Cruelty Isn’t a Bug. It’s the Brand.

There’s a running joke that every new Republican president somehow makes the last one look like a statesman. It’s the kind of dark humor you share with friends when you’re old enough to know better but still need to laugh to keep from screaming.

I think about that a lot, because back at the end of Donald Trump’s first presidential term in 2019, my high school friend, Zhubin Parang — then the head writer of The Daily Show and now a producer and writer at The Daily Show — posted a Facebook status that stopped me mid-scroll. He wrote something to the effect of: After four years of Trump, we could actually say George W. Bush was worse.

I didn’t necessarily agree with Zhubin, but I was willing to entertain the argument. You have to remember the context. Bush had eight full years in the White House, and he used them to run the country into the ditch. He sold the Iraq War on a pack of fantasies, scaring the public with talk of mushroom clouds and phantom weapons of mass destruction. That war cost hundreds of thousands of lives, destabilized the Middle East for a generation, and left the U.S. mired in blood and debt. He was the man at the helm when Hurricane Katrina hit, leaving poor and Black residents stranded in floodwaters while FEMA seemed to be waiting for divine intervention. He gave us the Patriot Act and a national security apparatus that treated privacy like an optional subscription service. Eight years of that? You can see why someone would make the case that Bush was worse. I thought about it, too. Zhubin and I are in our 40s now, and when he posted that back in 2019, it made me stop and wrestle with the idea.

But then came the years that followed. And hindsight has a way of ripping your old arguments to shreds. Because Trump’s first term was just the trailer—loud, messy, ugly, but ultimately only a preview of what was coming. His second, non-consecutive term is the sequel, and it’s like every bad Hollywood cash grab sequel: bigger explosions, more incoherent plot, and a lead actor who looks visibly older and somehow even more unhinged. Trump didn’t return to power to serve the nation or finish unfinished business. He came back to settle scores, to dodge accountability, to build himself a legal fortress out of executive power. He is not trying to govern; he is trying to survive. He is only the second president in U.S. history to serve a non-consecutive second term, the first since Grover Cleveland pulled it off in the 19th century.

His rhetoric has always been disgusting, but now it’s metastasized. We’re talking about a man who threatened to unleash troops and ICE on Chicago, gleefully posting a doctored Apocalypse Now meme of himself as a warlord declaring, “Chicago is about to find out why it’s called the Department of War.” He even capped it off with the line: “I love the smell of deportations in the morning.” I grew up on Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter, and even my parents — who micromanaged everything we watched on TV but somehow never noticed my siblings and I were running around gleefully uppercutting pixelated ninjas into pits of spikes—would’ve banned that kind of garbage. This wasn’t satire, it wasn’t strategy; it was the President of the United States cosplaying as Colonel Kilgore and promising to terrorize his own people.

Governor J.B. Pritzker called it exactly what it was: “The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city. That is not normal.” Mayor Brandon Johnson, who now wakes up every morning to check whether his city is about to be occupied by federal troops, told Chicagoans to resist the intimidation, even handing out whistles at Mexican Independence Day parades so neighbors could alert one another if ICE started hauling people away. Instead of music and joy, the parades turned into silence, entire neighborhoods hiding indoors as if the U.S. president were sending not soldiers but specters. That is the reality Trump has created: a climate where the fear of a knock at the door outweighs the celebration of culture.

It’s worth remembering that Republicans didn’t always sound like this. They’ve never been champions of immigration, but there was a time when they understood the importance of tone, of narrative, of optics. Reagan, whose administration unleashed its own damage on communities of color, still saw the political necessity of telling a story that was bigger than white resentment. He painted America as a “shining city on a hill”, a place made stronger by immigrants who had the courage to come here. Reagan would smile, quote scripture, and wrap the velvet glove around the iron fist.

George H. W. Bush, who inherited Reagan’s mantle, extended that performance into policy. He signed the Immigration Act of 1990, raising legal immigration caps, creating diversity visas, and offering a form of refuge through Temporary Protected Status to people fleeing wars and natural disasters. That wasn’t generosity pulled from the Sermon on the Mount so much as a recognition of demographic math and Cold War politics. But again, the framing was one of inclusion.

