Senseless Brutality Is Not a Reasonable Political Strategy

It's bad to be stupid and evil

The Trump administration is a clique of brutal, amoral thugs with no strategy beyond bluster and senseless violence. Evil has come to America, bringing with it economic catastrophe, death, and torture.

A paradigmatic example is the Trump administration’s policy of deporting people to CECOT—an Salvadoran prison rife with abuse. This was without due process; of the roughly 250 people sent there, only 32 men had convictions, and only six were convicted of violent crimes. One was a gay makeup artist who’d never been convicted of a crime—not exactly the model of a violent gang member.

A hardened gang member, apparently, who got sent to be tortured in a foreign country.

60 minutes published a report on the horrifying conditions experienced by CECOT inmates. The first person they interviewed was Luiz Munoz Pinto, a college student from Venezuela who came to America seeking asylum. He had no criminal record and had never even gotten a traffic ticket.

Despite this, however, he was sent to the CECOT facility, where he was forced onto his hands and knees, and his head was shaved. The guards savagely beat the inmates with fists and batons. Pinto was beaten until he bled. They broke all his teeth. Inmates were subject to sexual abuse and torture, according to Human Rights Watch.

Another inmate described being forced onto his knees for 24 hours. Every half hour, the inmates were beaten. If they couldn’t maintain the position, they were sent to solitary confinement, in total darkness. Guards beat the inmates’ genitals with their fists. Lights were kept on non-stop, making sleep nearly impossible—the warden even admitted to this fact. Food and medicine were often withheld. There was no access to clean water.

If we’re sending people to be tortured, at the very least we should have a high bar for doing so. However, 60 Minutes reports that the criteria that determined whether one was a gang member and sent to CECOT were whether one got at least 8 points on a checklist (checklists aren’t the model of ideal due process, and we would never support them being used to determine which Americans get sent to a foreign gulag). One got 4 points for having tattoos that were suspected to be gang related. Yet Tren De Aragua, unlike other gangs in Latin America, doesn’t use tattoos for demarcation.

These brutal conditions did not stop Kristi Noem from flying out to CECOT to do a photoshoot. Most administrations, when they do cruel things, try to distance themselves from their cruelty. This administration takes photoshoots in the torture dungeon where it sends innocent college students.

It’s important not to mince words. The conditions are accurately described as torture, and if an American service member was kept in these conditions by our adversaries, no one would doubt that “torture” was a fair description. America has sent innocent college students who applied for asylum to be tortured in a foreign prison in hopes of deterring more asylum seekers. The Trump administration makes a show of pettiness and performative cruelty because it has no policy wins to speak of.

This is a moral red line. One cannot, in good conscience, support an administration that sends innocent people to be tortured, and then takes photo shoots where they are being tortured. This is an administration of thugs and criminals. Now, the death toll of this action is much smaller than that of the foreign aid cuts that killed more than a million people. But still, the CECOT detainment is a particularly grotesque display of wickedness—almost a new low. And if an administration tortures people, even if just a few people, that is alarming because it signals something about what it’s willing to do.

Or take the administration’s recent policy of extrajudicially killing people on boats. This policy is plainly illegal; one isn’t permitted to engage in killings with no oversight when they’re not even at war. In one case, the administration even went so far as to order a second strike, killing the two survivors of the original strike. Imagine, for a moment, if China began ordering extrajudicial killings of Americans whom they suspected to be smuggling drugs, without even releasing the evidence that they were.

And the administration doesn’t even have a consistent story about what the people were doing or why they were killed. At various points administration officials have said:

1. The first strike was on a ship going to a country in the Caribbean.

2. It was carrying drugs to the U.S.

3. The purpose of the strikes was to topple Maduro.

4. The purpose is to stop drug trafficking.

Why are they doing this? Venezuela isn’t even a major source of drugs to the U.S.! The answer is that Trump likes machismo foreign policy where he acts tough and kills people. His statement on the matter was “we’re just going to kill people,” who bring in drugs. These are the kinds of people we’re dealing with. Megyn Kelly, not satisfied with mere extrajudicial execution, said:

I really do kind of not only wanna see them killed in the water, whether they're on the boat or in the water, but I'd really like to see them suffer. I would like Trump and Hegseth to make it last a long time so they lose a limb and bleed out.

This should be alarming to everyone. Good foreign policy is based on assessments of risks and benefits, rather than senseless attempts to signal strength. It is alarming if the president can simply kill people with no oversight. Killing is a grave matter. It is quite sensible to have restrictions on when it can be done. Mere bloodlust is not a sane policy.

This petty brutality is part of the reason the administration has floundered so disastrously on the economy. Tariffs majorly distort markets. There’s no debate to be had among economists about that. And while the administration claimed that the purpose of tariffs was to get other countries to lower their tariffs, they’ve had the opposite effect. China and Canada have raised their tariffs in response. Outrageously, the administration on average imposed higher tariffs on countries with lower tariffs on America.

Economic policy is subtle and tricky. While you can often bully your way through foreign policy decisions without facing too much harm, provided you have sufficient power, the same doesn’t hold on the economy. That is a major reason why the economy is so bad currently. Senseless aggression is not a sane economic policy.

And if an administration is mostly about playing tough on TV, it does them no good to be decent or compassionate. It is not surprising that an administration solely dedicated to vice-signaling cut foreign aid, killing over a million people. It is no surprise that an administration devoid of competence sold our best AI chips to China, vastly raising the odds they’d win the tech race, even as it used the threat of China winning the race as an excuse for obliterating AI regulation.

What’s the core throughline through these policies? Certainly there’s no ideological throughline. The only similarity—the only thing that ties together these disparate policies—is the desire for pettiness and brutality. It is the desire to be a third-world dictator where you can “just kill people.”

I think of the core insight of effective altruism as being that one can do a lot of good if one combines moral clarity and competence. Effective altruists dedicate themselves to making the world better and use high-quality evidence to try to do that as effectively as possible. Lacking both decency and competence is almost the defining trait of the Trump administration. All it has is pettiness, nastiness, and bluster. It is no surprise that an administration so pathologically bereft of virtue has failed catastrophically, leaving millions to die.