Saturday, January 31, 2026
MAGA’s War on Empathy and Decency
When I first saw the video of the killing of Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital, I immediately thought of the parable of the Good Samaritan. Federal agents shot Pretti after he tried to help a woman they had thrown to the ground and pepper-sprayed. Jesus tells us to love our neighbors as ourselves and help those in need. “Do this and you will live,” he says. Not in Donald Trump’s America.
Americans have now seen with their own eyes the cost of President Trump’s abuse of power and disregard for the Constitution. Videos of the killing of Pretti and Renee Good by federal agents have exposed the lies of Trump-administration officials who were quick to smear the victims as “domestic terrorists.” Even Americans who have grown habituated to Trump’s excesses have been shaken by these killings and the reflexively cruel and dishonest response from the administration.
This crisis also reveals a deeper moral rot at the heart of Trump’s MAGA movement. Whatever you think about immigration policy, how can a person of conscience justify the lack of compassion and empathy for the victims in Minnesota, and for the families torn apart or hiding in fear, for the children separated from their parents or afraid to go to school?
That compassion is weak and cruelty is strong has become an article of MAGA faith. Trump and his allies believe that the more inhumane the treatment, the more likely it is to spread fear. That’s the goal of surging heavily armed federal forces into blue states such as Minnesota and Maine—street theater of the most dangerous kind. Other recent presidents, including Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, managed to deport millions of undocumented immigrants without turning American cities into battlegrounds or making a show of keeping children in cages.
“The cruelty is the point,” as The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer memorably put it during Trump’s first term. The savagery is a feature, not a bug. By contrast, as Serwer noted recently in these pages, the people of Minnesota have responded with an approach you could call “‘neighborism’—a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from.” To my ears, that’s as Christian a value as it gets.
The glorification of cruelty and rejection of compassion don’t just shape the Trump administration’s policies. Those values are also at the core of Trump’s own character and worldview. And they have become a rallying cry for a cadre of hard-right “Christian influencers” who are waging a war on empathy.
Their twisted campaign validates Trump’s personal immorality and his administration’s cruelty. It marginalizes mainstream religious leaders who espouse traditional values that conflict with Trump’s behavior and agenda. And it threatens to pave the way for an extreme vision of Christian nationalism that seeks to replace democracy with theocracy in America.
The rejection of bedrock Christian values such as dignity, mercy, and compassion did not start with the crisis in Minnesota. The tone was set right at the beginning of this second Trump presidency. The day after taking the oath of office last January, Trump attended a prayer service at the National Cathedral. The Episcopal bishop of Washington, Mariann Edgar Budde, directed part of her sermon at the new president: “In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.” She spoke of children of immigrant families afraid that their parents would be taken away, refugees fleeing persecution, and young LGBTQ Americans who feared for their lives. It was an honest plea . . . .
Bishop Budde was immediately vilified. One Republican congressman said she “should be added to the deportation list.” The pastor and influencer Ben Garrett warned his followers, “This snake is God’s enemy and yours too. She hates God and His people. You need to properly hate in response.”
This is certainly not what I was taught in Sunday school, not what my reading of the Bible teaches me, and not what I believe Jesus preached in his short time on Earth. Yes, I went to Sunday school. In fact, my mother taught Sunday school at our Methodist church in Park Ridge, Illinois.
I’ve never been one to wear my faith on my sleeve . . . . I am not a disinterested observer here. I believe that Christians like me—and people of faith more generally—have a responsibility to stand up to the extremists who use religion to divide our society and undermine our democracy. . . . . No less a religious authority than the late Pope Francis called out the Trump administration’s war on empathy.
With leadership like this, it’s no wonder that one survey found a quarter of Republicans and nearly 40 percent of Christian nationalists now agree that “empathy is a dangerous emotion that undermines our ability to set up a society that is guided by God’s truth.” MAGA rejects the teachings of Jesus to “love thy neighbor” and care for “the last, the least, and the lost.” It recognizes only a zero-sum war of all against all. The world may look gilded from the patio at Mar-a-Lago, but the MAGA view is fundamentally fearful and impoverished. MAGA sees a world of vengeance, scorn, and humiliation, and cannot imagine generosity or solidarity.
