Falling into Barbarism: Keeping ScOR #5
March 28, 2025
In October 2018, Adam Serwer wrote one of those magazine articles that plants a lasting flag in the culture, at least among the online chattering set. In its title, the Atlantic piece made a bold assertion that some would debate and many would adopt as a hashtag: “The Cruelty is the Point.”
His point, of course, was that the harm done to certain groups by Donald Trump’s policies was not a bug but a feature. Trump and his supporters, said the subtitle, “find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear.” (Serwer would publish a book of the same title in 2021.)
Serwer was writing about the 45th president of the United States. Trump 47 is making Trump 45 look almost kindhearted by comparison. Let’s review just a sample of actions taken by the president and his allies in the first months of the new administration.
Within days of taking office, Trump effectively shuttered America’s foreign aid agency, U.S.A.I.D., which accounted for roughly 1% of U.S. government spending but provided tens of billions of dollars in lifesaving help to poor and hungry people around the world. A Boston University public health expert estimates that because of the funding cutoff, more than 100 people per hour will die unnecessarily from tuberculosis, H.I.V., malaria, malnutrition, and other preventable causes.
Trump and his Homeland Security department have shown great eagerness to round up and deport undocumented immigrants in the largest numbers possible, while making a celebratory show of it. The White House posted a video on X showing federal agents shackling men and escorting them onto a plane in Seattle, with the caption: “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.” ASMR, or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, refers to a lovely tingling feeling some people experience while watching videos with pleasing sensory stimuli.
The administration is claiming extraordinary powers to arrest and detain legal residents who’ve expressed themselves in ways that Trump officials don’t like. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has targeted at least eight students and professors who hold green cards or student visas. Mahmoud Khalil, until recently a graduate student at Columbia; Rumeysa Öztürk, a Turkish PhD student and Fulbright Scholar at Tufts; and Alireza Doroudi, an Iranian engineering student at the University of Alabama, were each seized by plainclothes ICE agents this month. Khalil and Öztürk were whisked off to a Louisiana detention center. Doroudi was being held for ICE in an Alabama jail. None was charged with a crime. The administration claimed the students supported Hamas while offering no evidence of this. The students seem to have been arrested for speaking or writing in favor of Palestinian rights. Khalil has declared himself a political prisoner. Much of the attention to these cases has focused on the police-state tactics and their evident illegality, but let’s not overlook the maliciousness on display as well.
The administration announced it will revoke the work permits and protected status of half a million Haitian and Latin American migrants who’d been welcomed into the country by the Biden Administration under a humanitarian sponsorship program. Because these people are here legally, Trump’s action belies the claim that the mass deportation drive is about removing people who didn’t come “the right way” and broke the law by entering the United States. These Black and Brown migrants came in the right way but are not the right kind of people. Notably, Trump does have a tender spot for South Africa’s White Afrikaner farmers, offering them “safe refuge” in the U.S. and a rapid path to citizenship. He claims that those farmers are being treated “terribly” by South Africa’s land reform efforts, even though as a small minority the Afrikaners still own most of the nation’s farmland.
The budget bill passed by the House, at Trump’s urging, will require substantial cuts to Medicaid and to SNAP, formerly known as food stamps. Both programs serve low-income families. SNAP helps 42 million Americans buy groceries. GOP leaders included the cuts to help fund an extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which have disproportionately benefited wealthy taxpayers and corporations. In case you’re thinking that food banks might pick up the slack and help those vulnerable families who lose their SNAP benefits, the Trump Administration also canceled half a billion dollars in food deliveries to food banks.
Trump ordered the Pentagon to purge the estimated 15,000 transgender service members from the military. Is this move based on evidence that trans people don’t perform their jobs well in the services? No. Studies show that allowing trans people to serve has no ill effects on military effectiveness or cohesion. Trump’s executive order instead libels trans soldiers as dishonest and selfish. Being transgender “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle,” the order states. Asserting a “falsehood” about one’s gender, it goes on, “is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member.” A judge who blocked the order said it’s unconstitutional and clearly based in nothing more than animus against trans people.
Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency has fired more than 100,000 federal workers, abruptly upending their careers and livelihoods. About three in ten federal employees are veterans, and those fired are disproportionately young. Many of the firings have been challenged in court and judges have ordered that some of the workers be rehired. These cases will likely wind up at the Supreme Court. In speeches before he became Trump’s Director of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, a key architect of the Project 2025 plan for the second Trump Administration, fantasized about inflicting pain on federal employees. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. ... We want to put them in trauma.” The chainsawing of federal agencies and programs is rippling outward, leading to layoffs in the states, too. Two examples in North Carolina, where I live: The slashing of U.S.A.I.D. contracts has led RTI, a large non-profit that carries out aid projects, to cut hundreds of positions, including 177 in North Carolina. And the North Carolina Department of Human Services, after abruptly losing $100 million in federal grants, announced a layoff of 80 employees. This says nothing of the people who will be harmed by the loss of the services performed by these agencies.
The list goes on. The Trump regime has left thousands of American farmers in financial peril by stopping promised federal payments for their conservation projects; frozen FEMA grants meant to help people hit by disasters, including Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina; and shaken up mental health services for veterans, whose suicide rate is 50% higher than the general population. Trump and DOGE slashed staff at the Social Security Administration, closed some of its field offices, degraded the quality of its service, and badmouthed the program itself (Musk called it a “Ponzi scheme”), raising alarm among seniors who rely on Social Security to get by.
Oh, and Trump has taken the side of the invading bully, Russia, while turning on its bullied victim, Ukraine.
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The United States has rarely ranked among the kindest, gentlest countries. As we’ve discussed on Scene on Radio, America is a hyper-individualistic society that tolerates extreme inequality and appalling gun violence, among other social ills, as the price of a commitment to a certain brand of “liberty.” Most Americans descend from immigrants, but the nation’s openness to newcomers – especially those who aren’t White – has ebbed as often as it’s flowed. Internationally, too, America has applied its power most reliably in service of U.S. economic and geopolitical interests. Even foreign aid is justified on the grounds that it’s good for America. (See: “soft power.”) And yet, at home and abroad, the country’s elites have generally expressed some humility and concern for the common good. Americans have fought endlessly over just how generous or harsh our government should be, and even those arguing for small-government austerity have usually insisted that it’s for the good of everyone, citing values like “personal responsibility.” Traditionally, in other words, America has wanted to be liked and has sometimes deserved to be.
With this crew, that’s over. Trump and MAGA have ushered in something more stark. It’s an anti-mercy, anti-kindness movement. “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” Trump’s right-hand man Elon Musk explained to Joe Rogan. Trump and Musk seem to believe that everyone is as relentlessly on-the-make as they are, seeking always to win the best deal at the expense of others, so to show kindness is to make yourself a sucker. Trump makes clear his contempt for (at least) half the country and his wish to get even with everyone who’s opposed or investigated him. “I am your retribution,” he told his followers in 2023. His crowds roared.
Trump and MAGA have ushered in something more stark. It’s an anti-mercy, anti-kindness movement.
A French member of the European Parliament suggested that the United States should give back the Statue of Liberty, a gift from France in the 1880s, since under Trump many Americans now side with tyrants and no longer value freedom and democracy. The MAGA response? Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt shot back that the French would be speaking German today if not for the U.S. — haha, take that! — adding a gratuitous Trumpian jab at the “low-level” French politician. Rightwing influencer and provocateur Matt Walsh tweeted that he’s against returning the statue to France “but I do think we should remove that dumb poem about the ‘huddled masses’ and send that to them. ... America is not an international homeless shelter.” Walsh went on to suggest replacing Emma Lazarus’s poem with this one: “Roses are red, Violets are blue, America is closed, we don’t want you.”
