Make no mistake: the next Supreme Court pick will no doubt for many end safe, sanitary abortion and usher in a new era of dead desperate women mutilated in illegal backroom procedures. At the same time, the Republican Party will crow about its being the “pro-life party,” which is ironic since in many other ways, the Trump-era GOP shows how deeply it hates children. (I’ll support that claim in a minute.)
Author and cognitive linguist George Lakoff has written that people see life in terms of metaphors and that large-scale ideas like community or country are often viewed or described in relation to the family unit. A country may be referred to as the motherland or fatherland; platoons of soldiers call themselves “bands of brothers.” According to Lakoff, conservatives view society through a “strict father” family point of view—families are led by an authoritarian father who protects them from a terrible, dangerous world by punishing children (who are bad by nature) to give them discipline through pain; children who learn become successful through self-interest and children who fail become dependent and need more punishment. Everything comes from the self and personal achievement. So, for example, someone’s poverty is their own fault and helping them keeps them from learning self-reliance, so they must be punished through suffering.
Everything that has come out about child-rearing over the past 50 years proves that hurting children doesn’t work, that it causes psychological damage. Still, this view of parenting persists, defended as the old-fashioned “tough love” from the “good old days” when kids weren’t mollycoddled, and it is the view that many conservatives have when making or supporting policies that obviously bring pain into other citizens’ lives: they are being taught a lesson about being self-reliant.
What does this have to do with Donald Trump or the Republicans who enable him through silence or encouragement?
Even parents who spank their children would admit that hitting a child can be taken too far. But how does someone know when punishment has crossed the line into cruelty? Since the father is the authority figure and is “always right,” if a family just accepts his punishment, no matter how harsh, who is to determine when it crosses the line into abuse? The conditions are even worse if the parent in question actually enjoys the child’s suffering.
An underlying, unspoken assumption in child punishment is that it is for the child’s benefit, that the parent is being responsible and does not actually like to inflict pain; it’s a duty. Even the most conservative parent would agree it would be abhorrent for a parent to take sadistic pleasure in hearing the child scream.
And yet, this is what we see at work from Donald Trump and, through their support, the GOP—the conservative moral code of punishing people for their own good turning into a source of sick pleasure, what I am referring to as “sadist father morality.”
Donald Trump is the perverse father/abuser. We have seen how much pleasure he took on the campaign trail encouraging his audience to beat and/or harass protesters exercising their right of free speech. His tweets drip with delight and triumph when he writes about his Muslim ban—hurting innocent people who might want to see their families or escape persecution. He enjoys mocking the disabled, calling women who say he has sexually molested them ugly, threatening nuclear annihilation at the drop of a hat. He beams when he imagines for his crowds how much worse the torture is that he has in mind. And like an abusive father, if confronted for what he is doing, he lies, denies it, or blames others, often accusing the subjects of his own cruelty. Like a sexual predator pointing the finger at his victim in court, Trump recently said of children at the border, “They look so innocent. They’re not innocent.”
You can almost hear the further accusation, “They made me do it. They had it coming. They were asking for it.”
As comedian Jon Stewart observed recently, we can see this same “gleeful cruelty” in Trump’s policies. This sadism can be seen most clearly in his administration’s savaging of immigrant families at the border. Crossing the border illegally is a federal misdemeanor (the same level of crime as the unlawful importation of honeybees or infringement on copyright), but Trump’s White House, where every undocumented immigrant is a terrorist or drug trafficker, has decided to pursue each case as a serious crime accompanied by incarceration. Detaining families is not new, but Trump’s team decided to make it worse by tearing children away from parents and placing them in pens, moving them hundreds of miles away to different states under the cover of night, ending a program that helped children with their legal defense, and—even after a federal judge demanded that children be reunited with their parents—to deny bond to kids who could be reunited with their families. The added detail to just how much worse the children would suffer indicates the level of sadism. Being terrified without their parents isn’t enough; now the government must crush their hopes of getting back to them, even if it means violating a court order. And just as in an abusive family, everything is secret: reporters cannot go into government, public facilities. Administration spokespeople give vague, unhelpful answers.
Trump, who championed accused child molester Roy Moore’s Alabama Senate campaign, surrounds himself with people equally as disgusting: Steve Bannon, who recently told people to be proud of being racist; Corey Lewandowski, who jeered at the story of a ten-year-old girl with Down’s syndrome being separated from her family and refuses to apologize; Stephen Miller, the architect of the child imprisonment program.
And like the family of an abusive parent, the GOP enables the abuse to continue by remaining silent, by justifying it, by defending the abuser, and by happily participating in the sadism.
Of course, it’s not hard to convince Republicans of the benefits of abusing children. Outside of their peculiar fixation on embryos, once the child pops out of the womb, Republicans are eager to harm her. Right-wing legislators have been cutting aid for poor families for years, even though children in poverty are most vulnerable. The GOP has been eroding support of public schools so they can create a two-tiered system so that wealthy children will benefit from public money for segregated private schools while less well-off kids suffer in substandard, underfunded public institutions. Conservatives urged having the death penalty for children. The kids in Flint, Michigan continue to drink deadly lead in their water with precious little concern or help.
But under their new, cruel daddy, Republicans can shape an even more wide-ranging Dickensian nightmare for kids. There has been talk of changing child labor laws. Republicans want to cut funding for health insurance for poor children. The GOP couldn’t hide their pleasure at trying to eliminate health care for millions of Americans, and, failing to do that, crippled the Affordable Care Act in their million-dollar gift to their wealthy donors, the 2017 tax plan. Meanwhile, they’re still licking their chops at trashing Medicaid and Medicare. Once kids are born, their health is of little concern. Conservatives have been fast at work cutting regulations to take away kids’ access to clean air and clean water. Life needs to be hard for these kids, after all, to teach them a lesson. And Republicans want to grind them into the dirt.
Yet, the sadistic father influence extends beyond politicians to the president’s base. Republicans don’t simply disagree with liberals anymore; they want to shoot them. Right-wing trolls cheer the murder of mass shooting victims and send pictures via Twitter to people depicting the recipients’ own children in gas chambers. They proudly defend their guns after mass murders by attacking the young survivors, sending them death threats, or, like Inforwars’ Alex Jones, pretending the massacre didn’t happen. When they’re not shooting guns into crowds, murdering people with cars, or merrily beating African Americans into the ground, the president’s supporters are praising and defending the president’s attack on immigrant kids.
“They were asking for it.”
The party of Trump hates children. They will lie, deny, defend, or blame others to protect their sadist authoritarian father, and Like the children of an abusive father, they become abusers themselves. But theirs is the first American political party to fully, openly enjoy the thought of destroying children’s