The Cruelty Isn’t the Point. It’s the Pleasure.
Trump 2.0 is a shared sensual experience in hurting other people.
Over the years, we’ve piled up some indelible images of gutless Republican surrender to Trump. Ted Cruz’s face of pure pain as he phone-banked for Trump in 2016. Mitt Romney’s rueful smile at dinner with Trump after that election.1 And now, a dead-eyed Marco Rubio cheerleading Trump’s abandonment of Ukraine from behind a negotiating table in Riyadh.
Rubio may have built his entire career around righteous opposition to autocrats abroad. Now, however, he’s discovered that what’s really best is for America to “take advantage of this incredible opportunity to partner with the Russians geopolitically, on issues of common interest, and economically.”
Isn’t it amazing, how people find they can change? Happy Wednesday.
Sadism for Its Own Sake
by Andrew Egger
The Trump White House is itching to ramp up its cartoonishly cruel immigration policy to industrial scale. But they’re finding the sledding frustratingly slow.
The Economist noted this week that “so far, mass deportation has been more rhetoric than reality.” Daily ICE arrests are up just a tick from the Biden years—from a few hundred a day to just over a thousand. “ICE stopped releasing a daily arrests number in early February,” the Economist notes, “which may be because the agency would rather nobody kept count.”
If you’re Trump, this is no good. He’d promised instant gratification: “the largest deportation operation in history,” beginning on Day One of his presidency. His fans, longing to see footage of migrants getting hustled into ICE vans by the thousands across the country, might be getting a little twitchy.
So the administration is taking a new tack: emphasizing quality over quantity. The White House is spotlighting the leering cruelty with which they carry out the deportations that are happening. Deporting former designees of temporary protected status back to countries where they face prosecution: check. Deporting migrants to countries they’ve never even visited: check. Holding detainees at Guantanamo Bay: check.
And yesterday, releasing the single most viscerally disturbing piece of deportation propaganda to date: A short video, posted to the official White House X account, titled “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.”
ASMR videos, which became popular on YouTube in the 2010s, use specific audio cues to stimulate feelings of relaxation and euphoria in the viewer. The White House video perversely mimics the style: lovingly lingering on the revving engine of an airplane waiting to take off; the jingling of chains as they are laid out in rows on the ground, then used to shackle deportees’ arms behind their backs; the shuffling of chained feet up into the plane. No faces are ever seen. The idea is not just that viewers should approve of the footage. It invites them to take sensual pleasure from it.
Plenty of Trump’s people were happy to oblige. The tweet quickly induced hooting replies—memes of American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman blissfully vibing on his headphones in a MAGA hat, exhortations to “let the clanging bar sounds of Guantanamo Bay whisk you away to your happy place,” speculation about when “some of our corrupt politicians” would be going the same way.
You can’t say Trump doesn’t know his audience. These people would love to see mass deportations, of course—but all they really need to get their rocks off is a big dollop of content of the government dehumanizing and humiliating migrants served up in the algorithm.
Not long ago, you’d mostly see this sort of open cruelty framed as a sort of bankshot—a posture, in theory, adopted partway in jest to trigger overly censorious Democrats or protest a culture that’s gone too woke. You know: owning the libs.
What’s amazing to witness now is how that bankshot permission structure has mostly vanished. Trump’s biggest fans are no longer styling themselves as half-ironic transgressors against liberal speech codes. The libs no longer enter into it. The guys cheering on deportation ASMR videos aren’t trying to trigger anybody; the guys identifying with Patrick Bateman aren’t pretending to occupy any moral high ground. As with their newfound love for using slurs like “retard” or their consistently cruel rhetoric toward trans people, they’re openly, unapologetically luxuriating in sadism for its own sake.
Many people have interpreted this sort of thing in the language of uncovering a rot that’s always simmered beneath the surface. Commentators speak of right-wingers taking the mask off, or saying the quiet part out loud. Obviously this is partially true: Sadists and racists and political deviants of all kinds long found it convenient to slipstream under the language of more respectable right-wing politics.
But it seems to me that this analysis misses the ways in which the Trump years have genuinely made so many right-wing people worse. What they have undertaken has been a long, slow, corrosive education in vice: from giving themselves permission to rationalize away Trump’s cruelty, to indulging in it in a quasi-performative way themselves, to realizing—almost to their own surprise—how much they liked the taste.
Betrayal, Again
by Bill Kristol
One may have thought, for one brief moment, that perhaps the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, once an eloquent voice for democracy and freedom, might resign in protest. Of course he did not. He followed President Donald Trump’s orders. He hurried off to Riyadh to try to arrange the betrayal of the brave people of Ukraine and the victory of the dictator Vladimir Putin.
The British historian Simon Schama commented, “The photo of Rubio sitting opposite Lavrov in Riyadh will forever be fixed in the historical album of infamous capitulations.”
So will the video of Rubio speaking to the press after the meeting, where he gushed that this was a moment of “incredible opportunities that exist to partner with the Russians geopolitically, on issues of common interest, and frankly, economically.”
The United States has no need to “partner” with Russia economically. But President Trump wants to partner with Putin’s Russia morally and politically—against Ukraine, and against liberal democracy.
The American president is on Putin’s side.
Trump made this perfectly clear a few hours later, in his press conference at Mar-a-Lago. He blamed Ukraine for Russia’s invasion: “You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.” And he made clear he’s going to make a deal—one that amounts to a capitulation—regardless of Ukraine’s wishes. After all, Trump said yesterday, “Russia wants to do something. They want to stop the savage barbarianism (sic).”
