ports from vulnerable people, and right-wing media stars brag about ICE’ s brutal tactics.
This administration’ s cruelty isn’ t just directed at migrants or protestors or the poor: it’ s aimed at democracy itself.
When they normalize suffering, when they use state power to punish the vulnerable and reward the cruel, they erode everything that holds a pluralistic democracy together: the rule of law, institutional checks and balances, civic trust, and the belief at the foundation of every functional and successful society that,“ We’ re all in this together.”
For example, look at the“ Big Beautiful Bill” that Trump, Majority Leader John Thune, and House Speaker Mike Johnson rammed through Congress last month with much fanfare and zero Democratic support.
They called it“ patriotic” and“ pro-growth.” In reality, it’ s one of the most draconian pieces of legislation ever passed in modern American history. It strips healthcare from over 23 million Americans by gutting the ACA’ s Medicaid expansion, throws up roadblocks to staying on Medicaid, and cuts subsidies to working families.
It raises taxes on middle- and lower-income households by removing credits and deductions that working people rely on, even as it slashes corporate, income, and estate taxes for the morbidly rich. It slashes funding for Medicaid, food stamps, school lunches, Pell Grants, Head Start, and housing assistance. It cuts Medicare and accelerates the GOP’ s longsought privatization of Medicare and Social Security.
And then it turns around and hands over $ 4 trillion in tax cuts to the very billionaires who fund Trump’ s brutal machine.
Trump and the billionaire boys’ club who got him elected and are in his cabinet— including the same crew that reprogrammed their social media algorithms to favor the far right and suppress independent and progressive media— are now openly celebrating policies that will kill poor people. That isn’ t hyperbole; it’ s the core of their political project made possible by the corrupt Citizens United Supreme Court decision.
It’ s a project built on fear, exclusion, and the weaponization of difference. What began with chants of“ Build the Wall” has metastasized into a state-run deportation machine that operates like a fascist police force. ICE, now expanded and unaccountable, no longer just terrorizes undocumented immigrants; it raids sanctuary cities, surveils citizens who participate in protests, and detains people without charges in the name of“ national security.”
Under Trump’ s second term, ICE has become America’ s gestapo— the word literally means“ secret police”— just as it was in Germany. And like their 20th-century predecessors, they operate by inspiring fear: in our case with black vans, anonymous uniforms, hidden faces and badges, unrestrained violence, and warrantless searches. They are Trump’ s domestic terror squad, designed not to protect but to intimidate, and answerable only to him.
This isn’ t just authoritarianism: it’ s moral rot.