Adam Serwer wrote a book during MAGA’s first term in the White House entitled The Cruelty is the Point. Very true. Millions of those who are devoted to Trump love his cruelty, which they believe is not a sign of painful weakness by one of strength. Killing over 100 unarmed men in small boats on the ocean, and almost that many during an illegal FBI/military incursion into Venezuela to render its president to a US court, is heedlessly, idiotically cruel. His people love that he does this kind of shit.
Trump accuses Venezuelans of smuggling fentanyl into the US and has Hegseth kill them a thousand miles from our shores, blowing up and sinking their small boats and then killing survivors. When the corpses wash up on land, along with pieces of their boats, not a trace of fentanyl is found. Smuggling drugs is not a capital offense, even if proved with a mountain of seized fentanyl. Even if you are a strongman dictator like Rodrigo Duterte, currently cooling his jets in a prison at the International Criminal Court in the Hague for his extrajudicial executions of suspected drug dealers. Still, the cruelty of this random, impossible to justify mass murder, and the unappealable violence of it, excite the grievance-drunk lynch mob that is Trump’s electoral base.
The cruelty is certainly the point, but equally essential to fascism is incoherence. If your explanation for your illegal, murderous actions is completely incoherent, self-contradicting, ridiculous, stupid, senseless, plainly false, a series of constantly changing brazen lies — well, congratulations you have escaped the trap of Reason. No argument can succeed against relentlessly asserted incoherence. Incoherence embraced by the faithful, unchallenged by trusted mass media, equals absolute control.
Ask the Secretary of State/National Security Advisor/Diet Coke bringer what the legal authority for a bloody extraction of a foreign leader is. That this violent, murderous attack on a sovereign nation violates the UN Charter the US signed is beyond question. It is an act of war to kill 80 more people, including civilians, to seize and render the head of a foreign country, and his wife, to “face the wrath of the American justice system” as cruel idiot Pam Bondi styled it. The Secretary of State/National Security Advisor/Ethics Advisor/cheerleader will mumble and fumble and give no hint of any legal authority for the mass killing in Venezuela, or the kidnapping, except to speak of leverage and whatever evasive drivel happens to seep out. He will blandly deny the assertions of his commander-in-chief while dodging questions and becoming increasingly indignant. Corporate media will not embarrass him too many follow ups, particularly once the guy gets testy and defensive. And so it goes.
The cruelty is the point, it frightens the opposition and thrills millions of sadists whose only real pleasure is the deliberately inflicted pain of others. The incoherence is also the point. There is no argument with a willful tyrant who wields incoherence as his final rationale. Ask Mr. Hitler.
Epstein at Trump’s second, or third, wedding.
From The Onion, America’s finest news source.
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