Over the 10 years of writing about The Don, I have continuously argued that cruelty is not a bug but a feature of his administration. I have written about America’s capacity for violence. Case in point: America is responsible for over 70% of the mass shootings among developed high income countries.
The Don’s desire for revenge, his bellicose language, his pleasure in being the bully, and his degrading comments about others have made America less safe. He gets great pleasure out of attacking others, using lies and disinformation to rile his supporters. He has given a permission slip for his flock to attack his detractors with impunity. His message to his followers is: Those who are against me deserve your wrath.
Threats against judges-including his three Supreme Court picks-are out of control. According to the U.S. Marshals Service, serious security incidents and threats against federal judges increased by 57% in FY 2025 (October 2024–September 2025) and have continued to rise through 2026. Death threats to judges and their families are becoming normalized. At their own costs, some are hiring private security firms for protection. Direct threats to judges were rare before The Don took office. Now he has an army of loyalists who are encouraged to disrupt our legal system, the cornerstone of our democracy.
The Don’s desire for revenge has no bounds. Even his most ardent loyalists are not immune from his sadism: You fuck with him you get what you deserve. MTG, one of his greatest defenders, experienced this when she chose to support the women who were victims of Jeffrey Epstein. The Don, a serially abuser of women, who was found guilty of sexual assault of E. Jean Carroll, was pissed at MTG for her stand. When she started receiving death threats toward her and her family, she pleaded with The Don to intervene on her behalf-in other words, to call the dogs off. His response was chilling: “Your fault, you deserve it.” A few weeks later MTG resigned from Congress. Pretty cold blooded: “Your fault, you deserved it.”
I’m sure he felt the same when his rioters on January 6th yelled “Hang Mike Pence,” for not obeying his demand to halt the electoral count which verified that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. When his own people, including Kevin McCarthy, pleaded with him to stop the rioting, The Don did nothing. He watched on TV as the mayhem continued and lawmakers’ lives were put in grave danger. He relished “his people” violently fighting for him. He was in a state of orgiastic ecstasy and did nothing for 3 hours.
Then there is Stephen Miller’s wet dream ICE. Under his leadership, we have watched untrained masked men terrorize people of color, snatching people off the streets, prowling neighborhoods, separating children from their parents, in an attempt to purify America from its “vermin.” Innocent people continue to be deported, held in detention with any due process and continue to be killed. The violence and violation of human dignity tastes delicious to these sociopaths.
Pete Hegseth has been selling the narrative that the armed forces need to be high-T warriors, killing machines. This mentality and his love of showmanship has pushed the idea of live streaming a public execution of Nidal Hasan, the Army officer convicted of killing 13 fellow service members in a 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood, in Texas. There is no doubt in my mind that The Don was all in on this. This is primitive shit. The fact that The Don just decided to cancel the live streaming doesn’t change a thing as the execution by a firing squad is still going as planned. Irony of irony, the day of the execution is the same day that the Christmas tree lighting happens at the White House. Merry Christmas everyone.
According to Amnesty International, 17 people were publicly executed in 2025. Eleven of these were in Iran and six in Afghanistan. Is this what we have become? Iran? Afghanistan? This “don’t fuck with us, I’ve got so much T that I could fuck the world” is exactly the message they are sending. This barbaric message may be for the world, but it is for Americans as well. This is not about Nidal Hassan: It’s about creating fear through violence. The same could be said for his flippant statement about Iran bombing Los Angeles or San Diego. People will say he’s just joking or he didn’t mean it, but I believe that in his heart of heart he wouldn’t mind if it happened. (It can’t actually happen because Iran doesn’t have the capability to reach us with missiles.) He could kill two birds with one stone: He would get rid of all those who don’t support him and have an excuse to blow Iran off the face of the earth. I don’t think this will happen, but this soulless, warped and dangerous man, who lives for revenge, is capable of anything.
The Don cares for no one except himself; Pete Hegseth, for all his high-T, is The Don’s puppet. In their world, violence is exciting, even fun. What happens when they decide to have some fun with those who push back and defy. The fact that a public execution in front of a firing squad was being promoted is horrifying. The Don has made violence sexy. So I ask: At what point will the conscience of Americans who voted for him move them to say “no more”?
