In Case You Missed It

Cruelty Is Not A Byproduct – It’s The Point

Government by Trump

As has been noted widely, there is a lot of chaos and confusion around government a la Trump. That is not surprising. We saw that last time and expected even more of all that on this round. Part of that is Trump’s nature – he thrives on conflict, anger, resentment, and confusion. Part of that is strategy – keeping people confused and feeling overwhelmed gives team Trump more maneuvering room to get done what they hope to accomplish.

Two other pillars of this bunch are cruelty and destruction.

Cruelty

This core element of the current group in power has three elements to recognize: pettiness, blindness, deliberateness.

An example of pettiness is removing the portraits of a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from the Pentagon because Trump got mad at him for insisting on sticking to the Constitution. Even for Trump, this is really pettiness at Industrial Strength. This is the kind of stuff Stalin used to do in the Kremlin. It is difficult to get one’s head around how one decides this is a good thing to do. Let’s hope someone has a similar mindset about what to do with Trump portraits once he is out of office. What goes around comes around.

Another example of pettiness is pulling Biden’s security clearance, doing so simply because Trump lost his clearance after January 6. I must have missed the acts of Biden that would warrant such an action. To pull the security clearance of former senior officials is almost a nonexistent precedent, one that has never been done before except for Trump’s loss for good cause. That Trump sees it only as a personal tit for tat shows how feeble he is and long has been.

Blindness

Blindness refers to the failure of this bunch to even imagine what impacts their actions have on others beyond their single goals (more on single mindedness in an upcoming blog). Trump and his buddies live in a bubble of privilege. They literally have no concept of what untreated illness, hunger, or fear is like. To the extent they think of it at all, it likely is in the mindset that such burdens must be the fault of those who suffer. A corollary is the idea that some suffering (by others, not by them) is necessary to accomplish other goals.

One of the leading examples of this is the attempted/actual shut down of USAID with no notice or preplanning to minimize bad effects. People literally will die for lack of medicine. People will starve for breaks in the food supply chain. American farmers will lose about $9 billion in agricultural sales. Thousands in government and in the private sector are likely to lose jobs with no notice, affecting families and communities all over the world.

Trump, Musk, et al seem never to have given any of this any thought, and if they did, they decided, without any examination, that all that was unimportant.

A second example of blindness was forcing out the FAA chief, apparently because the FAA had recently fined Space X millions for continuous safety violations, and not having a replacement ready to go. A related example was a government wide hiring freeze when the FAA was desperately short of air traffic controllers (and has been for decades, thanks to Ronald Regan).

We’ve already had two major air disasters on Trump’s watch and have heard zero about plans to ameliorate the underlying problems. They do not go that deep on anything. The closest we have seen was Trump, spewing blame on Obama and DEI for the DC midair, even as bodies were being pulled out of the water. One has to be sick to get to that point.

Deliberateness

Deliberateness goes to the dark heart of Trump and some of his minions as personal character flaws. They inflict pain because they can. They enjoy doing so and believe the fear such acts could spread is a useful asset for them.

Two examples of deliberate cruelty are easy to identify. First, kicking the fired (for no good reason) Commandant of the US Coast Guard out of her home with 3 hours’ notice. Who the hell does something like that? What could possibly be the point other than needless cruelty and the lack of respect for others.

A second example, this one with real risks, is the cancellation of security services for former officials under known death threats from foreign powers and domestic extremists. That a number of these people are under threat for what they did in the first Trump administration, under his direction, carries no weight with this bunch. Perhaps such threats will follow this current in power bunch when they leave office. Karma, baby

Moral and Political Costs

It would be a terrible outcome if such cruelty became normalized or lost in the background noise. We should be a better people than this. My hope is that when the Democrats get control of at least one house of Congress that hearings will highlight and make human the unnecessary and destructive cost of having this bunch in power.

Surely there are others ways and venues to bring this all home now, not waiting for the midterms. A good number of Americans, according to recent polls, think all this is OK. Some of that may speak to our faults as a people, some of it from people not yet realizing what is happening. Time will tell us which is the case.

There is some evidence that people are starting to get it and are reacting in a way that could carry political costs that the cowards in Congress may finally respond to in useful ways. I have seen one statistic that says the average Senate office gets about 40 calls an hour (another report says it is 40 calls a day). Since last week, they are averaging close to 2000 calls for the same time period, with a number of call lines collapsing among Republican senate offices.

Let’s hope that continues and builds. Are you helping make that happen?

See you next week.

Bill Clontz

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