Even George W. Bush, who will forever be haunted by the wreckage of Iraq and the grotesque invocation of nonexistent WMDs, tried to court Latinos. He sprinkled his stump speeches with Spanish phrases. He built a campaign apparatus that actually believed “Hispanics are Republicans, they just don’t know it yet.” He leaned on faith and family, knowing those were values that resonated. He created PEPFAR, which committed $15 billion to fight HIV/AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean and has since saved more than 25 million lives. I never liked his politics, but I can see why people found something to admire there.

That’s exactly the point one of my mentors, Mike Madrid, makes in The Latino Century. He argues that Republicans once knew the country was changing and, rather than deny it, they tried to harness it. They saw Latino voters as the future of their coalition, people who could be brought into a conservative vision if you showed them respect. It was self-interest, sure, but it was self-interest with at least a hint of strategy and hope.

Trump torched that. His second administration doesn’t even bother pretending. He’s abandoned optimism and replaced it with raw menace. He isn’t saying, “Be part of America.” He’s saying, “America is mine, and you’re lucky if I let you live in it.” That’s not even politics — it’s branding, and the brand is cruelty.

When I hear him now, I think about my own family story. My grandfather came from Lake Waccamaw, North Carolina, carrying the complicated history of being part Waccamaw Siouan in the segregated South. My grandmother came from Jamaica, bringing her faith and resilience with her to California. They started over here, in a place that did not want them, and yet they carved out a life anyway. They believed in the American experiment — not because America had rolled out the welcome mat, but because the church community helped them survive when institutions did not. Even in the old GOP’s selective rhetoric, there was at least the illusion that people like my family could belong.

That’s what makes Trump’s current immigration war games so grotesque. This isn’t Ellis Island mythology or Bush’s clumsy attempts to say “sí se puede” with a Texas twang. This is a man turning deportation into a punchline, communities into villains, and the presidency into a reality-TV season renewal. Every time he logs onto Truth Social, it’s another episode of “America’s Next Top Dictator.”

And this is where Beard’s old argument comes into play. In his economic interpretation of the Constitution, Charles Beard insisted that the founders weren’t angelic guardians of liberty — they were businessmen protecting their investments. The Senate was structured to favor landholders. The Electoral College insulated elites from the rabble. Slavery was locked into the nation’s DNA by design. It was self-interest dressed in Enlightenment drag. And even then, they felt the need to sell it as universal liberty. Trump doesn’t even bother. He’s a man who looks at Washington’s Farewell Address — a warning against faction, division, and tyranny — and takes it as a to-do list.

So when people ask me if I still think Bush was worse, I tell them: No, I don’t. I thought about that in 2019, when Zhubin made that post, and at the time it seemed like a fair debate. Bush had eight years, Trump had four, and the math looked different. But now, with January 6 burned into our history, with Trump already back in the White House for a second non-consecutive term, with threats to send troops and ICE into Chicago and immigrant neighborhoods turned into ghost towns on Mexican Independence Day, the question doesn’t even make sense anymore. Bush was bad. Trump is worse. And not just worse — he’s the worst. He’s dug beneath the floor, tunneled through the basement, and now lives in the sewer, crowing about how good it smells. Every time he opens his mouth, my ears beg for hazard pay.

My grandfather left Lake Waccamaw, North Carolina, carrying his Waccamaw Siouan roots out of the segregated South, and my grandmother came here from Jamaica, trusting America enough to build a life with him. They leaned on the church for survival, even while they knew the pews were full of hypocrisy. They believed in America not because it was flawless, but because it was worth fighting for.

And that’s the choice before us now: whether to defend that unfinished experiment with whoever will stand up against the march of authoritarianism, or to keep debating which bad president was worse while the house collapses around us.

Kristoffer Ealy is a political science professor who teaches at California State University Fullerton. He is the author of the upcoming book, Political Illiteracy: Learning the Wrong Lessons. Read the original column here.

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