Getting To the Point

OF ALL THE REVELATORY monographs which have been published about Donald Trump, perhaps the most prescient is "The Cruelty is the Point: the Past, Present, and Future of Donald Trump's America", by journalist Adam Serwer, whose collection of essays is a compilation of his writings for "The Atlantic" magazine since 2018. The title essay, "The Cruelty is the Point" serves as the flagship essay: all the others, though equally illuminating, are primarily augmentations and extrapolations derived from it. The book embodies two esential theses: the now famiiar one that Donald Trump, rather then being the originator of "Trumpism", is instead a symptom of it, and that his associates and followers are bound together by one, pervasive, perverse thread; their delight in in whatever cruelty they can inflict of those they despise and fear, meaning those whose beliefs and values differ from their own, and those who do not look like themselves. You can see it in the faces of the people in the first few rows of Trump's frenzied, frenetic rallies: the maniacal glee when Trump mocks and ridicules innocent people, when he promises to avenge imagined wrongs against him, when he projects onto his opponents the hatred and anger they do not feel but he does. To the lady sociology professor who accused Bret Kavanaugh of raping her in high school they chant: "lock her up". They laugh uproariously when Trump or one of his gangster aides mocks and ridicules a disabled person, and they applaud approvingly when Trump touts his policy of seperating children from their immigrant parents seeking asylum from desperation and poverty. This collection of cogent essays lays out in detail exactly how Trump and his followers constitute nothing other than a murderous gang of criminals and traitors to decency and democracy. Trump did not invent or create the darkness of America's far right wing; rather; he took advantage of it by recognizing it and exploiting it for his personal, political, and financial gain. That the Trump movement cloaks itself in a thin veil of Christian piety is a joke, a very cruel joke. Perhaps the most salient point the author makes is that this regressive, backward looking attitude, that America was once a great country but is now infected with a progressive ideology which must be exterminated, by violence if necessary, and must be made great again, has always been part of American values and culture, in various forms. As the years fly past, I become ever increasingly amazed at the Trump movement, even as it begins to subside and wither away. I derive comfort from witnessing its dissolution, but fear for the future, knowing that Trumpism, in one form or another, will inevitably rear its ugly head yet again.