the many young men left unemployed during the Great Depression. The SA grew from a few thousand members in the 1920s to over 400,000 by 1932, then to 2,000,000 by the time that Hitler came to power in 1933.

This doesn’t have to be our fate. U.S. public opinion continues to sour on Trump, limiting his appeal to just his hardcore supporters. The latest polls have him at record disapproval numbers. Through continuous hammering on his failed policies, as well as ubiquitous and sustained shaming of his ICE brownshirts, we can and must prevent a repeat of Nazi Germany.

Once we understand what we’re dealing with—that Trump’s playbook is built upon sadopopulism and the rationing of pain, and that he is justifying it all on a “greater purpose” of making America white again—we can flip the script.

Each infliction of pain is now a moment for empathy. Each new horror is now a call to action for compassion and the rule of law. In the face of unflagging resistance, Trump’s culture of harm and suffering, of carnage and fear, could eventually give way. In its place would rise the fundamental promise America has long held: to be a nation not just built on but welcoming of immigrants and their contributions.

Years from now, anyone who has ever served in ICE under Trump 2.0 will be judged harshly—and not just by history but by their own descendants. They will be seen as no different than the hooded terrorists of the KKK, or the brownshirted SAs of Nazi Germany—all spreaders and enablers of sadopopulism and the vile ideology of white supremacy.