"Thirst for the spectacle of Trump’s cruelty": Exploring MAGA's unbreakable bond

Donald Trump is a very successful hate merchant. What Trump is selling his MAGA political cultists — the racism, bigotry, nativism, xenophobia, misogyny, violence, fascism and other antihuman values — is highly addictive. Such poison damages a person’s mind and behavior. With fewer than three weeks until Election Day, Trump is further “refining” his product, making it even more toxic and addictive. Trump does not care if his product hurts his MAGA users, because the more dangerous it is the more they want it. Ultimately, there will be no crescendo or endpoint for the hatred that Trump is selling; he will only get worse in the coming weeks.

In a recent series of speeches, interviews and other communications, Trump is continuing to escalate his authoritarian and Hitlerian threats and menace. Last week, at a rally in Aurora, Colorado, and then during an appearance on Fox Business News, Trump said that he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act to remove Black and brown “illegal aliens” and other “criminals” from the country and also to crush the “leftists” and other “enemies within” the United States. The Alien Enemies Act was used during World War II to imprison Japanese Americans in concentration camps. Trump and the MAGA movement’s “Leftists” and the other “enemies” will expand to include any person or group that the Great Leader and his regime decide is some type of enemy Other.

As a preview, Trump has also publicly fantasized about his own version of Orwell’s Two Minutes Hate or the “Purge” films where his police and other thug enforcers are allowed to rampage, killing and brutalizing “criminals” and other “undesirables” at will. In a post last week on X ( formerly known as Twitter), Trump announced:

We are now known, all throughout the world, as OCCUPIED AMERICA...But to everyone here in Colorado and all across our nation, I make you this vow: November 5th, 2024 will be LIBERATION DAY in America. I will rescue Aurora and every town that has been invaded and conquered—and we will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail or kick them the hell OUT OF OUR COUNTRY. In honor of Jocelyn Nungaray, Laken Riley, Rachel Morin, and all of the others that are dead and mortally wounded at the hands of migrants who should never have been allowed into our Country, I am announcing today that upon taking office, we will have an OPERATION AURORA at the Federal Level. To expedite removals of this savage gang, I will invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to target and dismantle every migrant criminal network operating on American Soil. No person who has inflicted the violence and terror that Kamala Harris has inflicted on this community can EVER be allowed to become President of the United States!

This is part of a much larger pattern of behavior by Trump and his surrogates. During his presidency, he wanted to use the Insurrection Act to command the United States military to crush dissent under the pretense of stopping “political protests” and “riots.”

This week, Trump went even further.

At a campaign event in Pennsylvania on Monday, Trump said the following about his opponents: “They are so bad and frankly, they’re evil. They’re evil. What they’ve done, they’ve weaponized, they’ve weaponized our elections. They’ve done things that nobody thought was even possible.” In an interview that aired on Fox News on Wednesday, Trump specifically named Nancy Pelosi and her husband, Paul, who was the victim of a brutal home invasion beating last year. “These people, they are so sick and they are so evil,” Trump said of the Pelosis.

Trump and his agents are continuing to target Vice President Kamala Harris with both stochastic terrorism and explicit threats in the form of repeated lies that she is somehow responsible for the murders and other crimes committed by “illegal aliens” who are “invading” (White) America. “[She] has imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the third world," Trump says of Harris, "from prisons and jails and insane asylums and mental institutions, and she has had them resettled beautifully into your community to prey upon innocent American citizens.”

Social theorist and cultural critic Peter McLaren explained to me how Trump’s incitements to violence (and his fascist politics more broadly) reflect the collective psyche and emotions of the MAGA people and his other followers:

With the psychological deftness of a cult leader, Trump is able to infiltrate the shadowed corners of America’s consciousness, casting a sinister silhouette that bends reality into a fevered hallucination of chaos and bloodlust. His voice, like a conjurer’s incantation, stirs the embers of rage, mustering both a conviction and devotion that consumes both logic and restraint. This would not be possible if his audience did not already thirst for the spectacle of Trump’s cruelty — a grotesque panorama of cities overrun by thieves, murderers and criminally insane, sapping the marrow of the law that once made America safe for white collar felons like Trump.

It is important to understand that the key to Trump’s cruel and inflammatory pronouncements can be found in his audience. Trump possesses an uncanny, almost preternatural ability to reach into the very bowels of his most fervent followers, pulling from their darkest recesses the raw, untamed emotions that lie buried beneath the surface. With each execrable word, each veiled promise of destruction, he taps into the primal core of their fears and resentments, awakening something deep and unspoken — subconscious elemental forces — a state of being-in-the-world that resonates with their daily consumption of misinformation found in the echo chambers of their favorite MAGA podcasters and influencers. Like a harbinger of some twisted future, he speaks of a purge—a single, merciless day of reckoning — where lawlessness would be met with brutal reprisal. Here again, as with so many of his rallies, Trump’s oratory pulses with the promise of blood.

