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The Politics of Cruelty Starts With the Vulnerable

Trump’s attacks on Somali kindergarteners, immigrants, and the rule of law form a coherent authoritarian project. But voters and the courts are pushing back.

President Donald Trump recently reposted a racist attack against Somali kindergartners. Not adults or teens, but 4- and 5-year-old kids. Girls at a kindergarten graduation ceremony in Minneapolis were singing while wearing hijabs. And in an online video, someone with the moniker End Wokeness argued that this sartorial choice at an event bringing community together and showcasing American diversity signified the collapse of the education system and, by implication, an ongoing fundamentalist religious invasion.

Authoritarianism is defined in part by a gleeful willingness by state actors to scapegoat and direct violence at vulnerable minorities, and the United States is clearly hurtling toward this point.

Trump didn’t author the sniveling commentary on the kindergarten video, but in circulating it on Truth Social to his millions of followers, he gave it a visibility and a weight that it previously lacked. And in using his platform to dehumanize children, he stoked the racial hatreds, the pogromista-attitude, that his movement thrives on and that his goon squad is using to destroy the sense of safety of millions of immigrants.

The latest Trumpian diatribe against Somalis didn’t come in a vacuum. In recent weeks, ICE has been ramping up its odious activities, culminating with its agents killing two people within the span of three days. The first was a middle-aged man, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, in Texas—killed in cold blood by ICE agents who, it turns out, were looking for another individual. The second was Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a Colombian immigrant in small-town Maine. Both were shot in their cars while driving to work; both, ICE has claimed without evidence—threatened officers’ lives.

Let’s be clear: ICE is, as it did in Minneapolis earlier this year, killing with impunity; it is operating more like a paramilitary organization than an accountable federal agency, and it is doing so during a period in which its agents are under relentless pressure from the White House to increase their arrest rates.

To meet their quotas, ICE agents are performing positively Stakhanovite acts of labor heroics. Over the past month, daily arrest rates of immigrants have more than doubled, now hitting more than 2,000 per day. Small wonder that, to meet these targets and make that omelet, some eggs end up getting broken.

Of course, if you’re looking for evidence of authoritarian intent, you don’t have to zero in exclusively on Trump’s escalating war on immigrants. In fact, there’s a smorgasbord of choice these days.

Take the subpoenas issued against New York Times journalists after they reported on the security risks of Trump using the Qatari-donated Air Force One as he left an acrimonious NATO summit. It turns out that accepting a deluxe superjet as a........

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