The whole exercise is suffused with barely disguised misogyny. The extremist pastor Joe Rigney wrote a book called Leadership and the Sin of Empathy. Rigney is an ally of the influential Christian nationalist Douglas Wilson, who thinks giving women the right to vote was a mistake and advocates turning the United States into a theocracy. (Would it shock you to know that Pete Hegseth is a big fan of Wilson’s?)
Rigney declared that Bishop Budde’s plea for mercy was “a reminder that feminism is a cancer that enables the politics of empathetic manipulation and victimhood that has plagued us in the era of wokeness.” Manipulation by wily women is a sexist trope as old as Adam and Eve, but this is an ugly new twist. Instead of women tempting men with vice, now the great fear is that women will tempt men with virtue.
Christian nationalism—the belief that God has called certain Christians to exercise dominion over every aspect of American life, with no separation between Church and state—is ascendant in Trump’s Washington.
The National Council of Churches, the largest ecumenical organization for mainline churches in the country, has warned about the dangers of Christian nationalism. “In this quest for political power, Christian humility is lost, as is the message of God’s love for all humanity,” the council said in a 2021 statement. “Where the Bible has at its core the story of a people committed to welcoming aliens and strangers because they themselves were aliens and strangers, and to defending the oppressed because they themselves were once oppressed, the Christian nationalist narrative rejects the stranger and judges the oppressed as deserving of their oppression.”
Empathy does not overwhelm our critical thinking or blind us to moral clarity. It opens our eyes to moral complexity. It’s not a sign of weakness; it’s a source of strength. . . . I disagreed with President George W. Bush about many things, but I respected his sincere belief in a more “compassionate conservatism.” There was no greater proof of this commitment than the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a mission of mercy that helped save an estimated 26 million lives. It was a public-health miracle. Many of the program’s most ardent champions were evangelical Christians inspired by Jesus’s teachings to heal the sick and feed the hungry. That hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from slashing PEPFAR and other lifesaving assistance to people in need around the world. Experts predict that 14 million people could die by 2030 as a result—including millions of children.
In the 1980s, right-wing firebrands such as Jerry Falwell and Anita Bryant claimed that the AIDS epidemic was a plague sent by God to punish gay people. There was no shortage of rhetoric that I would call dehumanizing or un-Christian. These reactionary religious forces led a decades-long campaign against women’s rights and gay rights that helped turn the Republican Party against democracy itself. The rise of unabashed Christian nationalists is their legacy.
But what we’re seeing today feels different—and more dangerous. The question of who deserves empathy, and the rights and respect that flow from our shared humanity, has always been highly contested in our politics. But until now, no major American political movement has ever seriously suggested that empathy and compassion themselves are suspect.
The decline of mainstream Christian voices in recent decades left a vacuum that the most extreme ideologues and provocateurs eagerly filled. The Catholic Church and the old mainline Protestant denominations have been weakened by destabilizing scandals and schisms, and have seen declining attendance. . . . All of this has left room for upstarts such as Douglas Wilson’s Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a growing network of more than 150 Christian-nationalist congregations.
Another factor is Trump himself. No one mistakes him for a devout Christian or a person of faith or morality. But his corruption isn’t just a personal matter—it taints everything he touches, including his Christian supporters. The conventional wisdom is that Trump says out loud what many others think privately, that his blunt bigotry gives permission for people to throw off the shackles of political correctness and woke piety. That may be partly true. He does bring out the worst in people. But it’s more than that. He makes people worse. Cruelty and ugliness are infectious. When they become the norm, we all suffer.
Reagan cultivated a distinctly American mythos: the aw-shucks cowboy working his ranch and standing up to tyranny. Trump, especially in this second term, has styled himself as a gold-plated Caesar, the farthest thing from an American ideal. Instead of the decency of Washington we get the decadence of Caligula; rather than the humility of Lincoln, the cruelty of Nero. You’d think good Christians would see the irony of throwing their lot in with a wannabe Roman emperor, but the whole point of a cult of personality is to leave you blind and afraid.
