INSIDE
DONALD TRUMP’ S
CRUELTY MACHINE
By Thom Hartmann
In late July, ICE agents detained a 6‐year‐old Honduran boy battling leukemia as he left an immigration court in Los Angeles with his mother and sister.
A child fighting for his life was ripped from his fragile medical routine and locked away for over a month, interrupting his treatment, crying himself to sleep night after night in a concrete cell instead of a hospital bed.
This wasn’ t a mistake. It was cruelty by design: an intentional act of terror by a government that now treats compassion as weakness and suffering as a political weapon.
— ProPublica published a report titled“ Bloodied faces, sobbing children: Immigration officers smash car windows to speed up arrests,” documenting massive use of physical violence, including over 50 occasions where car windows were smashed and examples of people who were beaten up by masked, anonymous ICE thugs. The reporters call this level of police brutality“ unprecedented,” pointing out that no police agency had ever behaved like this prior to the Trump administration.
— The Guardian reported in an article titled“ Georgia detainee with prosthetic legs who objected to flooded cell sent to solitary”:
“ A Liberian-born man detained by ICE in Georgia was put in solitary confinement after complaining about flooding in his cell that he said was potentially dangerous for his electronic prosthetic legs … Since then, his challenges in detention have included the screws coming out of his prosthetic legs, causing him to fall and injure his hand, and being unable to obtain new, fitted legs …
“ Taylor was brought to the US from Liberia by his mother on a medical visa when he was a small child. He went through 16 operations. He has two fingers on his right hand. Now 46, he has lived in the US nearly his entire life, works as a barber, is active in promoting cancer awareness in his community and got engaged only 10 days before ICE detained him in January. Despite having a pending application for US residence— commonly known as a‘ green card’— ICE detained and locked up Taylor in January …”
When Donald Trump descended that golden escalator ten years ago and called Mexicans rapists and murderers, we should have known what was coming. What many mistook for bombast or political performance art in 2015 has since revealed itself to be something much darker: cruelty as a political strategy, an ideology, and a governing philosophy.
On the last day of July 2025, after six months of Trump’ s second term and with a fully compliant GOP marching behind him, it’ s undeniable: this is not incompetence or accidental malice. It is deliberate. Strategic. Authoritarianism.
Cruelty is not a bug in Trumpism; it is the central operating system. And it has become the organizing principle of today’ s Republican Party as you can see from the glee with which Republican members of Congress strip rights and sup-
76 The Trial Lawyer