The Cruelty Machine: Inside Trump’s America, Where Pain is Policy & Fear is the Fuel

Trump has built a movement that glorifies cruelty and cloaks greed in the language of patriotism and faith…

Early this month, ICE agents detained a 6‑year‑old Honduran boy battling leukemia as he left an immigration court in Los Angeles with his mother and sister.

A child fighting for his life was ripped from his fragile medical routine and locked away for over a month, interrupting his treatment, crying himself to sleep night after night in a concrete cell instead of a hospital bed.

This wasn’t a mistake. It was cruelty by design: an intentional act of terror by a government that now treats compassion as weakness and suffering as a political weapon.

— ProPublica this morning published a report titled “Bloodied faces, sobbing children: Immigration officers smash car windows to speed up arrests,” documenting massive use of physical violence, including over 50 occasions where car windows were smashed and examples of people who were beaten up by masked, anonymous ICE thugs. The reporters call this level of police brutality “unprecedented,” pointing out that no police agency had ever behaved like this prior to the Trump administration.

— The Guardian reports in an article titled “Georgia detainee with prosthetic legs who objected to flooded cell sent to solitary”:

“A Liberian-born man detained by ICE in Georgia was put in solitary confinement after complaining about flooding in his cell that he said was potentially dangerous for his electronic prosthetic legs… Since then, his challenges in detention have included the screws coming out of his prosthetic legs, causing him to fall and injure his hand, and being unable to obtain new, fitted legs…

“Taylor was brought to the US from Liberia by his mother on a medical visa when he was a small child. He went through 16 operations. He has two fingers on his right hand. Now 46, he has lived in the US nearly his entire life, works as a barber, is active in promoting cancer awareness in his community and got engaged only 10 days before Ice detained him in January. Despite having a pending application for US residence – commonly known as a ‘green card’ – Ice detained and locked up Taylor in January…”

When Donald Trump descended that golden escalator ten years ago and called Mexicans rapists and murderers, we should have known what was coming. What many mistook for bombast or political performance art in 2015 has since revealed itself to be something much darker: cruelty as a political strategy, an ideology, and a governing philosophy.

Here on the last day of July 2025, after six months of Trump’s second term and with a fully compliant GOP marching behind him, it’s undeniable: this is not incompetence or accidental malice. It is deliberate. Strategic. Authoritarianism.

Cruelty is not a bug in Trumpism; it is the central operating system. And it has become the organizing principle of today’s Republican Party as you can see from the glee with which Republican members of Congress strip rights and supports from vulnerable people, and rightwing media stars brag about ICE’s brutal tactics.

This administration’s cruelty isn’t just directed at migrants or protestors or the poor: it’s aimed at democracy itself.

When they normalize suffering, when they use state power to punish the vulnerable and reward the cruel, they erode everything that holds a pluralistic democracy together: the rule of law, institutional checks and balances, civic trust, and the belief at the foundation of every functional and successful society that, “We’re all in this together.”

For example, look at the “Big Beautiful Bill” that Trump, Majority Leader John Thune, and House Speaker Mike Johnson rammed through Congress last month with much fanfare and zero Democratic support.

They called it “patriotic” and “pro-growth.” In reality, it’s one of the most draconian pieces of legislation ever passed in modern American history. It strips healthcare from over 23 million Americans by gutting the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, throws up roadblocks to staying on Medicaid, and cuts subsidies to working families.

It raises taxes on middle- and lower-income households by removing credits and deductions that working people rely on, even as it slashes corporate, income, and estate taxes for the morbidly rich. It slashes funding for Medicaid, food stamps, school lunches, Pell Grants, Head Start, and housing assistance. It cuts Medicare and accelerates the GOP’s long-sought privatization of Medicare and Social Security.

And then it turns around and hands over $4 trillion in tax cuts to the very billionaires who fund Trump’s brutal machine.

Trump and the billionaire boys’ club who got him elected and are in his cabinet — including the same crew that reprogrammed their social media algorithms to favor the far right and suppress independent and progressive media — are now openly celebrating policies that will kill poor people. That isn’t hyperbole; it’s the core of their political project made possible by the corrupt Citizens United Supreme Court decision.

It’s a project built on fear, exclusion, and the weaponization of difference. What began with chants of “Build the Wall” has metastasized into a state-run deportation machine that operates like a fascist police force. ICE, now expanded and unaccountable, no longer just terrorizes undocumented immigrants; it raids sanctuary cities, surveils citizens who participate in protests, and detains people without charges in the name of “national security.”

Under Trump’s second term, ICE has become America’s gestapo — the word literally means “secret police” — just as it was in Germany. And like their 20th-century predecessors, they operate by inspiring fear: in our case with black vans, anonymous uniforms, hidden faces and badges, unrestrained violence, and warrantless searches. They are Trump’s domestic terror squad, designed not to protect but to intimidate, and answerable only to him.

