Donald Trump Wants Us to Find Comfort in His Cruelty

Back in 2018, The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer wrote an incisive article titled “The Cruelty Is the Point” — which he later turned into a collection of essays — that highlighted the “whirlwind of cruelty” in Trump’s first administration, and the ways in which his cruelty encouraged and enabled his supporters.

We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era. There were the border-patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant children separated from their families, and the Trump adviser who delighted white supremacists when he mocked a child with Down syndrome who was separated from her mother. There were the police who laughed uproariously when the president encouraged them to abuse suspects, and the Fox News hosts mocking a survivor of the Pulse Nightclub massacre (and in the process inundating him with threats), the survivors of sexual assault protesting to Senator Jeff Flake, the women who said the president had sexually assaulted them, and the teen survivors of the Parkland school shooting. There was the president mocking Puerto Rican accents shortly after thousands were killed and tens of thousands displaced by Hurricane Maria, the black athletes protesting unjustified killings by the police, the women of the #MeToo movement who have come forward with stories of sexual abuse, and the disabled reporter whose crime was reporting on Trump truthfully. It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.

Jump ahead to 2025 and Trump’s second administration, and that cruelty has not abated. If anything, it has only grown more callous and shameless.

On February 18, the White House posted this on its official X account:

The short video shows police officers laying out chains and handcuffs on the airport tarmac, shackling faceless individuals, and then directing them onto airplanes, which will presumably fly them to other countries for detainment and imprisonment (and possibly even worse).

The video is awful enough on its own, but then the Trump White House saw fit to label it as “ASMR.” The Bulwark’s Andrew Egger explains why that little tag ups the video’s disturbing nature by an order of magnitude (emphasis mine):

ASMR videos, which became popular on YouTube in the 2010s, use specific audio cues to stimulate feelings of relaxation and euphoria in the viewer. The White House video perversely mimics the style: lovingly lingering on the revving engine of an airplane waiting to take off; the jingling of chains as they are laid out in rows on the ground, then used to shackle deportees’ arms behind their backs; the shuffling of chained feet up into the plane. No faces are ever seen. The idea is not just that viewers should approve of the footage. It invites them to take sensual pleasure from it.

Or, as blogger Jason Kottke — who created the above screen recording — puts it:

A popular genre on YouTube, ASMR videos are designed to trigger feelings of relaxation and low-grade euphoria through sounds and imagery. In this video, the Trump White House invites us to relax to the clinking of handcuffs, the rattling of chains, and other sounds of immigrants being shackled like criminals and placed on flights out of the country.

Jeff Sharlet minces no words, calling the White House’s video “bondage porn”:

The wink for a bondage fetishist is that the violence, the control of another, isn’t real; in “ASMR Illegal Alien Deportation Flight,” the wink is that it is. The facelessness, the wordlessness, combined with “The White House,” makes the viewer a role player in the fascist imagination, whether you view it with horror or, like Musk, your own pleasure. Those are the choices “The White House” now offers: you can be the one who chains, or the one who’s chained. It’s about migrants, yes, but it’s also about fascism’s understanding of what it means to be human. And it’s a lie.

On the same day the White House posted their abhorrent video, The New York Times published a long report about hundreds of migrants, including kids, who have been flown to Panama, where they are currently imprisoned in a hotel with little hope of release or due process.

When President Trump took office in January, his plan for sweeping deportations faced a major challenge: what to do with migrants from countries like Afghanistan, Iran and China where the United States cannot easily send deportees, because the other nations will not accept migrants or for other reasons.

Last week, the new administration found a solution: Export them to a country willing to take them in.

On Wednesday, U.S. officials began flying hundreds of people, including people from Asian, Middle Eastern and African countries, to Panama, which is under intense pressure to appease Mr. Trump, who has threatened to take over the Panama Canal.

Now it will be Panamanian officials who decide what happens to them. Because the deported migrants are no longer on U.S. soil, Washington is not legally obligated to make sure they are treated humanely or have the chance to seek asylum.

One of the detainees the Times managed to interview is Artemis Ghasemzadeh, a 27-year-old Iranian teacher who sought asylum in the United States after converting to Christianity, which is punishable by death under Iran’s Shariah law. Ghasemzadeh, and hundreds of others like her, will soon be carted off like POWs to a camp near the Panamanian jungle, in a region often plagued by Dengue fever.

This is what Trump and his administration want us to celebrate with their little video. But it’s more than that. They don’t want us to simply celebrate the deportation and inhumane treatment of Christians and other asylum seekers fleeing death and persecution. They want us to find comfort and pleasure in it. They want to show off their cruelty and they want us to enjoy it.

Sadly, though not surprisingly, there are some who are indeed enjoying Trump’s cruelty, starting with Elon Musk, who reposted the White House’s video with a troll emoji. Adam Serwer pegged this moral failure nearly seven years ago when he wrote:

The president’s ability to execute that cruelty through word and deed makes them euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them.

Trump, Musk, et al. want us to be cruel like they’re cruel, and never mind that it will rot our souls, both individually and as a nation.