We can stand firm without mirroring the cruelty of our opponents. These are dark days in America. To rekindle our light, we must reject cruelty and corruption. To be strong, we need more empathy, not less.
Friday, January 30, 2026
The Case Against ICE and DHS
The renewed calls to abolish ICE are an understandable reaction to an intolerable reality. ICE has become dangerous and unaccountable by design under the second Trump administration, with its deportation quotas, dehumanizing rhetoric about immigrants and extrajudicial pronouncements that agents have “absolute immunity.” The assault on Minneapolis has demonstrated what can happen when that toxic mix of incentives is unleashed on a community. ICE has operated more like an invading army than a force for public safety.
But the rot goes deeper at the Department of Homeland Security, the behemoth that controls ICE, Customs and Border Protection (C.B.P.) and myriad other federal agencies, from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to the Secret Service. Since its founding in 2002, a combination of organizational flaws and mission creep has allowed D.H.S. to evolve into the out-of-control domestic security apparatus we have today, one that views the very people it is supposed to protect as threats, not humans.
The last time we had a true debate about how the U.S. government should be organized to protect Americans and to protect what it means to be American was almost a quarter century ago. After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, politicians sparred over how to balance security and liberty, as if they sat on opposite sides of a scale. Our obsession with security — aided by politicians determined not to appear “weak” and Supreme Court decisions that empowered the presidency — has obliterated that balance. As it has in other countries, the pursuit of security paved the way for the consolidation of power. Now, Minnesota has neither security nor liberty.
Unwinding this will take time and is unlikely during the Trump administration. But the time to start this debate is now, and there is one answer available if you look to the not-too-distant past: End immigration enforcement at the D.H.S. and return it to the Department of Justice so that it is embedded in the rule of law. This goes beyond abolishing ICE in its current form; we must fundamentally overhaul D.H.S. and end the securitization of American life if we are to have just and lasting peace in this country.
In February 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wrote a memo in which he quipped: “The word ‘homeland’ is a strange word. ‘Homeland’ defense sounds more German than American.” Then came 9/11. In the immediate aftermath, every aspect of the plot was scrutinized. . . . . The overwhelming instinct in Washington was to do something, lest we be caught unprepared again. In just over a year, Congress codified the largest reorganization of the federal government since the creation of the national security state after World War II. The agencies most responsible for preventing attacks — the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. — were strong enough to evade this reform. Instead, lawmakers created the alphabet soup of agencies that became D.H.S.
When President George W. Bush signed the legislation, he framed D.H.S. as a counterterrorism enterprise. Because of this new cabinet department, he said, “America will be better able to respond to any future attacks, to reduce our vulnerability and, most important, prevent the terrorists from taking innocent American lives.” He said nothing about immigration enforcement.
It was an odd marriage from the beginning. The only connective tissue among D.H.S.’s component parts was that they could hypothetically play a role in preventing — or responding to — terrorism.
By the time Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, it was clear that this mega-counterterrorism wing of the government was going to be defined by other issues. Ever since, D.H.S. has been in search of a reason to exist, shifting its priorities to suit whichever president or political challenge was predominant: from terrorism to hurricane response, to cybersecurity, to counternarcotics, to border security and immigration enforcement.
The department’s one constant has been the DNA inherited from the war on terror. . . . . by creating D.H.S., we chose to view all people and goods as potential threats. And by moving so many functions of government under its umbrella, we chose to make them — by design — part of fighting a war.
At first, the most visible and acute aspects of that war took place abroad in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. Each of those efforts morphed quickly into lengthy counterinsurgency campaigns with elements of mass surveillance, intelligence fusion centers, military patrols and targeted operations against threats — real or perceived.
That mind-set embedded itself at home. D.H.S. helped build the plumbing of a domestic security state, with its own fusion centers and expanding missions. . . . ICE has become a poster child for this mission creep. Removed from the Justice Department, it was decoupled from the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s adjudication and naturalization functions. The result: a security force untethered from prosecutorial norms, judicial oversight or a culture that protects rights.
