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TRUMP’S REIGN OF CRUELTY  
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Henry Giroux
February 17, 2025
Counterpunch
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_ Neoliberalism’s Embrace of Cruelty and Its Assault on Social
Bonds _

, Stephen Mayes

 

Neoliberalism has always been more than an economic project
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it is a political and educational weapon designed to erode social
solidarity and dismantle the foundations of democracy. It does not
merely defund public institutions like healthcare, education, and
welfare—it delegitimizes them, recasting them as burdens rather than
essential public goods. As a pedagogical and ideological assault,
neoliberalism has championed unfettered greed, unchecked
self-interest, and a notion of government devoid of any sense of
social responsibility.  It has conditioned people to see mutual care
as weakness and competition as the only natural order of society. When
individuals are forced into relentless competition for survival, they
lose any sense of shared responsibility, making them more susceptible
to the cruelty that defines contemporary politics. Neoliberalism is a
precursor to fascism, especially at a time when it can no longer
defend itself as a force for improving the quality of life
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In fact, its promotion of extreme inequality, the concentration of
power in few hands, and its view of democracy as a poisonous vehicle
for equality and inclusion creates the conditions for both extreme
violence and cruelty.

To understand fascist politics, we must reckon with its most visceral
expression—a culture of cruelty. This cruelty is not an abstraction;
it is inscribed on bodies and minds, destroying lives with calculated
precision. As Brad Evans
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us, violence must never be studied in an “objective and
unimpassioned way,” for it demands a reckoning that is both ethical
and political. A culture of cruelty exposes not only how systemic
injustice is endured but also how the machinery of power turns the
so-called American Dream into a dystopian ordeal, where millions
struggle simply to survive.

At its core, this culture strips working people, the poor, Black and
Brown communities, and the marginalized of dignity, hope, and the
right to a decent life. Though cruelty has long been woven into the
fabric of American history, Trump’s second administration will wield
it as an instrument of governance—hollowing out social bonds,
eroding moral compassion, and suffocating collective resistance. In
its place, it will stage an endless array of brutal spectacles, a
politics of suffering in which fear and violence are both the means
and the message.

 Trumpism is not an aberration but the logical extension of a
neoliberal system that thrives on hierarchy, disposability, and fear.
The destruction of public goods accelerates the emergence of what
Etienne Balibar calls “the transition from the social state to the
penal state”—where repression replaces care, and policing takes
the place of welfare. The gutting of federal aid programs, the assault
on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, and the
defunding of institutions that support the most vulnerable are not
incidental; they are central to the neoliberal strategy of
dispossession. In the age of Trump, cruelty becomes an organizing
principle of violence as is evident in homegrown notions of fascism
that define citizenship in racist inclusive terms for white Christians
only, sanctions genocide in Gaza, promotes mass poverty, and supports
the ecological destruction of the planet. What we are witnessing as
Pankaj Mishra
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notes is the emergence of a culture convulsed in hatred and rancor
matched by an ongoing process of dehumanization and a “retreat into
grandiose fantasies of omnipotence.”  Trump’s presence in
American politics appears as the current endpoint in which hate,
bigotry, and sanctioned ruthlessness “have reached a new peak of
ferocity.”
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Trump’s upcoming budget will epitomize this cruelty. There is no
question it will slash funding for “health care via the Medicaid
program and reduce access to food assistance via the Supplemental
Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).”
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there will be further cuts to Medicaid, low-income housing, job
training, and safety net programs for children to fund $4.5 million
tax breaks for billionaires and the largest military buildup since the
1980s. As Robert Reich has pointed out, this is not a question of
fiscal responsibility but of priorities: the poor and working class
are sacrificed on the altar of militarism and corporate welfare
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The ideology of hardness, as Adam Serwer
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notes, runs through American culture like an electric current,
ensuring that suffering is not just tolerated but celebrated. Under
the grip of gangster capitalism, especially as Trump’s second
administration unfolds, the essence of politics is not merely
diminished but obliterated, erasing the fundamental possibility of
human community and the emancipatory power of the social, public
goods, and the global commons.

