Of all the disparaging adjectives one could pick to describe the Trump administration, the one most under-used is cruel. Neither the media nor our political leaders are calling out the spectacular cruelty of the Trump/Musk cabal forcefully enough or often enough.
Yes, we hear about their unconstitutional actions, but the public is inured to hearing politicians flay their opponents over constitutional issues, some of them hair-splitting. They’ve become a dry and tepid attack line. We also hear a lot about lies told by the administration. But our nation has proven over the last 10 years that we will excuse lying if the liar is rich and powerful. Telling the truth has become a quaint relic. Clearly, voters no longer put much value in honesty or integrity.
Still, I held out a modicum of hope that Americans would draw the line at cruelty. But that flickering flame of optimism was blown out as Trump committed one indignity after another on his perceived enemies. I’m not talking about his “defiance of presidential norms” — the sanitized term for his churlish behavior. I mean the meanness that seems to animate him. If you think I’m overstating it, consider some examples:
- Revoking Temporary Protective Status for immigrants from Haiti and Venezuela. These two refugee groups were granted TPS (Haiti in 2010, Venezuela in 2023) because our government decided that sending them back to their home countries was unthinkable. Haiti is mired in an all-consuming crisis of violence, chaos, and unimaginable poverty. Venezuela is ruled by a ruthless dictator (as are we) who has exacted vengeance on all who oppose him. Venezuela’s once-vibrant economy has deteriorated spectacularly. Its people are desperate.
Immigrants who are granted TPS are able to live and work here. They know that if conditions in their home countries improve, their TPS could be revoked and they would have to return. Haitians with TPS include those in Springfield, OH, where Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance targeted their vicious hate campaign during last year’s election campaign. Trump and Vance claimed Haitians were stealing cats and dogs from better-off neighbors and eating them. That was unspeakably cruel and hateful — enough for voters with any moral grounding to disqualify them as candidates. Once back in the White House, Trump escalated his cruelty by revoking TPS for Haitians at a time when life in the country had become indescribably miserable and dangerous.
2.Firing of Government Workers without warning or cause. Anyone who’s ever had to fire an employee knows how wrenching it can be. People who do it without an iota of regret have no business occupying positions of authority. But wait — maybe treating people decently is an obsolete notion, inconsistent with the goal of achieving maximum efficiency. Unless you’ve been on Mars since Inauguration Day, you know that Trump/Musk have fired tens of thousands of government workers for no reason. The dismissals weren’t part of a well thought out downsizing of government. The victims were simply faceless names on print-outs that Musk’s minions used for emailing termination notices. Neither Trump, Musk or their hit men sat down face-to-face with the actual people whose lives were being overturned — ruined, I’m sure, in some cases — by losing jobs through no fault of their own. In any other era, I’d have expected a senator or member of Congress to raise hell if even a handful of government workers were treated so callously. But we’re talking about tens of thousands of workers, and about half of the country seems to think what’s happened to them is OK. Again, outright cruelty has become acceptable in Trump’s America.
3.Dismantling USAID has been covered pretty thoroughly in the media. We know, for example, that abruptly ending programs that protect people in Africa from malaria will mean many deaths. Cutting off USAID funding will have similar outcomes on other continents. People will die. Dr. Atul Gawande, formerly USAID’s chief medical officer, has spoken out persuasively about the looming disaster. In a podcast on The New Yorker magazine’s online site, Gawande estimates that hundreds of thousands people will die as a result of the indiscriminate cuts at USAID. Here is a link to that podcast.
If you’re unfamiliar with Dr. Gawande’s credentials, Google him. He is the person perhaps most qualified to speak about the effects of dismantling USAID. I guarantee you that he would deem the actions of Trump/Musk to be absolute cruelty, all the more outrageous because only 1.3 percent of the federal budget goes to USAID..
