2019-01-03
Trump’s Leverage in the Shutdown Fight: His Own Nihilism
By Eric Levitz[…] Trump has repeatedly indicated that he sees his own insensitivity to human suffering as a vital source of leverage over Democrats. He explicitly framed his administration’s sabotage of the Affordable Care Act as a strategy for forcing Democrats to cooperate with the law’s repeal and replacement. He has repeatedly suggested that he doesn’t want to make a deal on Dreamers while a court order protecting them from the threat of deportation remains in effect — because he believes he’ll be able to secure larger concessions once that population is thrown into peril. […]
In a nutshell: The man is evil. And seemingly the present US society is providing him with an environment in which being evil helps him.