The Cruelty Is the Point Read online

  Copyright © 2021 by Adam Serwer

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  One World and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to The Atlantic for permission to reprint the following essays by Adam Serwer: “Is This the Second Redemption?” (The Atlantic, November 10, 2016), © 2016 The Atlantic Monthly Group LLC; “The Myth of the Kindly General Lee” (The Atlantic, June 4, 2017) and “The Nationalist’s Delusion” (The Atlantic, November 20, 2017), © 2017 The Atlantic Monthly Group LLC; “Why Tamika Mallory Won’t Condemn Farrakhan” (The Atlantic, March 11, 2018) and “The Cruelty Is the Point” (The Atlantic, October 3, 2018), © 2018 The Atlantic Monthly Group LLC; “White Nationalism’s Deep American Roots” (The Atlantic, April 2019), “What We Do Now Will Define Us Forever” (The Atlantic, July 18, 2019), and “Civility Is Overrated” (The Atlantic, December 2019), © 2019 The Atlantic Monthly Group LLC; “The Coronavirus Was an Emergency Until Trump Found Out Who Was Dying” (The Atlantic, May 8, 2020) and “The New Reconstruction” (The Atlantic, October 2020), © 2020 The Atlantic Monthly Group LLC. Reprinted with permission of The Atlantic.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Serwer, Adam, author.

  Title: The cruelty is the point: the past, present, and future of Trump’s America / Adam Serwer.

  Other titles: Past, present, and future of Trump’s America

  Description: First edition. | New York: One World, [2021]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021001751 (print) | LCCN 2021001752 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593230800 (Hardback; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780593230817 (eBook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Racism—Political aspects—United States—History—21st century. | United States—Race relations—Political aspects—History—21st century. | Anti-Semitism—Political aspects—United States—History—21st century. | Trump, Donald, 1946– —Political and social views. | Cruelty—Social aspects. | Communication in politics—United States—History—21st century. | United States—Politics and government—2017–

  Classification: LCC E185.615 .S395 2021 (print) | LCC E185.615 (ebook) | DDC 305.800973/0905—dc23

  LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/2021001751

  LC ebook record available at lccn.loc.gov/2021001752

  oneworldlit.com

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Susan Turner, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Greg Mollica

  Cover image: Peter van Agtmael/Magnum Photos

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  A Note to the Reader

  Introduction: Promises Made, Promises Kept

  1

  The Cruelty of Backlash

  Is This the Second Redemption?

  2

  The Cruelty of the Lost Cause

  The Myth of the Kindly General Lee

  3

  The Cruelty of the Lies We Tell Ourselves

  The Nationalist’s Delusion

  4

  The Cruelty of Reconciliation

  Civility Is Overrated

  5

  The Cruelty of the Mob

  The Cruelty Is the Point

  6

  The Cruelty of the Nativists

  White Nationalism’s Deep American Roots

  7

  The Cruelty of the Stephen Millers

  Not the Right Way

  8

  The Cruelty of Conspiracy

  Why Tamika Mallory Won’t Condemn Farrakhan

  9

  The Cruelty of Exclusion

  What We Do Now Will Define Us Forever

  10

  The Cruelty of Philo-Semitism

  The Jewish Divide

  11

  The Cruelty of the COVID Contract

  The Coronavirus Was an Emergency Until Trump Found Out Who Was Dying

  12

  The Cruelty of the Code of Silence

  Abolish Police Unions

  13

  The Cruelty of the President

  The New Reconstruction

  Conclusion: The Slow Fall of Authoritarian America

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  The negro still hopes that some day the United States will become as great intellectually and morally as she is materially, to protect and honor all her citizens regardless of “race, color, or previous condition,” and thus make her professions a living reality.

  Ida B. Wells, May 28, 1894

  A NOTE TO THE READER

  Throughout this book, I use lowercase when referring to racial terms such as “black” or “white.” This is against the prevailing trend in letters, but I do it because I fear that capitalization reinforces the notion that race is a biological reality rather than a social reality. Racism and bigotry are very real, but race itself is a biological fiction.

  INTRODUCTION

  PROMISES MADE, PROMISES KEPT

  The day Donald Trump descended the golden escalator in Trump Tower in 2015 to announce his presidential campaign, he made a lot of promises. He said he was going to “rebuild our infrastructure, our bridges, our roadways, our airports.” He insisted that he would “save Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security without cuts.” He would “reduce our eighteen trillion dollars in debt.” The Affordable Care Act would be repealed and “replaced with something much better for everybody.” He promised to be “the greatest jobs president that god ever created.” America’s politicians were “controlled fully by the lobbyists, by the donors, and by the special interests, fully.” But Trump would not be controlled.

