Why Trump’s Viciousness Matters

He wants to destroy our values, not just our democracy

My first reaction upon reading Donald Trump’s despicable statement on the murders of Rob Reiner and his wife Michele was a sense of both shock and lack of surprise. It wasn’t news to me that the president of the United States is a vicious shmuck. My second reaction was the thought that I have nothing new to contribute here, as plenty of other people were already denouncing yet another example of Trump’s vindictive narcissism.

Yet, on reflection, I realized that there’s a story here that’s bigger than Trump, a story in which Trump is one especially egregious example of a larger pattern. What is that pattern? That being vicious and bigoted is cool, is based in current slang. Trump is one data point in the midst of an epidemic of performative hatemongering in America. And while most of this is emanating from right-wing extremists, not all of it is.

I am not going to present some rose-tinted, Pollyannaish view of America’s past here. There were people who crowed over the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. For most of our history there were Americans who reveled in harming, subjugating and dispossessing those who were considered of the wrong race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity. But we, as a country, changed. Over time, Americans on the whole became more humane and tolerant.

It’s true that significant numbers of Americans were never fully on board with liberal humanism. For example, a majority of white American’s didn’t approve of interracial marriage until 1997. However, we were slowly becoming a country in which open bigotry was frowned upon. Although we were never perfect, there was a growing sense of norms that contained any underlying hatred.

Now the impulse to hate is back. For example, according to a long-running survey conducted by NORC and the ADL, antisemitism has been making a big comeback:

Source

And Trump has made innumberable crudely racist comments about Black Americans, particularly about Black American women. He’s demonized immigrants and Muslims, and suggested Democratic politicians should be executed. But the resurgence of hate speech isn’t just about Trump, nor is it solely about politics. Grown men — it’s mostly, although not only, men — now feel free to be publicly cruel and vindictive, spouting childish insults against whomever they dislike.

Why is this happening? The rise of social media is one significant factor in making it far easier for the like-minded to find one another and magnify their hate.

The app formerly known as Twitter is thoroughly infested with bigots and bots, and all too many people who immerse themselves in that toxic environment end up internalizing the viciousness. Even right-wing activists like Chris Rufo are complaining that X has been “increasingly hijacked by bad actors who peddle baseless conspiracies and indulge their personal psychopathologies.” And G. Elliott Morris’s Substack “Strength in Numbers” has an excellent post on how Fox News polarized American voters and helped break American politics.

However, media alone are not to blame. I’ve been reading the British economist Simon Wren-Lewis, who has been writing about “the growing acceptability of xenophobic discourse” in the UK. His thesis is that there have always been a substantial number of people in Britain — and, surely, in every Western nation — who are socially reactionary and racist. In the past, however, mainstream political parties refused to associate themselves with anyone espousing such views. Eventually the cynical search for votes led to a breakdown of this cordon sanitaire — the Germans call their equivalent the Brandmauer, or firewall — and the latent viciousness broke into the open.

In a follow-up post Wren-Lewis, citing the work of the political scientist Vicente Valentim, acknowledges thatbroader social norms, largely established after World War II, also made overt racism and other forms of bigotry unacceptable in the public sphere. Even people who were privately cruel and bigoted – some of them in influential positions – felt obliged to be hypocrites and hide their true nature.

In time, however, events, ranging from the Syrian refugee crisis in Germany to the election of America’s first Black president, loosened the grip of these social norms. The already-existing pool of cruelty and bigotry, which had previously been veiled by hypocrisy, came back into full view.

A similar phenomenon is occurring in the US, where some Trump supporters are gleeful that Trump’s presidency will allow them to drop the veil of hypocrisy. For example, the Financial Times reported on the reasons some on Wall Street were welcoming Trump’s return:

“I feel liberated,” said a top banker. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled . . . it’s a new dawn.”

But where I would differ from Wren-Lewis’s analysis — although I’m not sure Simon would disagree — is that he implicitly treats the number of reactionaries and bigots as immutable. In fact, as G. Elliott Morris likes to point out, ordinary voters’ positions on issues — and, I’d argue, elites’ positions too — are far less fixed than political strategists tend to assume. They can and do shift greatly based on what people hear.

If this is true, then the world in which we lived until recently was a world in which the general public was steered away from the worst bigotry because, over time, it had been made socially unacceptable. Yes, there was substantial hypocrisy lurking below the surface, but the hypocrisy was a useful tool that reduced the amount of violent and hate-filled rhetoric.

Now, Trump is purposely breaking norms and engaging in open expressions of hate and bigotry. And among a set of people, this serves as a signal that it’s now socially acceptable to do the same – look, for example, atthe extremely racist and Nazi-praising chats among young Republican activists leaked to Politico. While these young MAGA-landers were outed and chastised, it’s clear that within MAGA-world emulating Trump’s hate-filled rhetoric is considered a way of signaling that you are loyal to the movement.

And it’s also clear that if Trumpism persists, we are facing a future in which such behavior is no longer publicly unacceptable. Because Trump’s remarks about the murder of the Reiners weren’t just his personal venting. They were a symptom and a symbol of his systematic destruction of our norms, our humanism, just as he tried to destroy the norms of American democracy on January 6, 2021. It’s a profoundly nihilistic vision for America.

And one of these days, I predict, history will judge harshly those who stayed silent.

Addendum: Trump gave a speech on the economy last night. It was nasty, brutish but mercifully short. It was, of course, full of lies. Were there any true factual claims? So far I haven’t found any. And it closed out with ugly claims about immigrants. A few more words about it tomorrow.

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