Winners & Losers: The Price of Performative Violence

Trump has two competing desires: universal love and total vengeance. He wants the whole world to love or respect him, and he wants to punish those who do not. But you can’t make someone love you by arresting them. Or pushing them over in the street. Or smashing down their doors and zip-tying their children in the middle of the night. That is not how it works.

Violence leaves a stink that is hard to wash out. Some of those in Trump’s base — and maybe even a majority of ICE personnel — lavish in the stink of violence. But to the rest of us, it just stinks.

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The latest poll of Pennsylvania voters from Quinnipiac shows a 4% job approval rating from Black voters.

4%. Four. Per. Cent. I thought it was a typo when I first read it.

The numbers from the rest of us — Republicans mostly excluded — aren’t great either. They are terrible, in fact. His terrible polling isn’t just because he’s unleashing terror on our cities for everyone to see. People don’t love his tariffs. We don’t love his handling of the economy, or how he’s managing our relationships with the rest of the world, and so on.

But when I looked back at the past week to find my Winner and my Loser, the violence stood out. They are building a negative feedback loop without even knowing it. There is a possible future in which ICE raids intended to instill fear in us do the opposite, where threatening rhetoric erases any respect we might have felt for those pushing it.

Think about the cops spraying Black protestors with firehoses, or German shepherds released into crowds of bystanders. It’s an ugly look that left an indelible impression on everyone who saw it.

This week, I want to dig a little deeper into that stink. My Loser is covered in the stink of performative violence, and my Winner is our fearless window into it. ...