  The media at the time covered the speech with headlines like The Ten Best Lines from Donald Trump’s Announcement Speech and The Best Moments from Donald Trump’s Announcement Speech. An article in Politico gushed that “it’s hard to pick just ten.” The Huffington Post announced it was relegating coverage of Trump to its entertainment section. After all, this was the birtherism spouting host of The Apprentice, a reality show star the sitting president had dismissed as a “carnival barker.” There was no way that Trump’s overt bigotry—his demonizing of Latino immigrants as violent criminals and Muslims as terrorists, his caustic misogyny toward any woman with the temerity to criticize him—would fly in a nation that had just elected a black president, no matter what he was promising.

  A lot of very smart people treated Trump like the whole thing was a big joke. At the time, I was at the BuzzFeed News offices in New York City, standing around a television screen tuned to CNN with my colleagues. The grotesque tone of the Trump years was still new and hard to describe. Later, my colleague John Stanton, a tall, tattooed former bouncer who is as kind as he looks tough, said to me after attending a few of Trump’s rallies, “I think he’s going to be president.”

  I was doubtful at the time—remember, this was before Trump steamrolled a bunch of guys who generated a year’s worth of magazine cover stories on the next Republican president—but wha
t Stanton said stuck with me. Win or lose, the dust Trump was kicking up would linger in the lungs. I started poring over old texts about racism, immigration, and nativism, like John Higham’s Strangers in the Land. I found disturbing echoes of Trump’s rhetorical style in Hannah Arendt’s description of Stalinist and Nazi apparatchiks in The Origins of Totalitarianism and had epiphanies about the fragility of American democracy reading W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America. Over the course of his presidency, I would write dozens of essays that drew on that history for The Atlantic, essays in which I tried to show how the ideological currents of the past had shaped the present. The realization dawned that Trump, win or lose, was summoning to the fore the most treacherous forces in American history and conducting them with the ease of a grand maestro.

  But could he win a Republican primary? For the previous eight years, the GOP had piously espoused their small-government fiscal conservatism in opposing Barack Obama, and here was a foul-mouthed, bombastic television personality who had a documented history of liberal policy positions on certain issues and no record of conservative achievement. Republican elites—elected officials, right-wing intellectuals, ambitious staffers—denied that this heretic preacher could captivate their supposed small-government flock with the gospel of white identity politics.

  They were wrong. They were wrong because they misunderstood their own base and the potency of Trump’s appeal to a theme that would emerge more distinctly later in his general election campaign, the “rigged system.” Trump adviser Roger Stone urged Trump to espouse two simple claims: that “the system is rigged against the citizens” and that, unlike other politicians, he “cannot be bought.” These themes were specific enough to be evocative but vague enough to be misinterpreted. The “rigged system” was one thing to Trump supporters and another to many of the reporters, analysts, and intellectuals tasked with understanding what it meant.

  After Trump’s unexpected victory, journalists attributed the win to his success in attacking an unfair economic system, which had served so many millions of Americans poorly. The slow, grueling comeback from the 2008 recession, the magnitude of the housing crisis, the absence of wage growth, the plague of the opioid epidemic—these struggles and politicians’ failure to address them effectively left the door open for an outsider who promised to fix them. Trump spoke often of these troubles as a candidate, but his presidency would reveal his true priorities.

  Five years later, the legacy of Trump’s presidency and his promises can be addressed. There never was an infrastructure bill. Trump’s budgets consistently proposed cuts to the social programs he vowed not to touch. He did little to combat the opioid epidemic he promised to end, with deaths rising by the end of his tenure. The national debt Trump promised to erase has ballooned by almost $7.8 trillion. Trump’s failed effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with nothing remains the nadir of his public approval, surpassing even the days following his incitement of an armed attack on the Capitol building in an effort to overturn his 2020 election loss. Trump has the worst jobs record of any president since 1939, with more than three million lost. He is, in fact, the worst jobs president “god ever created,” despite inheriting an economy that had finally begun to boom in the later years of the Obama administration. The promises of better healthcare didn’t materialize, and the job and wage growth from the economy he inherited were crushed by the pandemic he refused to address. Those were not the promises Trump kept.

  Yet Trump’s grip on the Republican Party is ironclad. The majority of conservative voters are devoted to the former president and echo both his intolerance for the slightest deviations from total obedience and his appetite for punishing dissenters—lifelong Republican politicians who chose their duties over upholding Trump’s will instantly found themselves inundated with harassment and threats of violence. Trump’s word is truth hewn in stone, even if it contradicts something he said the day before. That doctrine is then amplified by a conservative media committed to ensuring their audiences’ fidelity to their leader at any cost, whether that means lying to them about a deadly pandemic or misleading them about the results of an election. Their gospel is as he tells it.

