Earlier this week, I read a New York Times piece on the small Florida town of Marianna, and how it was being affected by the on-going federal government shutdown. The story ended with this quote.

“I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she said of Mr. Trump. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

The utter awfulness of that line has been stuck in my head ever since. The initial reaction to this should be obvious: The president of the United States doesn’t need to be hurting anyone. That’s not the job, and if you think it is, something is deeply, sickeningly wrong with you.

There’s a lot to unpack in that line. Perhaps the most striking aspect of it is the solidification that for some people, cruelty is the point of a Trump presidency. For some percentage of his supporters, making America great again expressly means inflicting pain on others, not as a byproduct but as a goal. That’s extremely disheartening.

I hope we can be better than this. I wish I knew how to get there.

But hey, I ought to at least try to provide a dark laugh about this whole thing, right? So, here’s a tweet from over three years ago that applies perfectly to this story:

Via Adrian Bott

Haha! Haha…ha…*sob*.

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