The cruelty isn’t the point, it’s their pleasure.

 

Late March, 2025: By now, we should believe any promises made by Donald Trump and Elon Musk to cause pain. The sheer scope and carelessness of their sweeping changes are almost unbelievable, and the excessive and prolonged stress and uncertainty is taking a heavy toll.

A chaotic administration bent on traumatizing the half of the country that it perceives as enemies has us all worrying, what disasters are next? You might be wondering if you can endure next week, let alone four years of this. A quote by President Obama gives me comfort: “The most important job in this country is being a citizen.” Another good quote is from the poem Dover Beach: “Let us be true to one another.” The trick is not to permanently pull away and ignore it all—go ahead and do that when you need a rest, but please come back. Stay informed, not overwhelmed.

A third source of help comes from the ability to recognize patterns of mental and emotional abuse for what they are. The effect of this shock-and-awe blitzkrieg and the type of trauma it’s causing is by design. It is mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually draining not only the groups and individuals who are being targeted, but the American people as a whole. For example, when the wealthiest men on the planet damage veteran’s benefits and destroy farmer’s and fisher’s incomes while saying only ‘bear with me, there will be pain,’ it’s condescending nonsense.

And for the White House to release a video of chained deportees that emphasizes cruel visuals and the sounds of rattling chains, and then publicly call it an ASMR relaxation tape intended to give viewers a pleasant tingling feeling—well, that’s sadism. To propose funding tax cuts for billionaires by firing and demonizing federal workers, cutting vital services, and calling people who depend on these programs “parasites” indicates that cruelty is not just their point, it’s their pleasure.

Mental and emotional abuse share common qualities. If you look up the characteristics of domestic mental and emotional abuse, they align with what’s happening nationally. These include humiliation in the form of name-calling, derogatory pet names, character assassination, yelling, patronizing, dismissiveness, sarcasm, insults, and put-downs. Also control and shame in the form of threats, unilateral decision-making, lecturing, outbursts, and unpredictability. Abusive relationships also include accusations and blaming, goading, use of ‘alternative facts,’ trivializing, demanding but not earning respect, dehumanizing you, turning on you or turning others against you, and indifference.

It’s normal to feel overwhelmed as we watch the cruel “flood the zone” tactics trigger peoples’ coping mechanisms, such as emotionally shutting down, or avoiding the subject. This can translate into apathy, but detaching can be a self-preservation tactic so long as it’s temporary. If it persists, though, it could create a state of despair and learned helplessness where, instead of rejecting Trump and his future strongman successors, many Americans could end up actually longing and voting for the stability and easy solutions these people always promise but never deliver. Even JD Vance called Trump “an opioid for the masses” back in 2016.

Here’s a good discussion by the Mayo Clinic on emotional exhaustion. And here are 5 more tips on how to deal with it, along with 7 practical skills. If you’re exhausted but can recognize that this is indeed abuse, and then, if you can selectively engage as much as your own strengths permit, even a little bit can help, especially if everyone does it. But remember: we should not greet would-be dictators and their enablers with meekness and exhausted overwhelm, we should greet them with public fury and a loud, echoing NO.

Despite the damage being done, there are signs of growing resistance, and on the positive side, we have a strong belief in the rule of law and the Constitution. Amending it so Trump could serve a third term would be very difficult—three quarters of the 50 states, meaning 38 out of 50, would have to approve it. Also, DEI isn’t going away forever, because multiculturalism isn’t, either, especially given our population demographics.

So, the sooner we understand that what Trump and company are doing is a form of mental abuse whose purpose is to demoralize, distract and disorient us to a point where we don’t resist the power grab, the better we will be able to cope with it and actively resist it. Understanding it in an abuse context will help us remember that we don’t have to be victims, because we are American citizens with an awful lot of collective power, not to mention (in my county) the highest voter turnout in the state (87%).

Among the strongest and best things you can do besides speaking out and voting in every election is to get involved in local organizations that strengthen community ties, especially those groups who can take direct political action. It’s also vital to reach out to people who aren’t like you, because history has shown us over and over again that only coalitions of people who are willing to make some compromises in pursuit of common goals like democracy, have ever been able to defeat authoritarianism and fascism.

For more if you want to join the resistance, I’ve created this fact sheet called “Things You Can Do.”