Cruelty

by Eduardo del Buey

PODCAST

Cruelty

“An evil man will burn his nation to the ground to rule over the ashes.”

Sun Tzu from The Art of War

Voltaire once said that those who can make you believe absurdities can lead you to commit atrocities.

Today, the personification of this quote is U.S. President Donald Trump.

Throughout his life, Mr. Trump has lied and spoken absurdities in and out of politics.

And now that he is in power for a second time, he is creating atrocities in many ways.

Encouraging and empowering the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) and letting them loose on society has proven to be a cruel mistake.

Masked and well-armed, with no warrants, ICE agents are intimidating people everywhere, arresting and detaining arbitrarily. Many legal immigrants and citizens have been detained without proper legal procedures. This is both unconstitutional and cruel and reminds one of the actions used by dictatorial governments.

The construction of large camps like Alligator Alcatraz, built at the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport inside Big Cypress National Preserve in Ochopee, Florida, is surrounded by a lagoon filled with alligators to prevent escapes.

This resembles Nazi concentration camps and Soviet gulags, where people were detained illegally and indefinitely without access to courts or lawyers.

Under this regime, people are being taken to countries they've never lived in and subjected to beatings, rapes, and torture in prison-like camps. It's about to get much worse.

Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol identified “massive militarization of ICE” as “the real heart of this law.” She points out that American scholars have believed the federal system in the U.S., where state and local governments hold police powers, provided the U.S. with some protection against a police state.

But, Skocpol says, officials in the Trump administration “have figured out a devilishly clever workaround. Immigration is an area where a U.S. President can exercise virtually unchecked legal coercive power, especially if backed by a Supreme Court majority and a compromised Department of Justice.”

Now Congress has provided ICE with unprecedented resources—much of this windfall could well be intended for graft with private contractors Trump favors. Still, a significant amount of money is available to hire street agents willing to go undercover and do whatever they are told, often against residents and fellow American citizens.

Administration officials reportedly are not only interested in rounding up undocumented immigrants,” she wrote to Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo. “They will step up using ICE and DOJ enforcements…to harass Democrats [and] citizen critics, and subvert future elections if they can.

Another target of Trump’s cruelty is the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” that has just been signed into law.

This bill will take away health care from over twelve million low-income Americans. The elderly and vulnerable will suffer so that Trump can fund ICE and give the wealthy tax cuts, along with other projects that harm Americans.

The appointment of Robert Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services is weakening the U.S.’s ability to deliver vaccines to millions of children and adults. This has led to a sharp rise in measles, once considered eradicated, along with other infectious diseases. His appointment legitimizes the anti-vaccine movement that gained traction during the COVID pandemic.

Other cuts will impede cancer research and efforts to fight other diseases, while also shutting down hundreds of hospitals, many in rural areas with no alternatives.

These are just a few examples of the cruelty the Trump administration is inflicting on Americans.

Trump is a ruthless man willing to do anything to gain unlimited power at the expense of Americans.

But he is not the only one.

Republican senators, House members, administration officials, and cabinet secretaries all engage in these acts of cruelty.

Furthermore, the eighty million Americans who voted for Trump and his supporters support these acts of cruelty.

Undoubtedly, American society has undergone a significant transformation over the past few decades, and what was once unimaginable has become a reality.

One of Trump’s objectives is to influence the education curricula in Republican-run states to include teaching his lies and a distorted view of American history, leaving many young Americans vulnerable to his agenda.

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich remarked that the biggest obstacle to dictatorship is an educated population. This is the real reason why Trump is targeting universities and attempting to dismantle the Department of Education.

It may take many generations of rational governments and a revised education system to reverse this trend, but Trump and his supporters appear committed to avoiding that outcome.

A wise man once said that the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.

This is more true than ever.