3 hours ago
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As Trump delivers a series of devastating and appalling executive orders and public pronouncements every day, it has never been more important to avoid being captured by his obscenity and focuson how the issues are interconnected.
It is easy to forget or sideline the executive orders of the previous week: bans on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs and discourse as well as “gender ideology” in all federally funded programing, as new obscenities flood the news cycle. Threats of deportation to international students who engage in legitimate protest; expansionist designs on Panama and Greenland and proposals to take over the total and forcible displacement of Palestinians in Gaza from their land are announced in quick succession. In each case, Trump makes the declaration as a show of power, testing to see whether it can take effect. The executive orders can be stopped by courts, but the deportation of immigrants has already begun, as has the re-opening of the grotesque camps of Guantánamo.
Amassing authoritarian power depends in part on a willingness of the people to believe in the power exercised. In some cases, Trump’s declarations are meant to test the waters, but in other cases, the outrageous claim is its own accomplishment. He defies shame and legal constraints in order to show his capacity to do so, which displays to the world a shameless sadism.
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The exhilarations of shameless sadism incite others to celebrate this version of manhood, one that is not only willing to defy the rules and principles that govern democratic life (freedom, equality, justice), but enact these as forms of “liberation” from false ideologies and the constraints of legal obligations. An exhilarated hatred now parades as freedom, while the freedoms for which many of us have struggled for decades are distorted and trammeled as morally repressive “wokeism”.
The sadistic glee at issue here is not just his; it depends on being communicated and widely enjoyed in order to exist – it is a communal and contagious celebration of cruelty. Indeed, the media attention it garners feeds the sadistic spree. It has to be known and seen and heard, this parade of reactionary outrage and defiance. And that is why it is no longer a simple matter of exposing hypocrisy that will serve us now. There is no moral veneer that must be stripped away. No, the public demand for the appearance of morality on the part of the leader is inverted: his followers thrill to the display of his contempt for morality, and share it.
The shameless display of hatred, the contempt for rights, the willingness to strip people of their rights to equality and freedom by banning “gender” and its challenges to the binary system of sex (denying the existence and rights of trans, intersex and non-binary people), destroying DEI programs meant to empower those who have suffered enduring and systemic discrimination; forcible deportations of immigrants, and calls for complete dispossession of those who have survived, traumatized, the genocidal actions in Gaza.
Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who coined the term “genocide”, made clear that it includes “a coordinated plan aimed at destruction of the essential foundations of life of national groups … it may be accomplished by wiping out all basis of personal security, liberty, health and dignity.” Indeed, forcible transfer of children is the fifth punishable act under the genocide convention adopted in 1948.
Not all forms of Trump’s rights-stripping belong to the category of genocide, but many of them express fascist passions.Denying rights to healthcare, legal recognition and rights of expressive freedoms for trans, intersex and non-binary people attacks the very foundations of their lives. Even the conservative supreme court found that discrimination against trans and gender non-conforming people constitutes discrimination on the basis of sex (Bostock v Clayton, 2020).
Hence, it makes no sense to say that trans rights threaten sex-based law: they belong to that law, and ought to be protected by it. Rounding up immigrants from schools and homes, forcibly deporting them to detention centers and ripping away their rights to due process shows not only clear contempt for those communities, but for constitutional democracy itself. The threat to birthright citizenship defies a basic constitutional protection and positions Trump as above constitutional rule and the balance of powers.
If we continue to be gripped with outrage and stilled by stupefaction by each day’s new proclamation, we will fail to discern what links them. To be gripped by his statements is precisely the aim of their utterance. We are in some ways in its thrall when it captures and paralyzes us. While there is every reason to be outraged, we cannot let that outrage flood us and stop our minds. For this is a moment to grasp the fascist passions that fuel this shameless grab for authoritarian powers.
Those who celebrate his defiance and sadism are as claimed by his logic as those who are paralyzed with outrage. Perhaps it is time to stand apart from these passions to see how they work, but also to find passions of our own: the desire for a freedom equally shared; for an equality that makes good on democratic promises; to repair and regenerate the earth’s living processes; to accept and affirm the complexity of our embodied lives; to imagine a world in which government supports health and education for all, where we all live without fear, knowing that our interconnected lives are equally valuable.
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Judith Butler is the Maxine Elliot professor in the department of comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Butler’s latest book is Who’s Afraid of Gender (Ferrar Strauss and Giroux, Penguin)
