No one has summarized the engine of Donald Trump\u2019s politics more aptly than the Atlantic\u2019s Adam Serwer, writing in 2018: the cruelty of his presentation and plans and promises is the point.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them,\u201d Serwer wrote, \u201cthat binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear.\u201d<\/p>\n
All that has changed over the past six years is the extent to which that cruelty manifests and the urgency that Trump and his supporters feel in demanding it.<\/p>\n
Speaking at a rally in Wisconsin on Saturday, Trump inveighed against immigrants, as he does, with his now-familiar hyperbole about the purported danger posed by those seeking new lives in the United States. When he announced his initial candidacy in June 2015, his comments about how Mexico was intentionally sending criminals and rapists into the country met with backlash from Republican politicians still operating under the assumption that such dishonest hostility was anathema to Americans. It wasn\u2019t, and Trump\u2019s reiterations of similar false claims barely makes it into news stories.<\/p>\n
The comments in Wisconsin did, though, because he added an important adjective to the mix.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn Colorado,\u201d Trump said, immigrants are \u201ctaking over. I mean, in Colorado they\u2019re so brazen they\u2019re taking over sections of the state.\u201d (This is obviously not true.) \u201cAnd, you know, getting them out will be a bloody\u201d \u2014 he seemed to search for a word \u2014 \u201cstory.\u201d<\/p>\n
He continued on for a bit, claiming (falsely) that the United States is now home to \u201cthe worst criminals in all of these countries,\u201d people told that \u201cif you come back, you will be executed.\u201d<\/p>\n
That \u201cbloody\u201d descriptor, though, is potent. It\u2019s a pledge not just of the cruelty of ostracism or subjugation. It\u2019s a promise that the purported dangers of immigrants will be met with force, with cracked skulls or \u2014 as Trump reportedly suggested while serving as president \u2014 gunfire.<\/p>\n
One of the lingering images from July\u2019s Republican convention was a sea of giddy delegates, then expecting a Trump romp in November, waving signs reading, \u201cMass Deportation Now.\u201d For nine years, Trump supporters have been reminded that dark-skinned people coming to the United States from other countries are a critical problem. Trump\u2019s 2024 campaign has been more explicit than his prior two about how he\u2019ll rip those immigrants out of the national fabric, and his party seemingly couldn\u2019t have been more thrilled. Sure, there are legal protections for people seeking asylum in the U.S., but there used to be legal protections for access to abortion, too.<\/p>\n
But he has to win first \u2014 or at least, be inaugurated. To that end, Trump offered another pledge of action in a post on the social media site he owns.<\/p>\n
\u201c[T]he 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny,\u201d he wrote, \u201cand, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again.\u201d He added that the threatened \u201clegal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials.\u201d<\/p>\n
There are multiple layers here, obviously. Trump wants to suggest that the election is already under threat, mirroring his months-long effort before 2020 to suggest that any negative results were suspect. He also wants to instill a sense of trepidation among those who finalize election results, a fear that accurately reporting a Trump loss will bear costs that falsely reporting a victory wouldn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
But he\u2019s also making another promise of punishment. Trump\u2019s definition of election \u201ccheaters\u201d is as vaguely defined and expansive as his definition of \u201cillegal immigrants.\u201d In the wake of 2020, he accused myriad officials and observers of having skewed the results \u2014 all accusations that were meritless. As with a national effort to remove immigrants, an effort to settle scores with those who weren\u2019t willing to rubber-stamp his victory would necessarily be scattershot and personal and chaotic. But there would be an earnest effort, as there was after 2020.<\/p>\n
Instead of picking out isolated bad actors, Trump identifies bad actions. He then folds people into those categories as needed.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s allies on the broader right understand how useful this approach is. A campaign predicated (as Trump has said) on retribution is one in which the person facing the retribution is less important. An entire galaxy of people and institutions can be presented as enemies of Trumpworld, including former members of Trumpworld. And his base is primed for them to be punished. Elites, Democrats, people who live in cities, gay people, immigrants, elections officials.<\/p>\n
And government rulemakers: One of Trump\u2019s central goals, should he return to office, is to upend the federal bureaucracy, ostensibly because it\u2019s a Deep State or because it\u2019s Wasting Your Tax Dollars. Also because making money is easier when you don\u2019t have to worry about the law, and a lot of Trump\u2019s allies are centrally interested in making more money.<\/p>\n
And those in popular culture: Conservative activist Leonard Leo has pledged to spend $1 billion in an effort to \u201ccrush liberal dominance where it\u2019s most insidious\u201d \u2014 meaning \u201cnews and entertainment, where left-wing extremism is most evident.\u201d His effort is an institutional one, aimed at creating an explicitly right-wing entertainment and informational space, like Elon Musk\u2019s purchase of Twitter brought to scale. He\u2019s doing so, in part, by leveraging the right\u2019s \u2014 that is, Trump\u2019s base\u2019s \u2014 hostility to those perceived or identifiable as left-wing and\/or as anti-Trump.<\/p>\n
The Washington Post\u2019s Tim Craig visited Butler, Pa., the site of the attempt on Trump\u2019s life last month, finding a community deeply divided along partisan lines. He spoke to a local businessman who supports Trump.<\/p>\n
\u201cEveryone knows you got to \u2018fight, fight, fight,\u2019 \u201d Bob Oesterling told Craig, \u201cor we are done as the United States of America.\u201d<\/p>\n
Oesterling was mimicking Trump\u2019s exhortation to the crowd after the attack, a call to do battle with unidentified enemies. But everyone in the audience knew who the enemies were. Everyone reading this knows who the enemies are.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
No one has summarized the engine of Donald Trump\u2019s politics more aptly than the Atlantic\u2019s Adam Serwer, writing in 2018: the cruelty of his presentation and plans and promises is the point. \u201cIt is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them,\u201d Serwer wrote, \u201cthat binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":9206,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9205"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9205\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}