What Explains the Sadism of Trump World?

court’s order to fund food stamps in full for November, taking their insistence on only partial funding to the appeals court. And in an action that betrays this supposedly populist regime as a fraud, the Trump scrooges even went to the extreme of demanding that states ‘undo’ any full-funding of their own, threatening them with harsh financial penalties should they disobey.

The administration fought the courts to take food off the dinner table of 42 million families and their children, using them as hostages for the political purpose of trying to force Democrats to vote for a funding bill that rolled back Obamacare subsidies for an expected 14 million families, many undoubtedly the same as those going without food. Trump tweeted:

“I do NOT want Americans to go hungry just because the Radical Democrats refuse to do the right thing and REOPEN THE GOVERNMENT”

But he did so. He would have let Americans go hungry had the Democrats not relented.

As a policy of deliberate cruelty, the sudden spending freeze and evisceration of USAID has no equal. An agency that employed more than 10,000, two-thirds on foreign shores, the U.S. Agency for International Development was cut to less than 300 in March, even leaving workers stranded abroad. Money ran out, contracts were summarily cancelled, supply shipments halted. Food was left to rot on docks and in ships, medicines left to expire. At the hands of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and “special employee” Elon Musk, it was brutal chaos that gave no thought whatever to its consequences.

Musk seemed to revel in cruelty. Millions around the world have benefited from U.S. aid but for him he was gleefully feeding USAID “into the wood chipper”. At a conservative gathering in February he wielded a chain-saw, emblematic of his working to reduce government by taking away the jobs and livelihoods of thousands of federal workers. "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy", he said on Joe Rogan’s show. Bill Gates, with his long record of humanitarian work around the world, said about Musk in The Financial Times

"The picture of the world's richest man killing the world's poorest children is not a pretty one".

The suspension of foreign aid grants, funds allocated by Congress that the administration is not free to withhold (impound), was ruled unlawful and with “catastrophic effect on the humanitarian missions” by D.C. District Court Judge Amir H. Ali. The Supreme Court agreed, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joining the court’s three liberal justices to order that the funding freeze be lifted.

Rather than attempt to restore humanitarian aid, the Trump administration in July pushed $9 billion back to Congress that was intended for USAID, National Public Radio, and the Public Broadcasting System. Then, as the end of the fiscal year approached when unused funding would expire, the administration went so far as to keep another $4.9 billion unspent and even go to the Supreme Court in defiance of Judge Ali’s demand that the congressionally allocated foreign aid monies be put to use as Congress intended.

This time the Court ruled in Trump’s favor, allowing the funding to expire, maintaining in just two paragraphs that the harm to the president’s ability to conduct foreign policy by ruling in Ali’s favor would “outweigh the potential harm” to the groups being denied funding. By halting $5 billion in food aid and life-saving medicines because our president must have his way to inflict harm, the Court signed on to the Trump cruelty agenda.

The effects of the abrupt and total cancellation of aid to poor countries were immediate. Nicolas Kristof, who seems to have spent several lifetimes traveling back and forth to the world’s most devastatingly poor regions, writes at The New York Times. He relates that since the disappearance of USAID…

”I’ve made three trips to Africa to report on children dying as a result of President Trump slashing humanitarian aid programs — his most lethal policy.
Gone - the pride we took in seeing photos like this with America's gift modestly stated.

In village after village I’ve found children perishing for want of $2 anti-malaria mosquito nets or 12-cent-a-day AIDS medicines.”

Kristof recounts by name the deaths of children he has witnessed for lack of these simple preventives. About one child,

“’It was aid cuts’, her mom told me — without bitterness or any sense of entitlement, simply stating a fact that is obvious on the ground here. ‘People are dying every day and night.’”

Marco Rubio says aid cuts have not killed anyone.

Public health programs have collapsed from the interrupted flow of vaccines, medicines, vitamin A and other supplements, de-worming drugs, and the low cost of local healthcare workers to administer them but who have been forced to find work elsewhere. Without mosquito nets villagers contract malaria. Without malaria drugs, the death count soars.

Diphtheria, a highly contagious bacterial killer of children defeated by a five-in-one vaccine combination, is on the rise, once again because of the end of American aid. A hospital in Mogadishu, Somalia, reports a twenty-fold increase this year over last, for example.

Huge stockpiles of a miraculous cure of malnourishment have sat all this year in warehouses in Georgia and Rhode Island. It’s a peanut paste with added micronutrients known as RUTF that in foil packets costing only 50 cents each has save millions of children’s lives by immediately halting body wasting. Yet in an unfathomable act of cruelty, there they are left – over 485,000 cases costing $10,000 a day just to store, over $600,000 so far — an utter waste apart from Rubio and his State Department allowing children to die rather than bringing them back from the brink of death.

There’s more. The Trump administration is trying to force incineration of $9.7 million in contraceptives sitting in a warehouse in Belgium. This is at cross-purpose inexplicably with the reduction of aid needed were women in African nations to give birth to fewer children. Before the USAID shutdown, the U.S. helped more than 47 million women every year prevent 8.1 million unintended pregnancies.

