( Tomdispatch.com ) – President Trump, his cabinet, and those who have profited from his rise seem to revel in public displays of cruelty. Take former Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) head Elon Musk, holding a chainsaw at a televised event to celebrate the firing of civil servants. Or Trump’s White House sharing a video featuring Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers marching handcuffed immigrants onto a deportation flight, with Jess Glynne’s musical hit “Hold My Hand” playing in the background. Or how about ICE allowing right-wing TV host Dr. Phil to film its sweeping immigration raids for public consumption? And don’t forget those federal agents tackling California Senator Alex Padilla to the floor (and handcuffing him!) when he asked a question at a Department of Homeland Security press conference. Or what about during the first Trump presidential campaign, when the then-candidate boasted that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in New York City and he wouldn’t lose a voter?
Violent imagery helped launch this made-for-TV president on his journey into the Oval Office. Now, he’s using it to govern with fear.
As journalist Adam Serwer put it, “Cruelty is the point.” Physical attacks and threats serve both to dehumanize vulnerable Americans (especially people of color) and to suggest what could happen to individuals who speak out against the wealth gaps and other problems of our times.
The underbelly of MAGA malice is, of course, greed. Compare the scenes I’ve just mentioned to the president welcoming to his inauguration not public figures who had done positive things for the welfare of Americans, but billionaires who made seven-figure donations to that very event. At the Oval Office, he also loves to host those who have presented him with shiny baubles — like Apple CEO Tim Cook, who had given him a gold trophy with his company’s logo on it. (Even then, Trump used the occasion to mock his visitor’s slight frame.)
Or consider Vice President JD Vance, who got the U.S. military to raise the level of a river so he could take a birthday boat trip on it. And that, tellingly, was only weeks after a real flood in Texas had killed more than 100 people, while the administration slow-walked aid in response to the disaster. And don’t forget that the president spent about $45 million taxpayer dollars on a military parade on his birthday in Washington, the very city in which he’s decried the homeless population as “unsightly” (and has now sent the National Guard into its streets). Those same funds could have paid for a significant amount of housing for hundreds of people in that same city.
America’s leadership has come unmoored from the values of equality and self-determination outlined in this country’s founding documents. They would prefer to display a let-them-eat-cake America that today boasts more than 800 billionaires (compared with around 60 in 1990), one where the average hourly wage has risen just 20% over the past 35 years — less than half what working people need to afford basic necessities like housing, food, and healthcare.
Mind you, Donald Trump is anything but solely responsible for creating such steep inequalities. However, he’s shown us how little he cares to make things right by cutting spending on health insurance, schools, farm subsidies, and so much more, while attacking the working poor and those who stand up for them.
American Carnage
Violence against people of color — especially workers of color who dare strive for better conditions — was already baked into American history. After all, we’re a nation that supersized our economy by using free or low-wage work. For example, the lynching of Black slaves and later Black Americans was one way that American leaders showed marginalized groups what they might expect if they spoke out.
In thousands of documented incidents in the history of this country, White mobs, often led by wealthy landowners, whipped, beat, hung, or otherwise murdered Black people in public places. (No surprise, then, that to this day, police violence against Blacks is all too commonplace.) Historically, in many lynchings, law enforcement either carried out the violence directly, organized the mobs who did, or at least stood by and watched without intervening.
With recent police crackdowns on protesters in L.A. and on people simply showing up to work, it should hardly come as a surprise that many Black Americans are now being punished for incidents when all they did was exercise the sorts of rights that many of us take for granted like going to school, writing, or gathering without the permission of Whites. Once upon a time, in places like pre-Civil War Virginia and North Carolina, the law forbade enslaved people from gathering for any reason, even to worship. Nor, in the post-Civil War South, were Whites subtle in their condemnation of Americans of color who managed to advance economically or challenged the status quo.
In 1892, for example, the Memphis office of Black journalist Ida B. Wells was destroyed by a mob whose members threatened to kill her after she wrote an article condemning the lynching of three Black men who owned a successful grocery store. Incidents like that may look very different from the sorts of confrontations Americans are now witnessing on their streets, but they remind me that we have long lived in a country where unfettered capitalism at the expense of so many of us thrives on violence meant specifically to silence people at the bottom.
The point was driven home for me by a scene in Percival Everett’s timely 2024 novel James, a rendition of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn told from the perspective of the title character, an escaped slave. The narrator watches a slave owner beat and hang a Black man who stole a pencil so that James could write something. As I read, it was easy for me to imagine life leaving the man’s body as he endured the lashes, and to feel his community’s terror. The lynched man’s last exchange during the beating involves him mouthing the word “Run!” to James, who is hiding in the bushes nearby.
The message of that scene should resonate today: If you want to express yourself or even just live in certain American towns and cities (including our capital!) in Donald Trump’s America, you’d better know that you’re risking your neck. Considered against such a historical backdrop, Trump and his followers could be thought to come by their moments of cruelty — as the saying goes — honestly (although if that’s honest emotion, what a world we’re now living in).
Our Contemporary Public Square
Since the president’s second inauguration, millions of Americans have turned out to stand up for fired federal workers, women, and LGBTQ+ people, as well as immigrants and people of color who have been the focus of ICE raids and extrajudicial detentions. The vast majority of those demonstrators have been peaceful, showing up in the streets or at immigration courts where they take down the information of those being detained so ICE can’t simply “disappear” them. Some have even waved Mexican flags to show solidarity with immigrant families hailing from that and other countries. Most importantly, such demonstrators committed their own bodies, including their eyes and ears, to ensure that people facing increasing state violence in Donald Trump’s America don’t always have to experience it alone.