Minneapolis has resembled a counterinsurgency campaign more than a law enforcement operation because that’s what it is — complete with tactics, equipment and legal authorities derived from the war on terror. Mr. Trump may have been the one who ordered the crackdown we’re living through, but it’s possible only because of the architecture of D.H.S. “Homeland defense” is now beginning to feel German in the ways Rumsfeld feared.
Democrats have already proposed sound reforms for how ICE should operate: No masks. No operations at schools, churches and hospitals. Enhanced vetting of recruits and training in de-escalation. Focusing, as Mr. Trump promised, on people convicted of crimes. Prohibiting arrests without judicial warrants, which simply reinforces the law that ICE should be following in the first place.
The very need for those reforms makes the case for deeper structural change. By returning the functions of ICE and Citizenship and Immigration Services to the Justice Department, we can once again embed immigration enforcement and naturalization in the part of the government responsible for both enforcing and adhering to the law. This would end ICE as it is, without abandoning the necessity of immigration enforcement.
Moving ICE and Citizenship and Immigration Services back into the Justice Department is not a radical idea; it would simply restore longstanding constitutional governance of our immigration system. Immigration laws would be enforced within a culture comfortable with judicial oversight, prosecutorial norms and the protection of civil and human rights. It would also locate these functions within the department already responsible for the judges who determine whether an immigrant should be removed from the United States. Yes, D.O.J. is susceptible to politicization, but it has built-in paths to transparency and accountability that the Department of Homeland Security clearly lacks.
Twenty-five years into it, the war on terror has become a war against ourselves. That forever war must come to an end. Enough with the military gear. Enough with the mass surveillance. Enough with the constant fear of an ever-shifting Other.
Democrats should not be afraid to make the case for this, or other, structural changes to D.H.S. and an immigration system in desperate need of comprehensive reform. Yes, Americans want a secure border. But most of us are also tired of war, wary of an intrusive militarized government, welcoming of immigrants, and protective of our core freedoms. Mr. Trump’s administration should be the period that concludes the post-9/11 era.
Thursday, January 29, 2026
How An Insulted Europe Can Hit the Felon
Near the village of Combe Hay, a few miles south of Bath (and close to where I live), there is a sloping field that has been preserved as a wildflower meadow. At the moment, it’s as bleak as the winter weather, but in a few weeks’ time there will be a scattering of primroses and other first signs of spring. In the middle of the meadow is a young oak tree, now about 20 feet high, at whose foot is a small enamel tablet, which reads:
This tree was planted | in loving memory of | Lt. David A.G. Boyce | 1st Queen’s Dragoon Guards | Killed in action in | Helmand Province Afghanistan | 17 November 2011 | Aged 25
I thought of David Boyce when I heard the president of the United States say that British and European troops had “stayed a little off the front lines” during the Afghan War. And I also wondered how Boyce’s family must have felt.
We’ve all had plenty of opportunities to get used to Donald Trump’s outbursts, his malignity and malice combined with complete unpredictability. In his weird way, he will say or do anything, however hysterical or irrational, however offensive to friend as well as foe. Of course he has no sense of decency, but he has no sense of irony, either, or sense of the ridiculous. The Great Draft Dodger never hesitates to deride people who have fought and died in action.
European leaders—all of them, really, but Sir Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, most of all—have tried dealing with Trump through what the Bible calls the soft answer that turneth away wrath, not to say with gross flattery. Starmer thought he could win Trump’s friendship by inviting him to the grotesque “state visit” last September, when the president was sealed inside a security cocoon around Windsor Castle lest he should be seen in public and jeered at. Once again, Trump displayed all the true military swagger and bluster of a draft dodger, standing stiffly to attention and saluting as the Foot Guards marched past, while King Charles, who has actually served in uniform in the Royal Navy, knew not to salute.
And then there was the grandiose state dinner, with a fascinating cast list, from Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff (of course) to Rupert Murdoch and Sam Altman. Two royal families were well represented, with the king’s wife, sister, and elder son, and the president’s current wife, daughter, son-in-law, wife’s chief of staff, and crypto czar.
