Back in the late 1980s, the first President Bush expressed a wish for a kinder, gentler nation.

A joke going around at the time, I recall, was that he had found it — it was called Canada and now he was going to buy it.

Fast forward almost 40 years and the U.S. has a president whose whole approach seems based in nastiness and cruelty, the very opposite of kindness and gentleness.

Indeed, I am struck by how often in the past couple of weeks I have heard the word cruel used in describing Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the U.S. government as a whole.

We see that cruelty in Trump’s childish name-calling and belittling of people, his attack on the federal workforce, his crushing of policies and entire agencies intended to protect and lift up the weak and disadvantaged.

Who can forget Musk’s disgusting celebration of the destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development, the single largest aid program in the world?

We fed it into the wood-chipper, he exulted — chainsaw in hand. How can anyone other than a psychopath celebrate the destruction of the lives and health of millions of........

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