His cruelty serves, in part, as a means to distract both us and himself from the true extent of his failures. The more egregious his failures become, the more egregious his cruelty becomes. Who can pay attention to the children he’s kidnapped and put into concentration camps on the Mexican border when he’s threatening to out whistleblowers, coercing senators to acquit him in the face of overwhelming evidence of guilt, and pardoning Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, who’d been accused of war crimes and convicted of posing for a picture with a corpse, all within the same month?
