The Cruelty and the Cover-ups

There’s a grim purpose behind both that we all need to be aware of.

Photo courtesy of The Daily Beast

The Trump years will be remembered for its cruelty and cover-ups. The level of sadism and brutality by the White House and its GOP enablers is both shocking and intentional, even as efforts to cover up or distract from crimes remain painfully obvious.

It’s all out in the open, leading to a hard truth: If cruelty is the point, and the cover-ups are so brazen, what result are they really driving toward?

Today I’ll examine recent headlines showing how cruelty is not only practiced but prized, and how very serious cover-ups are delivered with a shrug. There’s a disturbing reasoning behind this abhorrent behavior, but before we get to that, let’s take a look at what went down.

They left him to die

Nurul Amin Shah Alam, 56, had been missing for over a week, and his family was desperate to find him. As a Rohingya refugee who had escaped atrocities in Burma, Alam was in the U.S. legally, and the Border Patrol had no right to detain him, as DHS later admitted.

DHS officials insisted that Alam had been dropped off in a “warm, safe location”—a critical assertion, given that he spoke almost no English and was nearly blind.

But video evidence that emerged yesterday demonstrated that the Border Patrol actually killed Alam by leaving him outside to die. It shows him being dropped off outside a locked Tim Hortons, five miles from his home in Buffalo, New York, at night in the dead of winter. Agents made no phone call to his family or his lawyers to let them know Alam was being released and left there.

He was found dead on Tuesday.

Hey, if Noem could kill her own puppy…

The cruelty of ICE and Border Patrol agents may be the point, but it comes from the very top by design.

NBC News reporter Julia Ainsley reported in a new book that Trump passed over Kristi Noem for Vice President because of an incident she described in her book where she killed her own dog, Cricket, and left the dog’s body in a gravel pit. That incident so horrified the nation that, for a time, even MAGA turned on Noem.

But for Trump, it apparently sealed the deal for her appointment as Homeland Security Secretary. He decided to pick Noem for that post, with authority over immigration policy, precisely because she had demonstrated how cruel she could be to a helpless and innocent animal in her care.

First they came for the trans folks

The deliberate targeting and dehumanization of the most vulnerable groups in society is a hallmark of fascism, and the modern GOP is actively proving that point.

The Republican-controlled Kansas legislature overrode Governor Laura Kelly’s veto to pass a sweeping anti-trans law. It bans trans people from using public building bathrooms matching their gender identity, and it turns citizens into snitches and bounty hunters by offering a reward for suing anyone who violates the law.

In a chilling development, some 1,500 transgender residents of the state received notices that their driver’s licenses had been invalidated. “Pursuant to the new law, if the gender/sex indication on the face of your current credential does not match your sex assigned at birth, you are directed to surrender your current credential to the Kansas Division of Vehicles,” reads the letter.

This is not only a horrifying blow to all those who have successfully transitioned, but is also voter suppression of the worst sort.

Now you see him, now you don’t

Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick appeared in a photo in the Epstein files walking with his long-time business partner on his infamous island. Lutnick had previously claimed he’d cut all ties to Epstein in 2005 after learning Epstein was a pedophile. Then documents in the Epstein files indicated that he’d visited the island in 2012 with his family.

When the photo, which contains no family members of Lutnick, circulated widely in media reports and social media, the DOJ responded by removing it from its database. When the DOJ was called out for making this deletion, it quickly restored the photo, claiming it had just been performing routine reviews for redactions.

Former princes, former prime ministers and top university presidents have all faced accountability for their association with Epstein. Lutnick was not only one of Epstein‘s business partners but demonstrably lied about his association with the sex trafficker, and now the DOJ has involved itself to try to cover his tracks. Yet Lutnick remains the U.S. Commerce Secretary, even as calls for his resignation grow.

A sham investigation

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was forced to testify behind closed doors for some six hours before the House Oversight Committee, despite never having met Epstein and knowing nothing about him. She issued a blistering attack on the weaponization and cover-up of the Epstein files. Her opening statement blasted the sham proceedings:

“You have compelled me to testify, fully aware that I have no knowledge that would assist your investigation, in order to distract attention from President Trump’s actions and to cover them up despite legitimate calls for answers.”

She added, “You have made little effort to call the people who show up most prominently in the Epstein files,” noting that not a single Republican had attended the deposition of Les Wexner, a billionaire who helped Epstein become a tycoon.

What open cruelty and brazen cover-ups achieve

These horrors are all connected in a disturbing way. The open cruelty by federal agents, at the direction of cold-blooded leaders like Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem and Greg Bovino, sends a message of fear and intimidation to immigrant communities, while numbing the broader public to their atrocities.

This is something straight out of the NRA’s playbook. If society can accept the senseless deaths of school children with no real action to curb firearms, then it can accept just about any horror.

As proof that history rhymes, among the earliest books burned in bonfires by the Nazis in Berlin were those from the Institute for Sexual Science, which included research on transgender people. The Nazis understood something chilling about human nature: If they could target sexual minorities and seek to erase their existence, in documents or in public places, then they could do that with other groups, too. The people, after all, will have accepted the idea that erasure and eradication are on the table.

But what of the repeated lies and the obvious cover-ups? They serve a dangerous companion goal. In any moral and functional society, the response to such atrocities must be to demand legal accountability. But when obvious cover-ups are allowed to persist, whether to paper over negligent homicides or child sex trafficking, the public begins to despair and conclude that the rule of law is dead.

That, of course, is the point. When I’ve written about attempts at accountability, a common reaction is for readers to throw their hands up and concede, in advance, that the criminals will just get away with it all.

When this happens, the lawbreakers win. They have so undermined the rule of law that members of the public stop demanding it, because they believe it is futile to try.

That’s precisely why, tempting as it is to just give up, our response must be to redouble calls for legal consequences for the wrongdoers and justice for victims, even if this DOJ and this captured GOP-led Congress refuse to act now. We must develop a far stronger awareness of how this regime’s actions are designed to chip away at our resolve and our beliefs.

It hopes to do so until we are no longer moved by the death of someone like Alam, until we no longer stand up for our trans friends and neighbors, and until we no longer believe someone like Lutnick or Trump will ever face accountability.

Resilience and determination, especially in the face of an endless barrage of cruelty and crime without consequence, are no easy path. But it begins with realizing why we feel so besieged, and what the fascists hope to change inside us.

So the next time you clock an overtly cruel or criminal action, take that awareness as a good sign that your heart has not yet conceded the fight. And if you initially think, “But nothing will happen to them…” don’t allow that thought to burrow in. Instead, let it go after adding a simple word to the end: “…yet.”

A reckoning will come for these criminals, if we collectively insist upon it, when our voices become votes in November.