Bulwark Takes - MAGA Takes Pleasure In Making People Feel Pain

Episode Date: February 19, 2025

Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger discuss the White House posting a grotesque ASMR video about deporting immigrants and the administrations immigrations policy.

Hi, Bill Kristol here, editor-at-large of The Bulwark, joined this morning by my colleague on Morning Shots, the newsletter that you surely get and read, but you should if you don't, Andrew Egger. We both wrote this morning. We're both indignant, I think it's fair to say, and I think justifiably angry. Andrew, you had the lead post on the lead item on Trump's deportation policy. What outraged you? Yeah. So, yeah, angry morning shots this morning. It's been weird watching Trump sort of take his first baby steps toward this promised largest mass deportation in history that he wants to stand up. He's found it kind of slower going than perhaps he'd hoped, than perhaps some of his fans had hoped. Arrests have not really shot up in the way that people perhaps, you know, anticipated. And so I think one of the ways that the White House is trying to deal with this and try

to keep their fans happy at the same time is by, you know, the arrests that are happening are happening with just kind of like a secret sauce of extra cruelty kind of surrounding it, especially in the way they're messaged. You know, this stuff like sending migrants to countries that they've never visited before or holding detainees at Guantanamo Bay or yesterday. And this is what I wrote warning shots about this morning. This really chilling and honestly grotesque propaganda video that was posted to the official White House Twitter account or X account now, essentially saying deportation ASMR, ASMR video of law enforcement officers bundling a couple of detainees onto an airplane.

And I assume here we are on YouTube, the home of the bizarre genre known as ASMR. People kind of know what this is, but it's essentially these videos that are kind of designed to soothe you, to kind of induce these feelings of euphoria and kind of low grade relaxation and pleasure with specific audio stimuli. And so what this video was doing was kind of like a grotesque sort of parody of that with really dwelling lovingly on the sounds of the airplane

and the jingling of the chains that the migrants were going to be strapped into as they're laid out on the ground and then as they're buckled into them and then the sounds of them sort of shuffling up onto the airplane. I mean, it's like truly one of the most unnerving things just on kind of a physical, visceral level that we've seen so far out of this White House and put forward, you know, as this sort of jokey thing for their fans to just kind of like wallow in and appreciate online. I mean, it's really just kind of an alarming thing to see.

Yeah, just as we're reading more about how many of the people being deported aren't violent criminals, aren't gang members, are being deported. As you said, the countries that they didn't come from, some seem to be in Guantanamo, a woman and two little kids, I think, a wife and two little mother, two little kids, just seized in a car. They were driving too slowly at a 40 mile per hour zone. They turned out to be undocumented. And they've been sent off. The dad and the other two kids are still here in the US, I guess. I mean, really, the cruelty is pretty pervasive. But I think your point is we're now beyond cruelty. Yeah. And I think that for a long time, what you have seen with sort of the MAGA response to things like this is there's an element of kind of like performative cruelty where it's sort of this bank shot thing where they're almost playing a character specifically with the aim of triggering people like us.

It's always like an own the libs thing, and that's always kind of in the back of their minds and in the way that they message it. And what I think has been really startling since Trump, and you definitely saw this in the replies yesterday, is that element of it has kind of fallen out of it. The bank shot, the kind of performative thing, really thinking about the libs at all. I mean, there was not a lot of like, oh, this is really gonna trigger some people

when this was posted. What you saw was guys like just essentially just writing about how much they were enjoying it kind of on a personal level themselves. It was not a thought about like, how will the libs take this? It's, oh, how am I taking this? And I'm loving it because it's not, because I mean, when you, and this is essentially what I wrote about this morning, when you spend years just kind of like in this posture of like performative cruelty, kind of inhabiting this character of like a guy you think the libs would be triggered by,

what has happened with a lot of these people is they have just kind of come to actually themselves really appreciate the sadism and get a rush out of the actual act of cruelty themselves. And it's really kind of bewildering, and it's to see, and we're not in a good place with it. Yeah, and I suppose one could say that performative cruelty ends up becoming performing cruelty or something like that. And that's what we're seeing, I think, in immigration policy. I think I've seen that I wrote about, I wasn't planning to write this morning, we had your excellent piece already teed up. She wrote it late last night.