This isn’t just authoritarianism: it’s moral rot.

Trump’s cruelty is designed not only to consolidate power but to distort our collective sense of right and wrong. For today’s Republicans, empathy is now considered weakness. Kindness is called “wokeness.” Helping your neighbor is labeled “socialism.”

Faith has been turned into a weapon for the powerful rather than a refuge for the weary. Jesus wept — and not metaphorically — when he saw the temple turned into a marketplace. What would He say now about supposedly Christian pastors praising a man who brags about sexual assault, pardons rapists and cop-killers, and surrounds himself with grifters and predators?

And let’s not forget Jeffrey Epstein and the ongoing coverup of the elites in his orbit. The man died in federal custody under suspicious circumstances. The list of powerful men who flew on his plane, visited his island, and knew of his crimes continues to grow, yet the institutional GOP, which claims to be the party of morality, is silent. Worse than silent, they deflect, deny, or defend; they even shut down Congress to avoid having to vote on releasing the Epstein papers and videos.

This is exactly what Jesus warned against in the Sermon on the Mount: the hypocrites who pray loudly in public but are ravening wolves in secret. What morality is this?

The GOP today wraps itself in the language of faith and family, but what they practice is cruelty, racism, misogyny, and hierarchy. They criminalize compassion, turning public school teachers, judges, social workers, and librarians into targets for harassment. They encourage neighbors to report each other. They celebrate vigilantism. They ban books, persecute trans kids, and militarize the police, all while calling it “freedom.”

And it’s not just Trump. The entire Republican Party has reinvented itself in his image. From J.D. Vance, who once warned about Trump’s destructiveness and now echoes his every word, to state governors outlawing drag shows while doing nothing about gun violence in their own schools, the cruelty, violence, and even the deaths of our schoolchildren are the feature.

This political movement and the economic inequality it’s caused through 44 years of Reaganism, gutting our middle class while making a handful of billionaires richer than any pharaoh or king in history, is corroding our social fabric.

Families are being torn apart by deportation, addiction, and poverty. Communities are afraid to speak up or organize. Schools are underfunded, teachers frightened, parents angry and divided. Faith institutions are splintered, some radicalized into political cults, others silenced by fear of retribution.

And through it all, the GOP blames the victims — poor people, immigrants, Black activists, women seeking reproductive healthcare — for the problems Republicans themselves have created.

Trump’s America today is in decline, but it’s not because we’ve become too compassionate. It’s because we’ve allowed the morbidly rich to hoard wealth, the powerful to dodge responsibility, and the cruel to dominate the public square.

And yet history tells us there’s another way. Compassion is not weakness; it’s the glue of civilization and has been throughout human history.

FDR built the New Deal on compassion. LBJ built the Great Society on the moral imperative to lift up the least among us. Democrats fought — against fierce Republican opposition — for every major social advance of the last century: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, the minimum wage, voting rights, civil rights, safe food, women’s rights, union rights, gay marriage, student loans, public education, free college.

And the American people — time and again — chose compassion. Until the GOP figured out how to gerrymander, suppress, and lie their way into power. Reagan called poor people “welfare queens.” Gingrich told Americans to hate our own government. Trump put the knife in the back of democracy itself.

But it doesn’t have to end this way.

We need a return to morality: not the fake, punitive “morality” of the Christian right, but the genuine morality of justice, equality, and care that Jesus talked about. Of feeding the hungry and welcoming the stranger. Of binding up the brokenhearted and lifting the fallen.

That is not “radical leftism”: it’s the moral center of every faith, every humanist tradition, and the glue that holds together every decent society.

Government is the only force large enough to address systemic injustice, and it should be used to heal, not harm. We must reclaim our government as the instrument of public good. We must reject the outrage politics of the GOP — the hate, the lies, the violence and bigotry — and recommit ourselves to the American promise of liberty and justice for all.

Only 26% of eligible voters made Donald Trump president in 2024. That means three out of four Americans either didn’t vote or voted against him. We are the majority. But we must act like it.

Double-check your voter registration — every month — especially if you live in a Red state, where Republican-led purges are removing people from the rolls by the hundreds of thousands as you’re reading these words.

They are afraid of your voice. They are afraid of your compassion. They are afraid that if you show up, their cruelty will lose.

We are better than this complete repudiation of the ideals, aspirations, and founding visions of America. And now, more than ever, we must prove it. Not with hashtags or thoughts and prayers but with votes, with organizing, with moral clarity, and with the unshakable belief that in America, cruelty should never again become policy.

Let’s bring compassion and morality back to the center of American life, and demand that our elected representatives and those running for office do the same. Before it’s too late.

Pass it along.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Trump’s Cruelty Machine”

The song that was inspired by this article is here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is here.
My newest book, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink comes out soon and is now available for pre-order.
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