TRUMPISM AND THE POLITICIZATION OF CRUELTY

Trumpism is not simply a reaction to neoliberal decay; it is the
explicit performance of cruelty as an ideological principle. Unlike
past presidents who, however flawed, at least feigned a commitment to
democratic ideals, Trump embraces a politics of humiliation and
vengeance. In a series of actions emblematic of authoritarian
retribution, Trump has systematically targeted individuals he
perceives as adversaries, employing state mechanisms to exact his
personal vengeance. Notably, he revoked the security clearances of
former President Joe Biden, Letitia James, the New York attorney
general, and Alvin L Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, both of
whom prosecuted him
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Further intensifying this campaign of fear, terror, and intimidation,
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, under Trump’s directive, stripped
retired General Mark Milley and Anthony Fauci, among others,  of
their security detail and clearance
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actions that not only humiliate but also endanger those who have
previously challenged or criticized the administration. There is no
appeal to our better moral and democratic ideals here. This approach
to governance thrives on retribution, weaponizing state power to
instill fear, suppress dissent, and erode democratic principles.. This
is the ideology of fascist barbarism, with its knee-jerk contempt for
“all that is reflective, critical, and pluralistic.
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The death of moral authority in politics breeds a climate of cruelty
in which the unimaginable is normalized. For instance, the alleged
helping hand of the U.S. has now been turned into a brutal fist,
accompanied by the sneers of billionaire techno zombies, such as Mark
Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos, who endorse an anthology of
proto-Nazi sentiments.
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else to explain Trump’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for
International Development (USAID), leading to the suspension of
essential services, including HIV treatment in Uganda and cholera
prevention in Bangladesh, exacerbating global health crises? How else
to explain Trump pushing for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in
Gaza in order to build beachfront property along with  his
intensified efforts to deport millions of undocumented immigrants,
planning mass deportations on a scale unprecedented in modern American
history.

Furthermore, the administration has aggressively targeted sanctuary
cities—jurisdictions that limit cooperation with federal immigration
enforcement—by threatening to withhold federal funding and prosecute
local officials who uphold sanctuary policies. These measures not only
undermine public safety and erode trust between immigrant communities
and law enforcement, but they make clear a governance style deeply
rooted in vindictiveness, leveraging the apparatus of the state to
intimidate and punish, thereby eroding democratic norms and fostering
a climate of fear.

For Trump, governance has never been about serving the public but
about wielding power as a cudgel against the weak, His rallies have
always embodied a theater of cruelty and spectacle that encouraged his
supporters to find joy in the suffering of others. His celebration of
violence as a legitimate tool of political power is thoroughly
documented.  Whether mocking a disabled reporter, humiliating women,
referring to undocumented immigrants as vermin, or encouraging police
brutality
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Trump has a long history of cultivating cruelty not as an unfortunate
byproduct but as the very glue that held his movement together. In
this worldview, empathy is weakness, and domination is strength.

Trump has fully embraced the logic of state-sponsored violence and
weaponized governance, ensuring that social abandonment and the
politics of disposability and extermination is not just a byproduct of
neoliberal policy but a core feature of state ideology. This
orchestrated form of domestic terrorism targets marginalized
communities and those courageous enough to hold power accountable,
waging an unrelenting war against advocates of justice, equality, and
freedom. America is at war with itself.

MANUFACTURED PRECARITY AND THE WEAPONIZATION OF RESENTMENT

The devastation wrought by neoliberal fascism creates widespread
precarity, forcing people into conditions of perpetual insecurity.
When social safety nets are dismantled and economic mobility is
stalled, individuals become more desperate for stability, making them
prime targets for right-wing demagogues who offer scapegoats rather
than solutions. Trumpism exploits this desperation by redirecting
economic anxiety toward manufactured enemies—immigrants, welfare
recipients, transgender individuals, Black and Brown people, and
marginalized communities—rather than toward the corporate and
political elites responsible for social decline.