Most extraordinary, considering it was a program begun by fellow Republican President George W. Bush, was the Trump administration choking off the flow of HIV drugs that prevent AIDS and are credited with saving some 26 million lives in developing nations since the program began. In July, Congress voted to restore $400 million in funding for the program – the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief referred to as PEPFAR – but at the same time the State Department was evolving plans to shut it down altogether in coming years. People in the millions will be left to die. Beyond cruel to evil.

They already are dying, and in staggering numbers, from the Trump cut-off of PEPFAR, vaccines, food supplements, medicines. Estimates range from 330,000 children and 160,000 adults so far — children being more susceptible — to a recent study published in Great Britain’s authoritative medical journal The Lancet that says the cuts will cost the lives of about 690,000 children under the age of 5 in 2025, another 829,000 next year, and some 3.1 million children under age 5 during Trump’s second term as the result of his elimination of humanitarian assistance.

Squads of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have been given free rein to exercise their cruel practices by an administration that simply denies any claims of brutality. The citizenry knows otherwise, of course, with a
steady flow of cellphone video submitted to the media showing the ICE standard practice of snatching people off the streets, forcing them to the ground, punching them, zip-tying their wrists behind their back, then shackling them to the seats of the detention vans.. Minimally vetting and paying $50,000 signing bonuses, ICE is attracting too many who enjoy inflicting cruelty, and yet an appeals court has just reversed a lower court’s prohibition of ICE’s excessive force.

We have as president a sociopath who cares nothing for humanity and cannot speak of migrants without reminding us that they are criminals, rapists, released convicts, mental defectives, “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood” with only some of them good people. He demanded deportations of a million migrants this year, which henchman Stephen Miller was only too happy to enforce. It equates to 3,000 a day and has caused ICE to sweep up people indiscriminately – day laborers looking for work in Home Depot parking lots, car washers, landscapers, restaurant cooks, anyone with brown skin or speaking Spanish, even American citizens. To fill Miller’s quota, the administration long ago had to drop its supposed intention only to arrest “the worst of the worst”. ICE now detains and deports even undocumented families who have lived in the U.S. for decades, raising kids, and living useful, productive lives.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem showboats before captives at the El Salvador prison.

Not content with simple deportation, Trump shipped to El Salvador 252 Venezuelans where they were incarcerated in that country’s most notoriously inhumane prison, the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT. Months later, all were released in a prisoner swap and sent to Venezuela where they returned to their homes. The Times located 40 of them who said they had been trampled, kicked, hit on the ribs, on the legs; forced to perform oral sex on hooded guards; their heads forced into buckets of water to simulate drowning; made to kneel for hours with their hands cuffed behind their backs in a “crane” posture and then lifted by the arms; and subjected to bright lighting never turned off 24 hours a day. Told by guards they would spend the rest of their lives there, they began cutting themselves to write protest messages in blood on their bed sheets.

This was the horrifically cruel treatment Trump thought fitting for the Venezuelans who, in the alternate reality world he creates, were decreed to be members of a notorious gang for which he had no proof, nor proof of crimes committed even if gang members. But he sent them to a torture prison anyway.

Are the prisoners telling the truth? The Times found their stories and wounds consistent and persuasive, bolstered by their dispersal across Venezuela inhibiting collaboration of stories. The newspaper even engaged a forensic group that confirmed those findings, its doctors corroborating that the wounds and accounts of nightmares, insomnia, blurred vision, recurring migraines, trouble breathing, bodily pain perhaps brought about by the “crane” position, all amounting to “compelling evidence” in support of claims of torture.

As for Trump’s rapists and criminals? Only about 13 percent of the 252 “seemed to have a serious criminal accusation or conviction in some part of the world”.

With ICE and Border Patrol pressed to arrest faster than immigrants can be deported, detention centers are packed beyond capacity. To handle the overflow ICE is using private prisons, local jails, hotels, hospitals, airports, and military bases.

These facilities are not uniformly equipped. Those released report sleeping on a concrete floor in head-by-toe formation with aluminum blankets to cover them, spending their days in cramped spaces with one toilet for 35 to 40 men (and no privacy in its use), and going a week without a shower. Some report violence, medical neglect, poor food in tiny portions. Medications for diabetes, high blood pressure and other chronic health matters are not logistically distributed across the chaos of private prisons, local jails, hotels, hospitals, airports, and military bases ICE has had to enlist to handle the overflow. Lawyers and family have difficulty finding where family members have been taken.

Here again the Supreme Court brushed aside the Constitution’s banning of “cruel and unusual punishments” to agree with Trump’s argument that cruelty is the point. The six conservative justices permitted deportation to countries such as South Sudan, so endangered by civil war and famine that the State Department has issued a “do not travel” warning, and where the expelled do not know the language and have no ability to sustain themselves.

This is cruelty of indifference, of plucking a policy out of the air (Trump’s one million deportee quota) and then paying no attention to the effect on humans. And in the case of Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem, not giving a damn if conditions are intolerable. Noem shamelessly goes to El Salvador to pose in front of her captives. What sort of mentality does that? Her Department of Homeland Security dismisses counterclaims saying all detainees “are provided with proper meals, medical treatment, and have opportunities to communicate with their family members and lawyers.”

As columnist David French says, “If someone is here illegally they are still entitled to be treated with dignity and humanity”. Not in Trump world, where he and his fake Christian cohort are energized by pervasive hate others.

Please subscribe if you haven't, or post a comment below about this article, or click here to go to our front page.