UPDATE (July 3, 2025, 2:39 p.m. ET): The House on Thursday passed the GOP megabill focused on implementing Donald Trump’s agenda, sending it to the president to sign into law.
Lawrence O’Donnell said President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” which became one step closer to becoming law after narrowly passing the Senate on Tuesday, is just the latest example of the president’s ongoing “campaign of cruelty.”
In total, about 17 million Americans could lose their health care coverage under the sprawling, Trump-backed bill, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. “You have to consider what goes through the mind of a person blithely capable of such grotesque cruelty,” O’Donnell said.
O’Donnell predicted Trump would likely try to distance himself from the effects of the bill. “Donald Trump doesn’t want to own that particular cruelty,” he said. “Donald Trump doesn’t want to pay the political price, and he doesn’t want the Republicans who vote for it to pay the political price for snatching health care away from 17 million Americans.”
According to O’Donnell, the American people have been “embarked on” what he described as a “campaign of cruelty in their name by the Trump government.” O’Donnell said that the campaign includes “cruelty to immigrants in the United States and now cruelty to Donald Trump’s own voters who believed him as a candidate when he said he would not cut their Medicaid.”
O’Donnell said Trump and the Republican Party’s cruelty is an example of philosopher Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase, “the banality of evil.” He continued: Cruelty is easy to do when you just don’t think about it. Cruelty is easy to do when you just think the decisions are up to someone else. Cruelty is easy to do when you think you’re just doing your job. That’s how you arrive at the banality of evil, the banality of cruelty, if you turn off the sound when evil is being done. As Congress appears poised to take Trump’s bill over the finish line, O’Donnell said Americans are now “living with the banality of cruelty and we are feeling it.” You can watch O’Donnell’s full analysis in the clip above.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.
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