The Cruelty Is the Point Quotes

“Their cruelty made them feel good, it made them feel proud, it made them feel happy. And it made them feel closer to one another…Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.”
― Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America

“The artifacts that persist in my memory are the photographs of lynchings. But it’s not the burned, mutilated bodies that stick with me. It’s the faces of the white men in the crowd. There’s the photo of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana in 1930, in which a white man can be seen grinning at the camera as he tenderly holds the hand of his wife or girlfriend.”
― Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America

“It is not American Jews who have betrayed their Israeli cousins. It is the Netanyahu-led Israeli government that has betrayed Jews outside Israel, by aligning itself with nationalist parties in countries like Poland and Hungary, who are hostile to the ideals that make it possible for Jews in the diaspora to live free of persecution.”
― Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America

“Once malice is embraced as a virtue, it is impossible to contain.”
― Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America

“This is not a system ruined by a few bad apples. This is a system that creates and protects bad apples by design. Most people who become police officers enter the profession because it is held in high esteem and because they wish to provide a public service. But individual good intentions cannot overcome a system carefully designed to render them meaningless. Trying to be a good cop can actually get you in trouble with your superiors, your fellow officers, and the union that represents you.”
― Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America

“Frederick Douglass’s admonition that “between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference.”
― Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America

“Five years later, the legacy of Trump’s presidency and his promises can be addressed. There never was an infrastructure bill. Trump’s budgets consistently proposed cuts to the social programs he vowed not to touch. He did little to combat the opioid epidemic he promised to end, with deaths rising by the end of his tenure. The national debt Trump promised to erase has ballooned by almost $7.8 trillion. Trump’s failed effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with nothing remains the nadir of his public approval, surpassing even the days following his incitement of an armed attack on the Capitol building in an effort to overturn his 2020 election loss. Trump has the worst jobs record of any president since 1939, with more than three million lost. He is, in fact, the worst jobs president “god ever created,” despite inheriting an economy that had finally begun to boom in the later years of the Obama administration. The promises of better healthcare didn’t materialize, and the job and wage growth from the economy he inherited were crushed by the pandemic he refused to address. Those were not the promises Trump kept.”
― Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America

“Trump didn’t need to read William F. Buckley, Edmund Burke, or Russell Kirk to understand how to appeal to American conservatives. He just had to watch Fox News and study its success at finding new sources of rage and fear to sustain its audience’s perpetual sense of being under siege.”
― Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America

“American religious pluralism, however imperfectly practiced, is centuries older than the European commitment to purging anti-Semitism, which is younger than Israel itself.”
― Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America

“The cruelty is the point”
― Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America

“Donald Trump, whose uncritical support for Israel and belief that America is fundamentally a nation for white Christians exacerbates a divide between the two largest Jewish populations in the world.”
― Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America

“Multiracial democracy is hard and messy and sometimes rude, but it is preferable to the alternatives”
― Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America

“Since the Civil War, American Jews have built a place for themselves here much the way other minorities have-by holding the United States accountable to its own principles”
― Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America

“Memorial Day has the tendency to conjure up old arguments about the Civil War. That’s understandable; it was created to mourn the dead of a war in which the Union was nearly destroyed, when half the country rose up in rebellion in defense of slavery.”
― Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America

“There are former Confederates who sought to redeem themselves—one thinks of James Longstreet, wrongly blamed by Lost Causers for Lee’s disastrous defeat at Gettysburg, who went from fighting the Union army to leading New Orleans’s integrated police force in battle against white-supremacist paramilitaries. But there are no statues of Longstreet in New Orleans. Lee was devoted to defending the principle of white supremacy; Longstreet was not. This, perhaps, is why Lee was placed atop the largest Confederate monument at Gettysburg in 1917, but the 6-foot-2-inch Longstreet had to wait until 1998 to receive a smaller-scale statue hidden in the woods that makes him look like a hobbit riding a donkey. It’s why Lee is remembered as a hero, and Longstreet is remembered as a disgrace.”
― Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America