Central to the weaponization of resentment is the takeover of those
old and new cultural apparatuses that shape mass consciousness,
individual and collective agency, and social values. Citizens are
increasingly constructed through a mass produced language of contempt
for the vulnerable, poor, and others considered unworthy. A constant
torrent of hate and bigotry now spreads with tsunami force through
podcasts, corporate controlled media, and right wing platforms,  all
of which legitimate an ideology of hardness, cruelty, and lies,
sapping the strength of social relations and individual character,
moral compassion and collective action. As I have said elsewhere
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“Algorithmic authoritarianism and neoliberalism’s
‘disimagination machines’ have gutted the public sphere, eroding
critical thought with conformity and turning truth into the enemy of
politics and everyday life. Historical consciousness is now deemed as
dangerous, and dissent is branded as treason.” Matters of life,
death, and politics now converge in a MAGA party shaped by asocial and
ocular order marked by a militaristic and misogynistic notion of
masculinity, the celebration of profit over human needs, and an
addiction to violence. Shared values and truths have given way to
political corruption and the allure of escape from moral
responsibility.

Trump and his corporate sycophants are erecting a vast cultural
machinery designed to mold individuals into subjects fit for
authoritarian rule. This is a subject governed by fear, stripped of
agency, and molded into the shape of blind devotion—a body
surrendered to the iron grip of the strongman
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pull of certainty.

Ensnared in a culture of ignorance, they drift in the fog of
anti-intellectualism, where thinking is neither required nor desired.
Difference becomes anathema—the Other—an enemy, a poison to be
eliminated. They are prisoners of language, trapped within what Zadie
Smith calls autoimprisonment
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where words do not liberate but constrict, where thought itself is
reduced to the blinding poison of manufactured ignorance and consent.
Their world flattens into crude binaries—good and evil, us and them,
purity and contamination. Complexity is the first casualty, sacrificed
on the altar of simplicity, where nuance is a threat and history is
rewritten to serve power. This is not merely a political issue; it is
existential. It is the slow, methodical erasure of the ability to
question, to dissent, to see beyond the walls built around them. It is
fascism’s most insidious triumph: not just the crushing of
resistance, but the engineering of subjects who no longer know they
should resist at all.

Trump’s “rancid and irredeemable character
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now washes over America in pandemic-like fashion, weakening the body
politic and degrading the substance of language itself. His ruthless
attack on transgender athletes, his claim that the collision of an
Army helicopter with a commercial airliner was the result of “the
Federal Aviation Authority… hiring disabled people as air traffic
controllers—saying they suffered from ‘intellectual disability,
psychiatric disability, and dwarfism”
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and his false claim that government agencies were funding
“transgender comic books” and “sex changes” in foreign
countries do more than legitimate toxic policy changes. What is in
fact at work here is an ideological crusade designed to reinforce
white supremacist and patriarchal hierarchies. Balibar describes this
as the “preventive counterrevolution”—a strategy where extreme
violence and mass insecurity are systematically used to prevent
collective movements of emancipation.

FROM NEOLIBERAL DECAY TO FASCIST RESTORATION

Neoliberalism does not simply fail; it creates the conditions for
authoritarian restoration. As public goods are gutted and civic life
is eroded, the only function left for the state is repression. This is
why the rise of Trumpism has coincided with an expansion of the police
state, the criminalization of protest, and the increasing use of the
judiciary as a tool for political warfare. The collapse of the social
leaves a vacuum, and that vacuum is filled by the authoritarian
impulse to restore order through force.

One of the defining features of authoritarian rule is the alignment of
the state with extralegal violence. Under the first Trump
administration, we saw the embrace of white supremacist militias, the
incitement of political violence, and the normalization of attacks on
journalists, educators, and activists. These tactics are not
aberrations; they are hallmarks of a system in transition—from
neoliberal disorder to fascist consolidation. Balibar’s warning that
globalization has divided the world into “life zones and death
zones” is evident in Trump’s policies, which privileged corporate
elites while criminalizing the poor, dispossessed, and marginalized.

THE FIGHT FOR PUBLIC GOODS AS THE FIGHT FOR DEMOCRACY

The fight against this culture of cruelty cannot be waged solely
through electoral politics; it demands a radical reimagining of public
goods as the bedrock of democracy. The call for universal healthcare,
free public education, living wages, and strong labor protections is
not merely about economic policy—it is a direct act of resistance
against an authoritarian logic that reduces human life to mere
survival. More pointedly, it is a rejection of the false equation of
democracy with capitalism–a system driven almost exclusively by
financial interests and beholden to two political parties that are
hard-wired to produce and reproduce neoliberal violence . Resistance
begins with language, with exposing power, and in this era of
resurgent fascism, the most urgent task is to make clear that
neoliberal capitalism is not a pillar of democracy but its
betrayal—a gateway to fascism, not freedom.

