Trump’s Spectacles of Violence Can’t Hold Back the Growing Tide of Discontent

“My family is scared to step outside,” a student admitted during my class. Around him heads nodded. All were born in the U.S. but most know undocumented people. Donald Trump painted a big target on their backs. “We’re not criminals, you know. We’re just trying to work, and survive.”

After class, I looked at the news on my phone. A December 4 CNN report showed a video of a boat blasted to bits by the U.S. military. Flames engulfed the four men on it. They are only a few of the 115 people killed in the 35 military strikes so far on alleged “narco-boats,” ordered by Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. On that same day, conservative Andrew Kolvet told an audience at Turning Point USA that “every new attack aimed at Pete Hegseth makes me want another narco drug boat blown up.” Hegseth responded on X, saying, “Your wish is our command, Andrew. Just sunk another narco boat.”

Hear the disturbing glee in his reply? The Trump administration has made the spectacle of violence a powerful tool to achieve its goals. It paints opponents with the label of “criminal.” The “bad guys” are my students and Caribbean boats, whole immigrant communities, so-called “antifa,” and transgender people. When people are labeled “criminals,” it excuses others to look away as their rights are violated. The label serves as an excuse for murder.

Trump has sold the spectacle of cruelty for his whole political career. From his time as a real estate huckster to ascent in politics, he made a show of firing, insulting, and now, as president, killing people.

Trump has sold the spectacle of cruelty for his whole political career. From his time as a real estate huckster to ascent in politics, he made a show of firing, insulting, and now, as president, killing people. Trump’s politics have soaked into popular culture with cruelty-for-show like Dr. Phil on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids or the recent satirical film, The Running Man. All of this is possible because when Trump took over the Republican Party, he amplified and expanded a well-worn playbook of racial and gender scapegoating.

The Salesman of Slaughter

“Bring Back the Death Penalty!” Trump wrote in a 1989 ad in Newsday. “I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.” The white-hot rant was aimed at the Central Park Five, the five Black and Latino youth falsely convicted of raping a white woman. When another man came forward more than a decade later and confessed to the assault, Trump never apologized. No — Trump has doubled-down on race baiting his whole public life. Which is why in 2016 he kicked off his presidential campaign by saying Mexicans are “bringing drugs, they’re bringing crimes, they’re rapists.” It is why is he attacked Black voters, transgender people, Haitian migrants, and most recently, Somalis, saying, “I don’t want ‘em in our country … we are going to go the wrong way if we keep taking garbage into our country.”

Trump sells the spectacle of political violence. He uses stereotypes to paint the target as non-human — instead, he calls them animals like “snakes” or labels them “criminals” who are “threatening our families.” Central to a sale of slaughter is an aesthetics of cruelty. It creates a hunger to see those labeled in such a way punished — beaten up at rallies, arrested at the border, and killed in big explosions.

Why are so many buying it? Long before Trump came on the scene, the Democrats abandoned the working class for affluent suburban voters and corporate cash. Meanwhile, the Republican Party set the stage for him, building a throne and fluffing a pillow for the president. The business elite of the GOP scapegoated marginalized groups and the left as a way to build a base for free-market fundamentalism. After the civil rights movement and 1960s protests ended Jim Crow terror and posed a real challenge to white supremacy, Republicans courted white people fearful of racial integration through the Southern Strategy. Republican leaders each put their own unique spin on the brand of racism the party would come to be known for. President Ronald Reagan carried forward the rhetoric of white backlash by making the “welfare queen” a staple in his speeches. President George H.W. Bush turned to racist fearmongering in his infamous Willie Horton ad. His son, George W. Bush, ran on a constitutional ban on gay marriage. By the time Trump stirred up the birther movement against President Barack Obama, the stage had already been set for the kind of racist ploys he would begin to pull ahead of his run for president.

Over his years in the public eye, Trump honed a stronger version of the spectacle. He elbowed aside the last pantomime of respectability for Republicans and made the aesthetics of cruelty, the joy in punishing a made-up villain, into the central pillar of his appeal. You see it everywhere now. Dr. Phil goes on ride-along ICE raids. Pete Hegseth brags about blowing up boats. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem poses in athleisure in front of a prison in El Salvador. Trump posts AI-generated videos of his plan for a “Gaza Riviera” cleansed of Palestinians. The flames of cruelty, stoked by Trump and his ilk for decades, could take time to quell. But many progressives and activists are fighting back against both the policies and the aesthetics at the heart of Trumpism.

I’ll Be Your Mirror

People are fighting back. Not the Democratic leadership. Not the consultant class. Not MSNBC pundits. Instead, everyday people organized resistance to ICE raids. Civil rights organization have sued Trump. Millions marched in the “No Kings” protests, some even wearing silly frog costumes to fight right-wing media lies. Government workers slow-walk or don’t implement the Trump administration’s orders.

At the core of the new resistance is ending the politics of cruelty and replacing it with the politics of empathy. Citizen-led networks are defending migrants from ICE in cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, and in red states like Texas and North Carolina. Along with the on-the-ground organizing has come a wave of stories on left-wing and legacy media that re-humanizes immigrants by sharing their journeys. We see it on Vera. We see in The New York Times. We see it in documentaries like Migrant Crisis.

Over and over, you see in the reportage anxious teens climbing moving trains that go from Central America to the U.S.-Mexican border. They ride the rooftop where wind scrapes them raw. On CNN, you see women wiping tears as she tells of rape on the migrant trail. You hear it in the agony of children crying out for parents led away in handcuffs by ICE. The raw feelings pouring through broken families echo across the nation, ringing in our ears, reminding millions of people, even those who voted for Trump, that we all share a common humanity.

Resistance is beginning to work. Trump is plummeting in the polls as a rising resistance to his policies gains a foothold, and the consequences of his economic policies and the historic government shutdown become clearer to more and more people. Progressives can fight against Trump’s spectacle of state violence by recentering empathy as a political value.

The Power of Solidarity

Overcoming the aesthetics of cruelty with a politics of solidarity is a key part of the struggle of our time. The work of activists gives us hope that the violence that those aesthetics help enable can be turned around. Now Trump and MAGA are stumbling.

Overcoming the aesthetics of cruelty with a politics of solidarity is a key part of the struggle of our time.

Trump’s support among the MAGA faithful slipped. It was 78 percent, now it’s 70 percent. His one big issue — the economy — is now an albatross around his head. Trump can say the economy is an A++++ but more and more voters are in despair. Increasing numbers — 53 percent in a Pew poll — are turning against Trump’s cruel deportation raids. Half think he’s too old to be president and his stumbling, bruised hands and rambling speeches make it hard to ignore his decline.

What people across the country are realizing is political hatred and violence go beyond its target. Hate is not defined by its object. Hate is a form of thought. The dehumanization of others eventually comes for everyone. It is why Trump and the MAGA elite do not care that their so-called Big Beautiful Bill that cuts Medicare and Medicaid will cause an estimated 51,000 deaths each year. Rural hospitals will close. They don’t care. The cost of living is rising. They didn’t care until they saw Republican voters blaming them.

Trump will do the one thing he knows: stir hatred to hide his political misdeeds. The left, led by democratic socialists like New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, is showing not only an alternative to far right politics, but also to corporate Democrats who enable it. The only way we can get out of this mess is with struggle from below. It’s with each other.