It was British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli who said that, when dealing with monarchy, you must lay on the flattery with a trowel, as he did so successfully with Queen Victoria. It has finally dawned on Disraeli’s successor at 10 Downing Street that, however much Trump may see himself as a kind of royalty, the trowel doesn’t work with him. You can lick Trump’s boots, and he’ll still kick you in the teeth. Now the worm turned at last. As a spasm of disgust was felt in England, with the mothers or widows of soldiers who’d fallen in Afghanistan saying in blunt terms what they thought of Trump’s “a little off the front lines,” Starmer himself called those words “appalling.”
Of course, Trump can say something outrageous and then immediately contradict himself, as he did the next day when he said, “The GREAT and very BRAVE soldiers of the United Kingdom will always be with the United States of America! In Afghanistan, 457 died.… The U.K. Military, with tremendous Heart and Soul, is second to none (except for the U.S.A.!). We love you all, and always will! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
There might have been something behind the Donald’s latest tergiversation. A return visit to the United States by the king and queen this year is planned, or at least penciled in. . . . . Had Trump’s “a little off the front lines” been allowed to stand, it’s hard to see how the royal visit could have gone ahead. There seems to have been a discreet communication through channels from Buckingham Palace to the White House that prompted the insincere and over-effusive “tremendous Heart and Soul.”
We had already seen a masterpiece of Trumpery in his rambling and incoherent speech at Davos. He might have to take Greenland by force, or then again he wasn’t going to use force. He might have to wage ferocious tariff war on Europe, but then on a whim he said he wouldn’t be using tariffs. Not to mention his insisting that control of Greenland was essential for American interests, while repeatedly referring to it as “Iceland.”
Whatever with Greenland, Ukraine, or the Gaza Riviera, we English and other Europeans watch from afar with horror events in Minneapolis and elsewhere in America. There’s an acute apprehension that a grave and possibly irrevocable change is coming over your country. It has never seemed to me helpful to compare Donald Trump with Adolf Hitler—Trump quite lacks Hitler’s single-mindedness—or aver that the United States will become a fascist country, although watching the ICE goon squads at work this month, there’s a hint of the squadristi fascisti, Mussolini’s thugs who used to beat up his opponents.
But it seems more than possible that the United States will cease to be a Rechtsstaat, a country governed by a rule of laws not men, and that it might not only drift away from the Atlantic Alliance but cease to be part of the comity of those we can call, with all their faults and hypocrisies, civilized nations. To put it bluntly, we can now imagine the U.S. as an international pariah.
Do we have any recourse? Even after Trump’s palinode with respect to British soldiery, it might be very difficult for the royal visit to go ahead while innocent people are being shot on the streets of America. There can’t be any doubt that King Charles finds Trump acutely distasteful and would be relieved if his visit were postponed for as long as possible, if not indefinitely.
And there’s one other possibility. This summer’s World Cup is being played in North America, some games in Mexico and some in Canada but most in the U.S., for the second time following the 1994 World Cup. A condition of granting the World Cup to the U.S. that year was that a proper domestic soccer league should be set up in the country.
One American won’t be attending the Super Bowl: Trump has announced that Santa Clara is too far away (and California is hostile territory). But he’s longing to strut his stuff at the World Cup. The Nobel Peace Prize has so far eluded him, to his great rage, as he told a bemused Norwegian prime minister. And yet he had already received a “peace prize” from the hands of Gianni Infantino, the smirking scoundrel who is head of FIFA, the body that controls international football.
It has been suggested that European fans might boycott the World Cup—and maybe more than fans. If London bookmakers’ odds are any guide, eight out of 10 of the best teams in the competition are from Europe. Should Trump renew his threat to Greenland, they could withdraw and wreck the tournament. There are precedents, after all. In 1980, the United States led many other countries that boycotted the Olympic Games in Moscow after the (as it happened ill-advised and ill-fated) Russian invasion of Afghanistan.
This would be an unhappy outcome, and not very nice for all concerned. But then Europe has tried being nice with Trump, and look how well it has worked.
Wednesday, January 28, 2026
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