When Donald Trump mocked Dr. Christine Blasey Ford at his rally last night in Mississippi, many of us felt something akin to a muted gasp of horror in our bodies. Just as we had become so benumbed—almost acclimated—to this President’s casual employment of random cruelty, it was still shocking to see the laughing faces of those people in the stands behind him—people to whom we have, up to this point, afforded at least the notion of some semblance of humanity (after all, they were born here), cackling and roaring mindlessly, responding to their master’s gleeful prodding with shouts of “lock her up!”
In truth, it was less Trump’s abysmal dearth of empathy that surprised us, than the reactions of those so-called Americans whooping with him, reveling in the spectacle of their shared, wholly irrational hatred and the prospect of imagined violence against other Americans, a violence for nothing more than the sheer fun of it. A revenge fantasy, a moment of sweet malice for them all.
After witnessing that, one could easily be forgiven for thinking “these are not people who we could stand with. They are not people who we would send our sons and daughters to die for.” We could be forgiven for thinking that whatever it was that that made them human beings worthy of a place in this country, or deserving of our consideration in the first place, all but evaporated then and there.
But as Adam Serwer puts it, in a chilling piece just published in The Atlantic, for these people the cruelty is the whole point.
We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era. There were the border patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant children separated from their families, and the Trump adviser who delighted white supremacists when he mocked a child with Down syndrome who was separated from her mother. There were the police who laughed uproariously when the president encouraged them to abuse suspects, and the Fox News hosts mocking a survivor of the Pulse Nightclub massacre (and in the process inundating him with threats), the survivors of sexual assault protesting Senator Jeff Flake, the women who said the president sexually assaulted them, and the teen survivors of the Parkland school shooting. There was the president mocking Puerto Rican accents shortly after thousands were killed and tens of thousands displaced by Hurricane Maria, the black athletes protesting unjustified killings by police, the women of the #MeToo movement who have come forward with stories of sexual abuse, and the disabled reporter whose crime was reporting on Trump truthfully. It is not just that they enjoy this cruelty, it is that they enjoy it with each other. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to each other, and to Trump.
The shared embrace of cruelty and nascent sadism is the tie that binds Trump’s base of support. Serwer recalls the photographs of early 20th century lynchings, depicting both the lynchers themselves as well as the bystanders to the spectacle, all smiling ear-to-ear, mugging for the camera while the broken and torn bodies of African Americans, their faces grotesquely contorted, dangled behind them from a tree.
A lynching in Marion, Indiana, 1930.
The same cruelty that animated the faces of Trump’s supporters as he castigated an almost-certain victim of an attempted rape last night in Mississippi stems from the same impulse on display in the photograph to the right. It is a desire to be one with the pack, a desire to share something forbidden, and in that sharing, find a shared sense of celebration over the anguish of others.
This is the world that Trump has brought us to. It’s a place riddled with the sickness of anger, greed, privilege, and envy. It’s an un-American world, to those of us brought up to believe in the decency of others.
But it’s a world we should look at with a pitiless examination. Because if this many Americans can so easily find pleasure in the suffering of other Americans, whatever their reasons, then this country has little reason or hope to endure, its pretense to any shared “values” revealed as utterly false.
The other day I was at my gym listening to a group of men talking about the Kavanaugh hearings. They were minimizing what happened to Dr. Ford as “groping,” and all of them chuckled in tacit agreement that her claims weren’t worthy of serious consideration. I suspect this same ritual has been repeated and echoed across the country in venues where a certain class of men congregate, because as Serwer notes (and quotes Lili Loofbourow from Slate), “adolescent male cruelty towards women is a bonding mechanism, a vehicle for intimacy through contempt.”
This is the same kind of bonding that Trump supporters seek when this administration crosses over the boundaries into the type of cruelty that before now, only their fantasies would permit.
Even those who believe that Ford fabricated her account, or was mistaken in its details, can see that the president’s mocking of her testimony renders all sexual-assault survivors collateral damage. Anyone afraid of coming forward, afraid that they would not be believed, can now look to the president to see their fears realized. Once malice is embraced as a virtue, it is impossible to contain.
For some of us with a more cynical bent, the Trump administration has brought out what we always suspected to be the true character of many of our fellow countrymen. It is the same type of character that turned a blind eye towards slavery, the same type of character that ignored, or worse, romanticized, the genocide of Native Americans, and yes, the the same type of character that, on another continent, took mute satisfaction in seeing those railcars transporting “undesirables” to camps somewhere far away to the East.
But most of all it is a character that, once revealed, cannot simply be erased from our national memory. In describing this sorry moment in time, Serwer captures the Trump phenomenon in all its stark revealing of his followers’ true motivation:
Trump’s only true skill is the con, his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright. The president’s ability to execute that cruelty through word and deed makes them euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them.
Shame will never work with these people, because they have none. Appeals to conscience will not work, because they have none.
The only weapon we can wield against them is our vote.
(Credit to Rebecca Traister for Tweeting the Serwer article, and LJK).
