The cruelty is the point

| 6:00 pm EDT September 5, 2022
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With the Trump crowd, the cruelty, the malice is the whole point. I often ponder the question of whether people would have ever gone along with Trump had he NOT been cruel. This is because, for the Maga Republicans, cruelty is entangled in the sticky web of what it means to be a Maga Republican.

It happened pretty quickly, also. Many say the cruelty developed over a period of years. I call BS on that. The fact is the cruelty was there from the start. “Next time, we’ll kill him,” I remember a North Carolina Maga event where things got out of hand, and someone got punched. The quote above is from a Trump fan. It was broadcast all over television, and it had only been a short time since Trump announced.

So, yes, the cruelty is built into the fabric of Maga. And there is an explanation. It’s called: “Malignant. normality.” What is malignant normality? It is the psychological theory that “if one person’s crazy beliefs suddenly become mainstream, that is Malignant normality.”

This term was coined by Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton. He studied the doctors who participated in the evil activities of the Nazis. Here is more on malignant normality from him:

“Malignant normality is when a malignantly narcissistic leader takes control of society and gradually changes reality for everyone else.”

“So their crazy internal reality becomes enacted in the lived true external reality of that society.”

“This is how a leader can come in and change the mores of their society.”

This is the phenomenon of malignant normalcy.

And it’s up to us to fight it. We do that every day, and we are winning. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like it. But we are. Most of us never anticipated such a day would arrive. I’m sure the founding fathers did not overly worry about someone like Trump. Who could have foreseen it?

Yet the frightening aspect is how quickly, for some, the abhorrent behavior was normalized — how quickly malignant normalcy came to call and settle in for dinner — and many years. With Biden as President and our numbers rising daily, we have the tools to fight this cruelty and ensure it never becomes the new normal again.