But Trump has no shame. That is his secret power. He is, literally, shameless. So he can parade his vivid inadequacies—his ignorance, his vanity, his physical grossness, his overall gaucheness—before the world, shielded by this power of shamelessness. But there are times he needs more, and so he protects himself from the mortal threat that someone might stand up to him and compel him to recognize his own absurdity with an armor of cruelty. He is cruel. He must be cruel, must lash out, must smash, must humiliate and dominate any person who dares to notice how ridiculous he is, how wrong, how unlawful, how ignorant. That has probably happened a lot in Donald Trump’s life, and it has made him a master of cruelty.
This sick, disturbed, evil personality has captivated tens of millions of Americans WHO ARE JUST LIKE TRUMP. They have raised him up higher than almost any other American in our history. Why? How? There are structural economic reasons, yes; America was ripe for a populist revolt, as the 2016 campaign of Bernie Sanders showed. But Sanders is an eminently decent man. He lacked the elixir of hatreds, the cup of cruelty that Trump offers to all who follow him.
This is the key to Trump’s EVIL: He gives people permission to say and do out loud, in public, the things they used to do and say in secret. Trump’s followers are as mean, nasty, evil, and twisted as he is.
The contagion of cruelty has now swept our land, and swept Trump back into power. The culture of cruelty is now the center of power in our country. The ideal of American solidarity, that way of life that recognizes we are all bound together in this nation, all brothers and sisters living in one shared national community, working out our differences under law through democratic debates—that’s a joke in Trump’s America. MAGA doesn’t even pay lip service to it.
Oh, they prattle on about America all the time, but they don’t mean what Lincoln meant. Or Reagan. They sing “God Bless America,” when they ought to fear the judgment of a just and loving God. The only community that truly matters is MAGA. MAGA is America and America is MAGA. You’re in or you’re out. And once you are in, you are complicit, because MAGA is built and bound together by the endorsement of, and the participation in, this culture of cruelty. There can be no dissent. Dissent of any kind is dangerous, because it exposes the truth: The truth that is being cruel is a sickness, not a triumph. Their grandchildren will be ashamed of them for this.