In the Los Angeles area this spring and summer, ICE raids drew national attention for the frequent way they targeted Latino neighborhoods, with masked federal agents swarming public places and chasing workers based on skin color, type of job, and language. From just early to mid-June, tens of thousands of people actively protested such raids in Los Angeles, expressing solidarity with the people and neighborhoods targeted.
To be sure, a handful of those protesters made the demonstrations less productive by setting police and private vehicles on fire and vandalizing storefronts, causing significant damage. However, it just may be the understatement of the year to say that the law enforcement response to those protests was disproportionate to the threat. In addition to the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and other local police responses, Trump ordered 2,000 National Guard members and 600 Marines into Los Angeles, despite the warnings of local leaders that doing so would only escalate the confrontations between protesters and law enforcement.
And those concerns turned out to be all too well-founded. The police violently attacked at least 27 journalists, using supposedly non-lethal crowd-control munitions and tear gas. All too sadly, for instance, an LAPD officer struck a photographer in the face with a rubber bullet, fracturing his cheek and tearing open his eye, forcing him to undergo five hours of emergency surgery and potentially leading to permanent vision loss. ICE agents typically shoved David Huerta, a labor union leader, to the ground while he was observing raids in the city’s fashion district. Huerta would be hospitalized for his injuries. State police shot a New York Post journalist in the forehead with a rubber bullet as he filmed anti-ICE protests from the side of the highway, causing him to fall and leaving him with severe bruising and neck injuries. The journalist said he thinks he was shot because he was isolated and so “an easy target.”
Meanwhile, at least five police officers were treated on the scene for injuries sustained when a few of the protesters threw rocks from highway overpasses onto cars and one fired paintballs at officers. They were also harmed by their own flash-bang grenades and tear gas. Numerous protesters were, of course, injured, some by being tackled by police officers and others by tear gas and “non-lethal munitions.” Hundreds were arrested then (and continue to be), including peaceful observers and legal monitors attempting to track “disappeared” immigrants through the system.
Not surprisingly, I found it hard to get anything like a full count of people injured or detained in those demonstrations, which leads me to think that one future project of the Costs of War Project that I’ve long been associated with might be to tally up injuries and possible deaths among Americans whose streets are clearly going to be increasingly overrun by law enforcement and National Guard troops in this new Trumpian era. With the president already sending federal law enforcement officers and the National Guard into this country’s capital, surely, in the months to come, he’ll do the same into minority-led Democratic-majority cities (including, undoubtedly, New York, should Zohran Mamdani be elected mayor there in November). In my own backyard — I live near Washington, D.C. — it’s likely that we’ll see an increase in violent confrontations, too.
The rhetoric of the president and his followers has played no small role in the escalations we’ve witnessed in Los Angeles and elsewhere as he focuses the anger of Americans against each other. For instance, before he deployed troops in L.A., Trump stated, “We will liberate Los Angeles and make it free, clean, and safe again,” while describing protesters as “animals” and “a foreign enemy.” His close advisor Stephen Miller wrote on X, “Deport the invaders, or surrender to insurrection.” And note the ambiguity there. It’s not clear whether the invaders are immigrants, protesters, or both. Such statements give new meaning to the term “the bully pulpit” and the tacit permission the administration gave the police to hurt civilians (or else).
Imagine going to a protest and having to worry about some version of those crowd-control munitions or even a bullet getting lodged in your body. Imagine fearing getting tackled by the police and sustaining injuries, particularly in a country where nearly half of all adults are either uninsured or underinsured. Egged on by the highest office in the land, police violence makes a distinct point: it shows that, in the era of Donald Trump, Americans like you or me, should we decide to speak out, could find ourselves in danger.
Violence in Unexpected Places
These days, state violence (or the threat of it) arises even in places you might not expect. Recently, for instance, the Texas Senate attempted an untimely gerrymander meant to recarve that state’s electoral maps, diluting districts with large minority populations and so possibly delivering five more House seats to Trump’s Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections.
In a move of creative civil disruption, dozens of Texas Democratic senators, including significant numbers of women and minorities, promptly fled the state to ensure that there would be no quorum possible in that state’s senate and so delay a vote on the proposed new electoral map. The response from Texas Governor Greg Abbott? To urge Trump to have the FBI find and arrest those senators and force them back to Texas.
That Texas attempted gerrymander is exactly the sort of escalation of tactics that will only normalize the bullying of law-abiding Americans and could lead to the sort of democratic backsliding that, in 2028, might land us all in a full-fledged military dictatorship.
To counter such heavy-handed tactics, we should be ever clearer and more public about the violence that MAGA leaders are likely to commit against anyone who crosses their ravenous path. Sadly enough, television images of chainsaws, handcuffed migrants, and ICE raids don’t simply speak for themselves in the United States of 2025. They could just as easily offer the message that we should indeed hate minorities, poor workers, and homeless people as suggest that this president is violating basic freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution. While Trump and his followers may not always have the courage to say what they really mean, those of us who care about freedom of speech and assembly and other basic American freedoms certainly should — as loudly as we can.
If you have a few minutes, grab a pencil, a pen, or your laptop and make some noise about what you see “our” government doing, particularly when it involves such contempt for human life and dignity. Write your lawmaker, or a letter to the editor, or post something on social media. Make a sign and go to a protest. Stand up for America and against terror. After all, at this point in our history, what choice do we have? Where is there to run to?
Copyright 2025 Andrea Mazzarino
Via Tomdispatch.com
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