Ian Bond, a former British diplomat accustomed to speaking diplomatically, was brutally frank: Trump’s remarks were “some of the most shameful comments uttered by a president in my lifetime. Trump is siding with the aggressor, blaming the victim. In the Kremlin they must be jumping for joy.”
Ukraine’s President Zelensky understands the situation. “It seems like Russia and the U.S. are preparing an ultimatum to Ukraine, talking about Ukraine without Ukraine,” he said. “We didn’t accept ultimatums in 2022, when the situation was much more serious and nobody was helping us, and I have no intention of accepting any ultimatums.”
Nor should he.
And nor should we.
Trump is trying to upend not just three years of our policy towards Russia and Ukraine but eighty years of American foreign policy towards Europe and the world. But Trump is not (yet) a dictator. Americans at all levels, from those serving in the executive branch to members of Congress to patriotic citizens, can oppose Trump’s betrayal of our interests and our principles, and try to stop and reverse it.
Ukraine will fight, and Ukraine will be right. We can work to stand with them in their fight, on behalf of freedom and democracy, and on behalf of an America of which we could once again be proud.
The Latest Afghan Betrayal
by Will Selber
People often call me a hero, but I must admit I hate it. I hate it because the Hollywood version of heroes are men and women who always accomplish the mission. I’m not sure that applies to me.
I’m often asked, “How many Afghans did you save?” I honestly don’t know. One time, an Afghan refugee who works for me calculated that I helped save at least 500 Afghan families.
I left behind at least five times as many.
For the last four years, a truly heroic group of men and women has been fighting a rearguard action to save those Afghans who were left behind. The Biden administration adjusted law and precedent to help thousands immigrate to America through various pathways. It wasn’t nearly enough, but it was something.
Now, however, according to press reports, the Trump administration plans on shutting the office in charge of overseeing Afghan resettlement in the United States. In doing so, it is effectively closing the doors to America for all of those still stuck somewhere inside the American immigration system. I don’t know how many of my friends are stuck there, or where in the process they remain. Hundreds? Thousands?
What I do know is that heroes don’t leave their friends behind. And an honorable nation wouldn’t slam shut any hope for rescue.
The Afghan War was lost in D.C. It was lost inside the White House of every administration between George W. Bush and Joe Biden. Now, it seems the Trump administration aims to close the deal for good. According to Afghan Evac, at least 200,000 Afghans will be affected by their actions. Of those, at least 2,500 are related to U.S. service members.
You read that correctly. I have numerous Afghan brothers who serve in the American military who are still trying to get their family members out. One, a very courageous female airborne intelligence analyst, served America heroically for more than 20 years.
Now, I fear, it will be a life on the run for these families. The Taliban will sharpen their blades. They will continue their lethal assassination campaign. More Afghan women will be raped. More Afghan men will meet an early death. More friends of mine will be killed—some, possibly, for simply being friends with me.
As for my brothers and sisters in arms, many of them Trump supporters, perhaps this will be a wake-up call that the Trump administration isn’t exactly invested in saving the Afghan people. Unless Secretary of State Marco Rubio is gearing up to support the anti-Taliban resistance and support a government in exile, then this administration has likely delivered the final nail in the coffin for the dreams of thousands of American combat veterans.
And it will provide an important lesson for the Ukrainians and others: never trust us.
Quick Hits
PLEASE STOP HURTING OUR PEOPLE: The old adage runs: “Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.” But this unfortunately fails to capture phenomena, like the spasmodic “cost-cutting” of Elon Musk’s DOGE, which appear to combine both.
Take the indignities currently being heaped on USAID’s foreign service officers, who traveled overseas at their country’s request to work on behalf of the American people—and now find themselves not only likely fired and accused by Musk of fraud and other malfeasance, but also forced to find their way back home on their own dime.
Some of this has been covered in harrowing affidavits. But privately, top officials are also ripping current USAID leadership over it too.
Last week, Randy Chester, vice president for USAID of the American Foreign Service Association, a professional association representing the foreign workforces, sent a letter to Pete Marocco—the “acting deputy administrator” charged by Trump with officially drowning USAID in the bathtub—in which he denounced the administration’s “efforts to sideline and dehumanize” the agency’s foreign service officers and accused them of stiffing employees stationed abroad.
The letter, obtained by The Bulwark, reads as follows: “Currently, the Agency is refusing to reimburse FSOs for travel expenses incurred for authorized official travel, costs incurred due to ‘ordered departures,’ and overseas housing and COLAs among others . . . We have reports from evacuees from the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, who have been told not to expect to be reimbursed for their expenses on OD, new FSOs with outstanding vouchers for their transfers to DC, and other FSOs who are carrying official travel debt of the USG with no indication that they will ever be reimbursed.”
Sounds like a healthy work environment.
Cheap Shots
To his credit, Romney grew out of it.
 | A guest post by
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Andrew’s piece gets to the heart of one of the things that (literally) keeps me up at night now: How does a society walk itself back to a place of broadly valuing tolerance once it has become socially acceptable—if not actually “cool”—to openly practice hate?
At least, I don’t see how that society resets itself without some sort of convulsion. Maybe we’ll be the first to figure that out but it feels like the viability of civil society in the US is hanging by a thread now.
That deportation flight video was astonishingly grotesque. Actual, unvarnished fascism. And the most telling was Elon's response to it: tweeting with a "wow, epic troll" response.
Sooner or later, this administration is going to confront a major crisis (Israel striking Iran nuclear sites? Bird flu? Crisis with China?) and when they do, they're going to find that the "epic troll" mentality does not comport well with the incredible responsibility of running the United States of America, as they sail the ship into an iceberg.
Eventually, the bill will come due, and it will redound to the eternal shame of everyone who cheered for this.