President Donald Trump’s greatest gift to America this year was to liberate people to be their worst selves. It’s okay to relish extrajudicial killings. Hey, it’s just some stranded Venezuelan drug mule clinging to the side of a bombed-out boat. (Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth: “No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement.”) Trump has made it unexceptional to see a terrified Guatemalan housepainter (or as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt put it in March, one of the “heinous monsters, rapists, murderers, kidnappers, sexual assaulters, predators who have no right to be in this country”) being bundled by masked agents into a car that will speed him to a supermax in oblivion. After a possibly PTSD-addled Afghan was charged with shooting two National Guard officers in Washington, D.C., and with killing one of them, Trump halted naturalization ceremonies for immigrants, who were poised to become U.S. citizens after years of waiting, from “high-risk” countries. This year has been a master class in the exercise of casual inhumanity.
