In a 2018 article for The Atlantic, Adam Serwer infamously claimed that, for Trump and his supporters, the cruelty is the point. Serwer claims that, for the far-right, “community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them.” This take correctly identifies the fact that the right-wing isn’t ashamed of the horrors it creates. In fact, it relishes them. But saying that “the cruelty isn’t the point” doesn’t get us closer to understanding the ways in which the cruelty is being strategically deployed. It’s a pop-psychology reading that suggests that our enemies are driven only by base, unthinking “adolescent” “joy in suffering.” While this might flatter the centrist readers of The Atlantic, it leaves us no closer to being able to defy or even protest Trump fascism.
And make no mistake: there is plenty of cruelty on display. Kilmar Abrego Garcia remains incarcerated indefinitely in El Salvador, as do hundreds sent without trial to the concentration camp called CECOT.
The most recent available data shows Trump has still deported fewer people than Biden did in the same time. As Border Report outlined in late March:
When Immigration and Customs Enforcement data from removals through March 8 is calculated, the daily average drops to 661 per day, nearly 11% below removals averaged during the Biden administration in Fiscal Year 2024, according to TRAC.
Let that sink in for a minute. The most anti-immigrant president in US history has overseen fewer deportations than his liberal predecessors because, as it turns out, Scranton Joe was pushing the deportation machine as fast as it could go. If this doesn’t cause some soul-searching among electorally-inclined liberals, I don’t know what will.
In other words: Trump actually can’t deport people any faster than he, and Biden, already have been. The federal government doesn’t have any more capacity to conduct mass deportations unless they include mass self deportations: migrants “voluntarily” leaving the country themselves.
This is why the barbaric strategy of anti-migrant terror “makes sense” for the administration. You don’t self deport because the feds might deport you later. You self deport because the feds might secretly condemn you to life in prison in a Salvadoran concentration camp without your loved ones ever knowing your fate. The cruelty isn’t the point. Terror is.
Trump’s game is to use political terror as a strategy of government. This means simply highlighting its barbarity isn’t only ineffective, it’s counterproductive. It’s doing the administration’s work for it. We can’t simply reflexively protest Trump fascism because to protest Trump fascism without understanding the administration’s motivations sets us up for failure. We can’t just gawk at the inhumanity of Trump’s anti-migrant policies because the spectacle of terror is their whole point. We need to impede the functioning of the deportation machine, during this administration and whatever comes next.
Right-wing provocateurs love to crow that “facts don’t care about your feelings,” which I suppose is technically true, if largely meaningless. I’d add: power doesn’t care about your feelings either, authoritarian power least of all. Your outrage, dismissal, or judgement alone won’t stop the cruelty because the ascendant far-right doesn’t give a shit about your feelings. (The moribund electoral left doesn’t, either.) They care about executing a legislative agenda without rioting in the streets and accumulating enough votes for their reelection campaign because that’s what the literal job of politicians is. (And if you don’t like that hard truth, there’s a pithy conservative quote about facts and feelings you can pull up.)
The problem with “the cruelty is the point” discourse is that it correctly identifies far-right policies as irredeemable villainy while leaving us singularly ill-equipped to discern 1) why they’re doing it or 2) how to make it stop. “Our opponents are bad and like doing bad things” might be useful partisan propaganda, but it’s terrible political analysis unless it’s followed by, “and this is why these specific bad things are in their interest and this is how we can replace them with less-bad things.”
Now’s the time to find people doing effective work in your community and plug in. Wherever you are in the United States, you’re probably near an immigrant community and people doing covert or overt immigrant defense work. Hit them up. Get involved. Make friends. Trump doesn’t want us building collective community capacity. He wants us frozen in front of our screens, staring in either sick joy or sheer horror. Riling up the base or owning the libs. In this, he isn’t that different from any other politician, all of whom benefit from an atomized, demobilized populace just waiting to get “engaged” when its time to head to the polls.
Feeling morally superior at the cruelty of our opponents it easy. Doing something about it is hard. It is also the only thing that can provide us purpose, community, and refuge in dark times.
This post has been syndicated from In Struggle, where it was published under this address.