Marko Elez, a staffer at Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Oversight, operated an anonymous X account that spewed out-and-out race hatred. He called on Americans to “normalize Indian hate,” said “you could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” and proudly declared that “I was racist before it was cool.”

After the Wall Street Journal outed Elez on Thursday, he resigned. By Friday afternoon, Musk reinstated him at the behest of Vice President JD Vance. “To err is human, to forgive is divine,” Musk posted on his platform.

Yet forgiveness requires contrition, and there’s no evidence Elez has any. He has not publicly apologized or even repudiated his ugly comments. In Trump’s America, you can engage in this kind of publicly performed cruelty without any real consequence.

This, for some, is actually the point of voting for Trump. New York’s Brock Colyar attended a swanky Trump party where one attendee said he voted for Trump because, in Colyar’s paraphrase, “he wanted the freedom to say ‘f**got’ and ‘r****ded.’” An anonymous “top banker” recently told the Financial Times that they felt “liberated” after Trump’s win because “we can say ‘r***rd’ and ‘p***y’ without the fear of getting canceled.”

The new ethos of cruelty reminded me of a passage in the philosopher Richard Rorty’s 1998 book Achieving Our Country. Warning of the rise of a right-wing American strongman in the not-too-distant future, Rorty predicted that such a political shift would also........

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