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Trump supporters cheering on all this sadism would not admit to being gratuitously cruel. Many would call it payback. David French, the conservative, never-Trump journalist, says “many Republicans (sadly!) want their opponents to suffer. They’re actually happy to see people lose their jobs or to see nonprofits lose funding if those people are perceived as part of the ‘deep state’ or RINOs.” (RINO stands for “Republican in name only.”) Trumpers rationalize these attacks on their enemies, French says, as “fighting fire with fire.” In MAGA world, those who are now the targets of Trumpian vengeance were long the victimizers: woke government bureaucrats, university snobs, holier-than-thou social justice warriors, even rank-and-file supporters of the “Democrat party.”
There’s a long-running argument among centrists, liberals and progressives over the validity of these right-wing victim narratives. Reactionary centrists scold progressives for having turned off half the country with precious language policing and extreme positions on issues from trans rights to policing to anti-racism. Most of us can find examples of progressives crossing the line into silliness or intolerance. But there’s a long-running cultural project that’s had at least as much impact as the “Great Awokening,” and that’s the right-wing campaign to convince conservative, religious and working-class White people that liberal coastal elites hate and look down on them. This relentless drumbeat, led by right-wing elites from Newt Gingrich through Trump, Tucker Carlson, and now most of today’s Republican pundits and politicians, has been wildly successful.
Which is it going go be? Cruelty or care? Which side are you on?
Some Trump supporters do, no doubt, have real if misinformed fears — that godless “globalists” (and pedophiles!) really are out to wreck the country, that violent “aliens” really are “taking over” U.S. towns and cities, etc., and that only Trump can save America. Consider where folks get their news. On the day I started writing this piece, with all of the above going on, the lead story on the Fox News website was a hard-hitting account of the president attending the NCAA wrestling tournament and receiving a “roaring reception, complete with chants of ‘USA! USA!’” The article quoted GOP Senator Markwayne Mullin, who was at Trump’s side at the event: "He says, 'They absolutely love me here, don't they?' I said, ‘Sir, they do.’” In the face of such coverage even Kim Jong-un might tell his state media lackeys to take it down a notch.
For many MAGA denizens, though, the story is even more straightforward. A decade of Trumpism has created a widening permission structure for those inclined to otherize and demonize wide swaths of the population. For many in Trump’s base, that means everyone who isn’t White, Christian, straight, and ideologically correct. The rest of us are the enemy, and the task is to defeat the enemy by any means necessary.
Let’s be real, too, about the asymmetry between the excesses of the left and the right — one side saying “Latinx” and sharing pronouns, the other embracing a fascist authoritarian takeover of the American republic.
To counter Musk’s remark about empathy being the fundamental weakness of Western civilization, some are circulating the words of Hannah Arendt: “The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.”
Just how far will we fall?
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I’m no political strategist, but maybe the torrent of raw malice from Trump 2.0 can point the way to an angle of resistance and counterattack. We tend to frame political struggles as left vs. right. As Trump’s autocratic aspirations became clear, some tried to shift the terms of the debate to democracy vs. despotism. Fair enough. But perhaps there’s more leverage to be gained by hammering home a simple moral question: Are you on board with all this cruelty — with this, this, this, and this? — or do you stand for decency and care? Which side are you on? (And by the way, it’s never too late to switch sides.)
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Some readers would like me to say more about how to take action in this emergency. In all humility, that’s really not my lane. As a lifelong journalist I have little confidence or experience as an activist in that sense of the word. (I do believe, along with Nikole Hannah-Jones, for example, that journalism is activism.) And I do think it’s crucial that everyone, whoever can, do something — find some way to speak up, to say no to the lawlessness and the harm. Call or write your members of Congress, find a street protest to join (there’s a big one coming April 5th), give money or volunteer for opposition candidates, do a kindness or provide mutual aid in your community…. What else? Pete Seeger said this decades ago but I think it applies: "I'm convinced that if the world survives these dangerous times it will be tens of millions of small things that do it."
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Scene on Radio the podcast is available wherever you get your shows, and at sceneonradio.org.