It’s times like this that I really wonder, “What is it going to take?”
The levels of bloodthirstiness, gutter racism and defiant lawlessness reached this week by President Donald Trump (who defamed citizens of an entire country as “garbage”), his defense secretary (who shared a ghoulishly violent meme to defend his policy of extralegal killings in the Caribbean) and one of his most influential supporters (who called for the U.S. military to inflict maximum cruelty on defenseless targets) should chill the blood of any decent human being.
It’s neither hysterical nor hyperbolic to call these actions and statements dangerous, and they ought to be deal-breakers for right-leaning sympathizers and supporters of the president who aren’t fully dedicated to the cult of MAGA.
And yet, because Trump and MAGA have so thoroughly obliterated concepts that were previously taken for granted — such as government officials having respect for the rule of law and mainstream pundits not sadistically yearning for the violent suffering of other human beings — I’m not holding my breath for a wave of denunciations from right-leaning political and cultural critics. This is all just normal now. Basic human decency is for snowflakes and suckers.
It’s neither hysterical nor hyperbolic to call these actions and statements dangerous.
I foolishly presumed MAGA media superstar Megyn Kelly had hit her rhetorical nadir last month, when Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City. Kelly declared she doesn’t think Muslims are compatible with “Western civilization” and “should not be ascending to our mayors and our governors.” In a column, I described her “gutter bigotry” as “un-American.” And yet, somehow, this week she descended to an even lower depth of the putrid MAGA fever swamps, when she called for the U.S. military to inflict slow, painful deaths on people it calls — without evidence — “narco-terrorists.”
Kelly lamented on her podcast on Monday about the growing backlash over the U.S. military’s extralegal killings of suspected narcotics traffickers in the Caribbean, which she called a “manufactured” controversy. Kelly giddily called for the U.S. military attacks on boats in the Caribbean to be more gruesome and willfully inflict greater suffering on the victims.
Addressing reports that two people survived an initial drone strike on Sept. 2, only to be killed by a “double-tap” attack while clinging to the wreckage of their boat, Kelly said, “I’d really like to see them suffer. I would like Trump and Hegseth to make it last a long time so that they lose a limb and bleed out a little.”
It’s at this point that I ask myself, “Is there any level of inhumane depravity that MAGA thought leaders can express before their less-deranged fellow travelers in conservative and centrist punditry say, ‘Enough?’” Probably not. To the MAGA-adjacent, “wokeness” is always the worst threat to Western civilization.
Case in point, on Tuesday, President Trump’s comments about Somali immigrants were so extreme that a news article in the typically objective-to-a-fault New York Times said, “President Trump has a history of insulting people from African countries, but the outburst was shocking in its unapologetic bigotry.” The president of the United States said Somalis are “garbage” and “we don’t want them in our country.”
As ICE launches a removal campaign against Somali immigrants in the Minneapolis area, the president’s words attach a level of wanton malice to what’s nominally supposed to be an immigration enforcement and public safety operation. Trump doubled-down on his shameless racism Wednesday, saying Somalis have “destroyed our country” and that “a lot of it starts with Barack HUSSEIN Obama, because that’s when people started coming in…” Megyn Kelly’s bloodthirsty rant — and her rank xenophobia — ought to disqualify her from being perceived as a serious participant in the marketplace of ideas. I’m not holding my breath that Republicans — who obsessed for years about the supposedly dire national security threat posed by Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server — will be the ones calling for accountability and demanding respect for the rule of law, in this case. I realize I run the risk of inviting MAGA mockery for clinging to a certain earnestness about American values and the virtue of holding one’s political allies accountable, but the hell with it. Trump’s racism must not be met with more equivocations about the progressive left’s foolish obsession with identity essentialism during the height of the so-called Great Awokening. Every Trump-supporting (or Trump-friendly) pundit and politician should condemn his racism, or leave us to assume they support it. Hegseth’s national security-endangering incompetence and enthusiasm for what many military veterans and legal experts have described as war crimes shouldn’t be waved off as just another problematic misstep by a member of Trump’s cabinet. He should be held accountable, with impeachment if necessary, and any Republicans still in possession of a spine should be leading the charge. Megyn Kelly’s bloodthirsty rant — and her rank xenophobia — ought to disqualify her from being perceived as a serious participant in the marketplace of ideas. It’s far more appropriate to liken her to the dehumanizing demagogues on Radio Rwanda in 1994 than as a conservative intellectual heir to William F. Buckley. And it should be people on the right who declare her sickening ideas beyond the pale. This is what should happen, but in the Trump era, courage on the right is in short supply, and MAGA clout is the coin of the realm.
Anthony L. Fisher is a senior editor and writer for MS NOW.
Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Sunday shared a cartoon meme celebrating the attacks on boats in the Caribbean that he oversaw — for national security reasons, of course. And yet on Wednesday, a Pentagon inspector general report found that Hegseth risked endangering U.S. troops and sensitive Defense Department information with his reckless use of a private messaging app to share classified, specific information about military operations.
