Cruelty is the point, but not just for Trump

Many former Republicans claim that Donald Trump’s myriad acts of cruelty shocked them. Horsefeathers. I find those claims hard to believe since his whole candidacy, from the time he spoke upon descending the famous escalators, to his debates with his GOP rivals, and finally his bullying of Hillary Clinton on the stage, was an exercise in cruelty. If you look farther back, it becomes clear that his whole life has been an exercise in cruelty. Republican last-minute renegades, you weren’t looking, you didn’t want to see, or you are of the mindset that “greed is good.”

The truth is that the Republican Party is a cruel party that follows a crude and cruel playbook. Taking a page from the platform of a former GOP candidate in Florida, and adding one item, it can be summed up in a few words: “less taxes, more freedom, more and harsher punishments.” That is basically the entire intellectual and ideological arsenal of the Republican Party.

We have come to find out what these words mean in practice. Not lower taxes for you and me but vanishingly small taxes for billionaires and the richest corporations. Freedom not to peacefully assemble in protest (if you are Black Lives Matter, you get free transportation to jail but if you are an anti-communist Cuban, you get a pass). Freedom to pollute oceans and streams, to charge exorbitant prices for life-saving medicines and treatments, and to exploit a defenseless labor force deliberately denied unions through a doctrine that would have amused Orwell—the right to work. Some right, the privilege to labor at low wages, with no paid leave or medical insurance, and at-will firing.

Below I detail three examples of a bill of moral indictment against Republicans for their consistent cruelty. It barely scratches the surface.

From the New York Review of Books, Feb. 25, 2021, page 29.

On January 5, 2021, five days before Joe Biden became our forty-sixth president, the Supreme Court issued an extraordinary late night order that cleared the way for the execution of Dustin J. Higgs…Higgs was the third person to be put to death by the federal government that week, and the thirteenth to be executed since July when the Trump administration began what Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor aptly called an expedited spree of executions.

Not satisfied with his Covid-19 policies, rhetoric, and example, which amounted to mass viral homicide, Trump was determined to deploy the rarely used federal death penalty before the guy that he knew might beat him could come in and stop the bloodbath, as Biden did.

Bloodthirsty laws make for bloodthirsty customs, wrote Albert Camus. The U.S. executes more people than any country, even authoritarian China, with many times our population. We kill each other more often than people in any other part of the developed world too. Any connection?

Less guns, less killing could be the mantra of a reformed GOP. But no. The authoritarian personality‘s foothold in America is strong and it must have a political expression, and the GOP is that expression.

From The Miami Herald, Aug. 24, 2021

Leaving money on the table. Florida hasn’t applied for food aid for 2 million kids.

Gov. Ron DeSantis hasn’t yet applied for $820 million in food aid, raising concerns from food assistance groups and others who note that child hunger remains a significant problem.

Child hunger in a country as richly endowed as this one with $820 million of unused free money available to address it is not “a significant problem.” It is an outrage, a scandal, a moral stain on our state and its leader. It is also characteristic of the cruelty of Republicans and by no means an anomaly. When Obamacare laid a significant amount of basically free money on the table to provide health care for the uninsured, the state, then led by Rick Scott, another moral moron, refused to take it. This is systematic and gratuitous cruelty rather than just the moral failure of one man.

From multiple sources

Covid-19 deaths have reached 629,000 in the United States and over 40,000 in Florida. This virus is highly contagious and deadly. This comes under the category of things we cannot control. But we can control what we do about Covid-19. The response of the Republican president and governors, with ours in the lead, has been malignant malfeasance. They have acted more as co-conspirators of the virus than implacable enemies. They made the immoral choice to give priority to economic opening over human lives. By the time Trump was through, the economy was at its lowest point and the bodies were piling up.

That this is not the only way of dealing with the problem is clear from very early in the next presidency. From The Miami Herald, Jan 22-23, 2021. Biden unveils a pandemic response that Trump resisted. He calls approach a ‘full-scale wartime effort.”

Cases, hospitalizations, deaths plummeted. Then came the far deadlier Delta variant, and the original Civil War secessionist states, plus a few others, refused to join the war against Covid and instead joined a full-scale war against democracy.

Philosopher Hannah Arendt coined the term the banality of evil to describe functionaries of horror who make the trains run on time toward the death camps but were kind to their wives and dogs.

From ‘On the Issues.org’

Over the course of his administration the [Jeb] Bush legislation produced $19.1 billion in tax cuts. The centerpiece of Bush’s tax-reform effort was the abolition of the state’s intangible tax.

That was a tax counter-reform! Taxes in Florida come mostly from sales taxes which are highly regressive, which means paid mostly by the middle class and the poor. The state of Florida, with no state income tax, already was a rich person’s Utopia before Jeb and more so after Jeb, with the abolition of the intangible tax. As a result, the state’s public services and assistance, from jails to schools to juvenile facilities to everything else, have been systematically starved of money. Some prisons have become cesspools of abuse and even murder. As we learned during the pandemic, unemployment insurance is miserly and disastrously understaffed.

All of this is cruel, and it was all predictable under the “less taxes” philosophy. It shows that cruelty is so inextricably woven into the fabric of the Republican philosophy that even “decent” Republicans cannot help but to perpetrate cruelty through their actions. Jeb Bush may be a decent man but there is no doubt he is a cruel politician.

A recent series in the Miami Herald documented the extreme levels of inequality in South Florida. The product of decades of rule by Republicans in the nation and the state, and the dominance of their cruel philosophy even when (rightward drifting) Democrats like Bill Clinton were in power, bore full fruit at the worst possible time: amid a lethal pandemic.