Balibar argues that democracy requires an “insurrectional
element”—a constant struggle against the forces that seek to
exclude and dehumanize. The political order is always fragile, always
in need of radical renewal. Rebuilding the social is not merely about
reversing neoliberal policies but about reclaiming politics from those
who have weaponized it as a tool of domination.

Democracy cannot survive in a society where people are forced into
constant competition for dwindling resources. Without public goods,
civic life collapses, and despair takes its place. Hope, in this
context, is not naïve optimism but a call to organized resistance—a
refusal to accept the conditions of cruelty as inevitable. The
challenge ahead is not only to expose the logic of neoliberal
destruction but to fight for a future in which public life is not
dictated by profit, and social solidarity is not dismissed as a relic
of the past.

With Trump’s second term looming, the stakes could not be higher.
Fascism is no longer a distant threat but an unfolding reality,
accelerating the collapse of democratic institutions and the expansion
of state violence. What is particularly dangerous in this new world
order is that Trump and his rich Vichy tech stooges are not simply out
to get more tax cuts. The threat they pose is much larger. It is about
the resurgence of a totalitarian instrumentalism which, as Mike Brock
notes in a recent essay, _The Plot Against America_
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not about efficiency. It is about erasure. Democracy is being deleted
in slow motion, replaced by proprietary technology and AI models. This
is a coup—not with guns, but with backend migrations and erased
databases, a digital purge designed to rewrite history and consolidate
power.”  Under the Trump administration, this erasure will
accelerate alongside acts of overt violence. Countering this new stage
of state brutality requires not only understanding the deep roots of
neo-fascism in the United States but dismantling the economic,
political, and cultural forces that sustain it.

Writing in The New European
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Suzanne Schneider delivers a sharp critique of far-right ideologue
Curtis Yarvin’s embrace of “turbocapitalism.” She notes that
“the engineers… represent the triumph of instrumental reason in
our new century. They fetishize efficiency and understand the
democratic state as an impediment to the sort of ‘progress’ they
desire.” This is not just about controlling information systems; it
is a clear indication that education itself has become a political
battleground. In this framework, knowledge is no longer a means of
enlightenment but a tool for reinforcing authoritarian power.

Only through a massive educational and political struggle can we
dismantle the culture of cruelty and its underlying form of
“turbocapitalism,” which has taken root in the United States. The
aim of which was stated by Peter Thiel, who wrote in 2009 that  “I
no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
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Yarvin, a much celebrated fixture of the right-wing media landscape
goes further and argues “that American democracy should be replaced
by what he calls a “monarchy” run by what he has called a
“C.E.O.” — basically his friendlier term for a dictator.
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The fusion of gangster capitalism and MAGA techno-fascism has deepened
the crisis of democracy, but it has not yet crushed the possibility of
renewal. That possibility endures—but only if we refuse to surrender
and fight to reclaim the future.

The question Americans face is: Will we surrender to the forces of
disposability and repression—or whether we will reclaim a sense of
collective agency, opposition, political imagination, and the renewed
struggle for a world where democracy is not just a hollow promise, but
a lived and collective reality. We live in a time too urgent to
abandon hope for a more just and radical future.  We face an immense
task in recognizing that hope is wounded but not lost and as Alain
Badiou states, what we now face is “showing how the space of the
possible is larger than the one assigned—that something else is
possible, but not everything is possible.”
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The task before us is not just to resist, but to widen the horizon of
the possible—to refuse the suffocating limits imposed by neoliberal
fatalism and authoritarian rule, and instead, to fight for a future
where justice is not a dream deferred but a struggle embraced, where
democracy is not a relic of the past but the foundation of what must
come next.

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Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for
Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies
Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical
Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen
(Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition
(Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education
in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against
Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education
in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and
coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the
Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member
of Truthout’s board of directors.

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* Neoliberalism; Fascism; Trumpism; Turbocapitalism;
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