And Will Selber has an excellent piece on another act of cruelty, cutting off access to Afghans who worked for us to come to the U.S., who are already in the pipeline, who have already been vetted, multiple vettings, much know, is going to pretend that there could be terrorists there and we don't need to take them in. And what do we care about people who fought with us or helped us or risked their lives and are currently at risk of their life for us? So that's Will Selbert's piece. I woke up this morning and was looking forward to maybe adding just a tiny little, you know, quick hit to warning shots or something. I was so indignant when I really read the transcript of what Trump said last night at his press conference following on Rubio's pathetic performance in Riyadh, all of it on Ukraine and just the total betrayal of Ukraine that I wrote a short piece as well. And it's sort of similar in the sense that J.D. Vance said in 2022, I don't care about Ukraine. And he's just trying to be just. He's trying. I mean, I think, A, he's trying, I mean, I think A, he doesn't care, but B, you could not excuse it,

but minimize the importance of it by saying, well, as you say, he's trying to own the earnest people like me who think maybe we should help this, these people fighting for their nation and for their freedoms against brutal Russian invasion. But it turns out they don't care. And, and they're, in fact, Trump prefers Putin and is happy to negotiate with Putin, ignoring the wishes of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people. And really, I mean, doing something that, again, has gone so far in the direction of betrayal. It was one thing when it was going to be kind of, well, he's going to be a little more dovish than Biden or he's going to try to negotiate a little more. He's going to relax a little bit the isolation of Putin. But we're just way beyond

that. It's sort of like on the immigrant, you know, we're way beyond the sort of what was the semi-reasonable or excusable, you might say, version of this policy. And now we're, and people are really horrified, I think, around the world. And it'd be nice if more people spoke up here about it and fought it. And he's the president, very hard to stop him from doing. Two, the areas we've both written about it and think about this until just now are areas where Trump has an awful lot of power. Immigration policy, the president has great latitude. Foreign policy, even more, I suppose. Pretty hard to reverse that. On the other hand, we do have a Congress and we do have public opinion and we do have all kinds of people in America who have some influence. And I think

on both, I mean, what this country will look like if we have four more years going down the path that you outlined and I chimed in on a little bit, that's pretty worrisome, don't you think? Yeah, yeah. And I mean, isn't there something like, there's almost that like special sauce with Donald Trump himself, where it's not just this kind of like parsimonious, short-sighted, isolationist foreign policy that guys like Vance are laying out, where he's kind of like parsimonious, short-sighted, isolationist foreign policy that guys like Vance are laying out where he's kind of like, you know, hardening our hearts against this

people that has been invaded, but also just bizarre kind of like factual diversions and like, wow, where did that come from? Like the moment when he said, well, you know, like, you know, I like Zelensky, but, you know, if I were him, I would have just won this war a little sooner. You know, he's had three years to do it. Why hasn't he done it? I mean, that kind of thing is where you're really just so far off the map of anything. I mean, it's really just, I don't know, it's like you're out to sea without a rudder watching it happen or something like that.

Right. Well, truth doesn't matter. Usually they'd be saying, wait a second, let me explain to you how dangerous this is, my matter. But they've sort of, yeah, untethered themselves from that, those kinds of fact-based arguments as well. Well, I hate to be so dark. Anything you'd like to say to cheer me up, cheer us up, cheer the viewers up? No, I mean, if you saw all the stuff we left on the cutting room floor of this morning shots, like other insane stuff that happened yesterday with Elon Musk and, you know, Doge, and they were hanging out at the Department of Defense yesterday. I mean, like, it's just there's a lot. There's a

lot going on. So we're all covering it, you know, as quick as we can. We'll be gathering that up from the cutting room floor later today and updating it, of course, for tomorrow's Morning Shots. Thanks for joining us.