  Trump broke many of his policy promises, particularly those that diverged from Republican economic orthodoxy. But those policy promises weren’t the only ones he made, in that initial speech or elsewhere. His characterization of Mexican undocumented immigrants as “rapists” and “drug dealers,” his vows to ban Muslim travel to the United States, his undisguised contempt for black Americans—these were also promises. They were promises to fight against a rigged system—not the one fixed in favor of the wealthy that Bernie Sanders railed against but a different rigged system, one that elevated the unworthy over the worthy.

  This was a system that coddled undocumented Latino immigrants with benefits denied to citizens. A system that gave black Americans undeserved benefits white Americans did not receive. A system that welcomed Middle Eastern refugees who would inevitably turn into terrorists, while ignoring the people who, as the cliché goes, “worked hard and played by the rules.” It was a system in which you couldn’t even talk frankly about crime, or terrorism, or religion, without some mouthy liberal disagreeing or calling you racist.

  That was the system Trump’s most committed supporters were angry about. It didn’t matter that most of these grievances were false or—like political disagreement—part of living in a free society. What mattered was the sense of loss that accompanied the perception that a certain kind of conservative cultural and political hegemony was coming to an end. For millions whose identities became intertwined with Trump and his politics, that loss was embodied by the election of the first black president and the possibility that Hillary Clinton might be his successor. But others were driven to Trump by the rapidity of recent cultural change, such as the swift acceptance of same-sex marriage, the vicarious thrill of watching Trump put ambitious women in their place, the growing diversity of their cities and towns, or simply the fact that the things Donald Trump was saying—the things that made perfect sense to them—were greeted with outrage. Faced with the existential threat posed by their fellow citizens, anything Trump might do—no matter how lawless, destructive, or cruel—was justified. Trump didn’t need to read William F. Buckley, Edmund Burke, or Russell Kirk to understand how to appeal to American conservatives. He just had to watch Fox News and study its success at finding new sources of rage and fear to sustain its audience’s perpetual sense of being under siege.

  Trump didn’t interfere with the actual rigged system. His greatest legislative achievement was cutting his own taxes and those of his donors, the populist president signing a tax-cut bill even more regressive than that of the previous Republican president, who himself was the son of another president. The slow wage growth of the recovery from the Great Recession was wiped out by Trump’s unwillingness to confront the coronavirus epidemic, which led to half a million American deaths as of this writing. Amid all the families shattered by the plague, Trump to this day regards himself as its greatest victim.

  Yet his voters stood by him, because he kept the promises that mattered to them. He imposed harsh restrictions on immigration and especially asylum. He attempted to rig the census to enhance the political power of white voters at the expense of black and Latino voters. He encouraged police to abuse suspects, then cheered them as they crushed protests against brutality. He railed against liberal censorship, then imposed speech restrictions on universities, federal agencies, and government contractors to silence talk of systemic racism. He barred transgender people from serving in the military and pushed to repeal anti-discrimination protections for LGBT people elsewhere. He imposed new restrictions on abortion and appointed judges and justices—now fully a third of the Supreme Court—inclined to gut or overturn Roe v. Wade. His Justice Department all but abandoned fighting racial discrimination in voting, employment, and education. In the twilight of h
is administration, he made a futile attempt to further rig the system so that he would remain in power.

  These were the promises that actually mattered to his most committed supporters—the promises to use the power of the state to wage war against the people many Trump voters hold responsible for the state of the world and their place in it. These were the promises he kept.

  This book is a catalog of how the Trump administration kept those promises and why. It is also a guide to the social and ideological impulses that brought Trump to the fore. The ideological currents that swept Trump into the White House are not some aberration—they are essential forces of political conflict in American history that have been concealed by accidents of conservative sentimentality and liberal optimism.

  For this book, I selected the essays I think most effectively capture the connection between the present and the past, adding introductions written at the end of the Trump administration to contextualize them. Although the result is by no means an exhaustive exploration of Trumpism—that would require more than one book—I have chosen these pieces because I felt they best filled the gaps in American public memory.

  This book also includes new pieces on subjects I was unable to publish during the Trump presidency, including the myth of the legal immigrant from the turn of the century, the internal Jewish community divisions exacerbated by Trumpism, and how the local politics of police unions went national, and a concluding essay on the past and present of American authoritarianism. This book is a story of the America we turned out to be rather than the one many of us wished we were. It is also a warning that, despite Trump’s defeat, the unfreedom promised by his rise may yet come to pass. Reporters are often taught that journalism is the first draft of history, but American journalism is afflicted by a presentism, a kind of goldfish memory that struggles to think outside the present or recent past. That makes a certain amount of sense—the old chestnut is that the “news” is what is “new”—but an old editor of mine, David Corn of Mother Jones, used to say that the news is also what people have forgotten. The reactions to Trump, whether the enthusiasm or apprehension on the right or the disbelief on the left, showed that Americans had forgotten quite a bit, and I have spent the last five years trying to help people remember.