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Monday
For today’s post I am going into a very dark place and drawing on the darkest of authors to do so. My subject is the pleasure that comes from inflicting pain. According to Jay Kuo, whose substack blog The Status Kuo I subscribe to, oligarchs like Trump create a culture of pain in which everyone suffers, even their own supporters. “I’m going to hurt you,” they signal to their base, “so you’ll want to hurt others.”
Fascism expert Timothy Snyder calls this “sadopopulism,” and perhaps no one has explored the attraction of inflicting pain more than the man whose name is applied to the phenomenon. I visited the Marquis de Sade’s repellant works decades ago and, if I didn’t find him useful now, I would be steering clear of him. In a moment I’ll stifle my gag reflex and cite some passages from his novel Juliette.
First, however, here’s Kuo asking a series of questions that highlight how the Trump administration is flaunting its sadism:
Why tear hardworking, non-criminal undocumented immigrants from their communities and families, often terrorizing them in plain sight of their children?
Why post videos of migrants in shackles as you render them to third-country torture prisons?
Why create “Alligator Alcatraz” merchandise and fantasize about people being eaten by reptiles in the Everglades swamps?
Why relish in “liberal tears” and rejoice when the other side is traumatized by your lack of humanity?
Kuo’s questions then take a twist since it’s not only liberals that Trump is hurting. Thinking of the president’s support amongst various Latino groups and rural and lower class white voters, he asks,
For that matter, why take healthcare away from your own voters, impose huge new tariffs on them, close down their rural hospitals, and send their costs soaring on groceries, electricity and housing?
Snyder and Kuo explain that oligarchs like Trump thrive on an ethos of pain. Following Snyder, Kuo reasons that “if you teach people that life is full of pain and grievance, then at least Trump’s voters have the consolation that they are not suffering as badly as immigrants, minorities, and queer people.”
In this scenario, the very pain that Trump’s voters experience accentuates “long-held divisions and resentment.” The MAGA faithful find solace knowing that they are at least better off than people of color and LGBTQ+ folk. And that, Kuo says, is a powerful motivator.
Why would Trump deliberately withhold FEMA aid even from red states? Why does he send masked ICE agents into rural communities that voted for him? It’s because he wants people to understand that the government “inflicts pain”:
It makes you hurt. It’s all encompassing and all powerful, and you just want so badly for it to harm others more than you. So instead of thinking about how we all might prosper together in the future, Trump would see us cast into different competing groups, fighting over scraps, trying to feel less relative pain.
Kuo observes that the entire Confederacy, along with the Jim Crow era, was built on sadopopulism:
It explains the public torture and lynchings of Black citizens while whites looked on with their children in tow, as if attending a happy social gathering. It explains how rich property owners in the South could continue to justify massive wealth inequality while dire poverty persisted in those states. The problem wasn’t the oligarchs; it was the Blacks, so the narrative went.
Kuo describes pain as a social resource that Trump doles out, and the president hopes that the taste for it will spread. By actively propagating images and memes about brutal detention and deportation, his administration invites us “to wallow in torture and cruelty.” Kuo turns to philosophy professor Jason Stanley at the University of Toronto, who explains,
“What you have is this desire to get people to buy into the fun of sadism.” It’s the U.S. government itself saying, “This is something we’re doing together, we’re having a blast, we’re laughing and those wimpy liberals are saying it’s scandalous. We’re going to show our power over them by having as much fun as possible.”
Once one creates a culture of pain, it’s only a short step for people to begin accepting mass atrocities.
Sade’s Juliette goes through life seeking erotic stimulation, which she gets from torturing and killing people. As Princess Olympia Borghese, one of her confederates, puts it, “Let us now turn to perpetrating some of this delicious evil in order to keep the habit bright and in order to dull our regrets over the evil we have done in the past.”
In response, the evil Cardinal Bernis ups the ante, just as the Trump regime keeps striving to outdo itself: “But this projected evil, in order that it delight us the more, let us perpetrate it thoughtfully and on a broad scale.”