4. Mass Deportation and Arrests of Immigrants under the guise of “keeping America safe” is an exercise in needless cruelty. To fully understand Trump’s animus against immigrants, you have to know about the man who schooled him: Stephen Miller, the president’s deputy chief of staff. This Joseph Goebbels lookalike is the architect of the mass deportation movement embraced by the Republican Party. He has despised Latinos since his high school days in California. And he is one of Trump’s closest and longest-serving advisors. All you need to know about Miller is on the website of the Southern Poverty Law Center:
https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/stephen-miller/
Immigrant families awaiting deportation are confined in prisons designed for criminals. This is prima facie, intentional cruelty. The fact that some have lived in the U.S.for many years, raising families while working hard is also well known. Do they deserve mass deportation? Who will be better off as a result? It’s more convenient than doing the hard work to reform our immigration laws. Imprisonment pending deportation is a solution devised by two soulless people — Stephen Miller and Donald Trump.
So why do we as a nation tolerate elected officials who use cruelty to accomplish their personal goals? First, Trump wants to give his MAGA base what they want and what he promised: Ridding the country of millions of brown and black-skinned people no matter what kind of citizens they have been. This pleases his base supporters because they embrace the racist “replacement theory,” which took hold in Charlottesville during Trump 1. The second goal is a financial one. Trump promised his top 1% fans that he would make them richer by extending the tax cuts that he pushed through Congress in 2017. But doing so would create a deficit disaster unless he found other areas of the budget to cut. So he brought in Musk to ruthlessly cut other government spending so that the richest among us could keep their undeserved tax cuts. If eliminating USAID and reducing Medicaid hurt some poor people, so be it.
If you are not a racist, a rich Trump backer, or a Republican, why aren’t you screaming bloody murder? (I included all Republicans since it is demonstrably true that all of them will support anything their cult leader does, no matter how cruel.) No less an iconoclast than Ralph Nader penned an article in The Guardian recently asking the same question as I’m asking: Why so little overt opposition from people who have access to a bully pulpit. Take a look at his essay here: https://nader.org/2025/03/14/stay-silent-and-stay-powerless-against-trumps-tyranny/?fbclid=IwY2xjawJE9klleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHUGXxlQA6atveaTVZN_SQ3DvjVaBDj6Sz_0Zi_qj7A-ZBLNTecirBs
It ain’t time to be silent. It ain’t time to make nice. We don’t need more feeble attempts at bipartisanship by the Democratic Party. Who in the world wants to make common cause with the MAGA crowd? It would be treasonous. My dream is for Bernie and AOC to somehow wield the influence they deserve by wresting leadership of a moribund party from Chuck Schumer and his ilk. I have friends, including one who will edit this piece, who tell me that this is a pipe dream, too extreme, too politically unrealistic. Maybe so, maybe not. But I believe we need political leaders who will fiercely and uncompromisingly fight Trumpism. We need leaders who will audaciously champion working people, especially the millions of working poor. Our leaders need to be fearlessly pro-union, fearlessly anti-gun, fearlessly pro-environment. They can’t be afraid to offend the business elite when necessary, and they can’t be beholden to wealthy campaign donors. Sounds like Bernie to me!
Without straight-talking, evocative leaders, we will never get people to flood the streets. The Republicans use fear, grievance, and greed to grow their MAGA hordes. We need to build an opposition party by appealing to decency and making “good trouble,” but it won’t happen without galvanizing leadership.
I propose a team of Sanders and AOC, but there may be other leaders who would be equally effective. I simply named those two because I agree with them on every position they’ve taken and because they articulate their positions clearly and forcefully.
As Trump/Musk pile cruelty upon cruelty, day after day and, God forbid, maybe for the next 4 years, let’s pray that they ignite in America’s 340 million souls a searing outrage. Not just half-hearted opposition, but white-hot anger that forces our leaders in Congress and state houses to call out, without hesitation or fear, the inhumanity of Trumpism. And let’s hope this awakens a spirit of conscience and humanity in the populace as seismic as what we saw during the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Deacon Buck Close serves on the staff of the Church of St. John the Evangelist in Newport, RI. He was born in South Carolina, graduated from Tulane University in 1972 with a BA in Economics and Latin American Studies.
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Right on.