I can be slow on the uptake.
Back in 2018, the journalist Adam Serwer argued that “the cruelty is the point” for Donald Trump and his supporters. “The Trump era,” Serwer wrote in The Atlantic, “is such a whirlwind of cruelty that it can be hard to keep track.”
Greg Carey
Serwer found particularly malicious the separation of immigrant children from their parents, including a lack of record-keeping that would prevent parents from reuniting with their children.
At the time, I certainly found Trump’s behavior cruel, but I failed to accept Serwer’s key point. I just wasn’t ready then, but it is clear to me now. It is not just that Trump and his administration did and do cruel things. The greater problem is that Trump’s most devoted followers celebrate his atrocities. Trump and his allies are training his supporters to love cruelty. That reality should alarm every American.
“Trump and his allies are training his supporters to love cruelty.”
Publicity stunts by Trump and some of his officials recall some of the same horrors to which Serwer pointed. During the Jim Crow era, for instance, white Americans routinely posed for photos beside the mutilated bodies of Black lynching victims.
In March, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posed for glamour shots in front of immigrants crowded into a cell at a notorious maximum-security prison in El Salvador.
Trump supporters celebrated the Noem images. We know this because Republican U.S. Rep. Riley Moore of West Virginia made his own visit to that El Salvador prison, where he flashed the thumbs-up gesture so popular among Trump and his supporters.
Now, we learned the Republican Party of Florida is selling “Alligator Alcatraz” merchandise, gleefully capitalizing on the construction of an immigrant detention center — labeled a concentration camp by some critics — in the Everglades. During a visit, Trump seemed to delight in the prospect of a detainee being attacked by an alligator in what he called the “miles of treacherous swampland” surrounding the facility. Earlier in the day, he joked about teaching detainees “how to run away from an alligator if they escape prison.”
Eager to get in on the action, U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina posted on social media that she’d like to bring “Alligator Alcatraz” to her state. “South Carolina’s gators are ready,” she wrote. “And they’re not big on paperwork.”
Meanwhile, Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and an anti-immigration zealot, is pressing for ever more immigrant detentions by masked ICE agents. And Trump is championing a domestic policy bill that will decimate health care, food assistance and Medicaid for the poorest Americans.
Greg Carey serves as professor of New Testament at Lancaster Theological Seminary and Moravian Theological Seminary and is co-pastor of Life Church Lancaster.
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