Juliette observes the effect on Olympia of poisoning her kindly father:
Never before had I seen her in such a lively state. Ah, my friends, ’tis so, and well ye know it, crime embellishes a woman as does nothing else. Olympia was pretty, no more than that. But the moment she had committed this crime she took on an angelic loveliness. How intense, I then realized, is the pleasure one receives from someone cleansed of all prejudices and soiled by every crime.
I think of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem, who auditioned for the vice-president spot by shooting a puppy and who dolls herself up to appear before men in cages.
Various Trump voters have begun lamenting, “This is not what we voted for,” but they shouldn’t be surprised that Trump’s sadism has been turned on them. Sade notes that there is particular pleasure to be gained from betraying former friends. Olympia, once confident that she was with the torturers, eventually becomes one of Juliette’s victims:
“Slut,” she was told, “we are tired of you; we led you to this place with a view to your destruction. There is a volcano below: you are going to be thrown into it alive.”
“Oh, my friends!” she gasped. “What have I done?”
“Nothing at all. We are tired of you. Is that not quite enough?”
So saying, we stuffed a pocket-handkerchief into her mouth, to avoid her screams and jeremiads. Clairwil then tied her hands with scarves we had brought for this purpose; I tied her feet; and when we had reduced her to helplessness, we contemplated her and laughed.
Tears flowed from her beautiful eyes, splashed down in pearly drops upon her beautiful bosom. We undressed her, we laid hands on her, stroked and molested every part of her body; we mistreated her snowy breasts, we spanked her charming ass, we pricked her buttocks with hatpins, we plucked hairs from her bush; and I bit her clitoris almost in two.At length, after two hours of unremitting vexations, we picked her up by her bound hands and feet, carried her to the brink, and let her fall. Down she went into the volcano, and for several minutes we listened to the sounds of her body crashing from ledge to ledge, being torn by the sharp outcropping rocks: gradually the sounds subsided, and then we heard nothing more.
Liberals like Barack Obama and Joe Biden have often expressed faith in the fundamental decency of the American people and have governed accordingly. Such a faith is integral to the Enlightenment principles on which this country is founded. Sade, however, deliberately challenged Enlightenment idealism, revealing a heart of darkness in humanity that revels in dishing out humiliation and pain. He knew that people get an illicit thrill from seeing Olympia torn apart and thrown into a volcano, and Trump, ever the entertainer, has found electoral success in appealing to people’s sadism. As Kuo puts it,
The Trump regime wants the U.S. public to buy into and even delight in the horrors inflicted by ICE, as many MAGA cultists currently do. It wants its program of mass deportation to become more popular, for citizens to sport “Alligator Alcatraz” merch proudly, and for “woke culture” celebrating the broad diversity of our nation to be stamped out completely.
When liberals and some moderates wonder what has happened to the America they thought they knew, this is what they have in mind. Of course, African Americans and Native Americans will sometimes observe that they have always known the country has this side to it.
How do we counteract Trump’s sadopopulism? Kuo states that we must recognize it for what it is and respond with our own weapons, which are empathy, compassion, and kindness. We can flip the script once we realize that Trump’s playbook is built upon “the rationing of pain, and that he is justifying it all on a ‘greater purpose’ of making America white again”:
Each infliction of pain is now a moment for empathy. Each new horror is now a call to action for compassion and the rule of law. In the face of unflagging resistance, Trump’s culture of harm and suffering, of carnage and fear, could eventually give way. In its place would rise the fundamental promise America has long held: to be a nation not just built on but welcoming of immigrants and their contributions.
Public pushback is already having some effect as recent polls show that most Americans now favor immigration. If Democrats can keep Republicans from rigging the 2026 and 2028 elections, there could be a corrective coming.
Today we look back at Nazi brownshirts and KKK terrorists with horror (at least most of us do), and Kuo predicts that someday we will do the same with hooded ICE agents. In other words, sadopopulism will not necessarily get the last word.
We just have to get there.