McLaren notes "Trump is speaking to an audience that since 2016 has come to share Trump’s worldview, his political intuition, his apprehension of the world, what the Germans call Weltanschauung and has created a visceral, almost savage bond with the aspiring dictator."

As the next step in Trump’s dictator and authoritarian-fascist plans, he is now embracing scientific racism and eugenics by telling his followers that nonwhite migrants, refugees and “illegal aliens” have bad genes, i.e. “a murder gene.” Last Monday, Trump told right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt that, “You know now, a murderer — I believe this — it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” Take Trump’s obsessions with good genes and bad genes and couple them with his remarks about “purifying the blood” of the nation by removing the human poison and other human vermin. Historically, both in American society and other parts of the world, people with the “bad genes” that Trump is so obsessed with have been removed from normal society through imprisonment and other means. Such targeted populations have also been subjected to eliminationist violence and forced sterilization.

Trump, JD Vance and other MAGA and right-wing propagandists and provocateurs have also continued to tell the racist conspiracy theory lie that Black Haitians have “invaded” the white community of Springfield and are eating (white) people’s cats and dogs. These lies are an example of some of the crudest, ugliest and most dangerous manifestations of old-fashioned racism and white supremacy where Black and other nonwhite people are judged to be savages and beasts not fit for “white civilization.” These racist conspiracy theories and panic about Black Haitians are part of a larger propaganda campaign about how nonwhites are invading white society more generally, taking over apartment buildings if not entire towns, forming their own “armies” and acting like Hannibal Lecter and other cannibalistic serial killers as they murder, rape — specifically innocent and beautiful white women.

Mentioned as an aside in the Washington Post’s very important recent reporting on Trump’s apparently worsening mental and emotional state and related behavior is this description of his talk at an event in Milwaukee on Oct. 1:

Much of what Trump said here he has said before. He repeated false claims about a U.S. government app directing cartels where to drop off smuggled migrants; in fact, the app lets migrants request appointments for legal processing. He falsely accused the Biden administration of admitting 13,000 convicted murderers — a number that in fact reflects several decades of migration and includes people in federal or state custody.

He also repeatedly praised predominantly White countries such as Denmark, Norway and Sweden while emphatically warning against immigrants from Congo in Africa. And he again said migrants crossing the U.S. southern border were taking “Black and Hispanic jobs,” a characterization that many Americans have found offensive and economists said was false.

“They come from, from the Congo in Africa,” Trump said at the event at Discovery World, a science and technology museum a couple of miles from where the Republican National Convention was held in July. “Many people from the Congo. I don’t know what that is.”

These dreams and idolization of “white countries” are standard talking points of white supremacists and other members of the right-wing such as “Christian nationalists” who view America’s multiracial democracy as a failure and a threat to what they see as the “natural order of things” and white people having total control over the country’s political, economic and other centers of power.

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Social scientists and other real experts have shown that contrary to these White dreams of a white utopia and “superior” “culturally and racially homogeneous” societies, racially and ethnically diverse societies and countries with a strong civil culture and shared values are actually more dynamic and economically vibrant.

Public opinion polls and other research demonstrate how effective, Trump and his propagandists have been in laundering and mainstreaming the ideologies and policies of white supremacists and related white racist conspiracism and white victimology such as the so-called Great Replacement Theory and “White genocide” (these white supremacist conspiracy theory-lies posit that Jewish people and other global elites are working together to somehow replace white people in by importing large numbers of nonwhites) into the United States and Europe. A majority of Trump MAGA and other Republican voters now believe in these conspiracy theories.

"This is eugenics," wrote Beth Shapiro on X. "As President of the American Genetics Association and a human, I reject this. We are better than this."

Trump’s idolization of “white countries” motivates his proposed policies of mass deportation of nonwhite immigrants, ending birthright citizenship and taking away the legal status of naturalized citizens and reinstating the Johnson-Reed Act to limit if not outright ban the number of immigrants from “nonwhite” countries that are allowed in the United States. Trump’s plans for de facto ethnic cleansing in service to making America into a “white nation” are further revealed by how specific and obsessive his focus is on nonwhite “illegal aliens”, migrants, refugees and other undocumented people(s). There are large numbers of undocumented immigrants from “white” countries such as Ireland, France, Russia, Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe living in major cities and other parts of the United States. Trump and his agents have not targeted those people (or based on my cursory search, made prominent if any mention of them) as being “undesirables” and “vermin” who are “poisoning” the “blood” of the nation.

Donald Trump the hate merchant is giving his MAGA people and other followers, voters and members of the right wing what they want. “Make America Great Again” actually means “Make America White Again.” Trump is a political entrepreneur who understands his target market. Social scientists have repeatedly shown that if given a choice between real democracy and sharing power with nonwhites and an authoritarian country where white people are the dominant group, racist and racially resentful white Americans choose the latter. Trump was America's first White president. If he wins the election in November, he will then "ascend" to the status of first White dictator for life.