According to Donald Trump’s niece, Mary L. Trump, the “malignantly dysfunctional” Trump family bred high-functioning sociopaths. Basic human empathy was met with taunting at the dinner table, and weakness lost the respect of the family’s narcissistic patriarch Fred Trump — Donald Trump’s father. When Donald Trump’s first electoral victory occurred in 2016, Mary Trump was wary of a world that mocked suffering and took pleasure in humiliation, resonating the inhumanity of her family home.
Nine years later, as Donald Trump holds a photo-op inside of Alligator Alcatraz, an immigrant detention center in the Florida Everglades, Mary Trump’s forecasts become a distant prophecy in the cruel, escalating reality of the Trumpism political ideology.
The state, whose purpose should lie in justice and morality, has reassembled into a machine of vengeance. A smug type of vengeance propels the administration forward — it pushes the government to rid the nation of its undocumented immigrants military-style and gut the federal workforce of anybody who dissents. And lawyers, judges and campus protestors who do not align with the president are not safe either. Rolling out the National Guard to Los Angeles protests without an apparent need was a flagrant flash of power aimed at making a spectacle of the protestors.
Trumpism thrives on goading an already divided people. Tracing back to the early days of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign can partially explain how an oppositional political style has led to our current state of affairs. From the very first day of his 2016 campaign trail, Donald Trump has antagonized the media, encouraged conspiratorial thinking, bullied the opposition and reveled in cruelty.
The Make America Great Again (MAGA) campaign did not have the signature stealthy dog whistling of the Reagan administration. It overtly declared MAGA adversaries to be lazy, stupid and a poison to the nation. People who had been quietly resenting other Americans were now emboldened to embrace their hatred.
Despair, fear, division and paralysis are the inexhaustible sources of human emotion Donald Trump preys upon; he places himself, the American strongman, as the only savior in an escalating nation. His trademark tactics are bullying and lying.
Donald Trump is not above the approach of schoolboy bullying to bring his supporters closer together. Mocking Serge Kovaleski for his disability or making light of Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual assault accusation against one of Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, Brett Kavanaugh, were early controversies that made his most fervent fans praise his utter lack of filter. Feeding into his shield of invincibility, the MAGA movement was dedicated to defending any and all of Trump’s actions. After all, he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and probably get away with it, as he claims. He can incite an insurrection, circumvent the Constitution and still maintain the devotion of his most ardent followers.
But what is perfectly coupled with cruelty is constant lying. Every unsavory news article about the Trump administration is labeled an alleged brainwash attempt, as apparently, the deep state is trying to control the minds of the good people. The public looks to Donald Trump, the revered strongman who, alone, can be trusted by his word. The process is simple: make an outrageous claim, bait the attention of the media and then point to the news outlets’ simple truth-telling reports as another example of media bias. President Trump wants bad press so that he can continue his never-ending battle against the so-called Washington deep state. The narratives come in and out at record speed, never allowing his supporters to linger too long onto a claim before they are launched into the next.
Sustained by lying and cruelty, the shock of the daily news has lost some of its novelty. With a nation of people narcotized by their screens and caught inside of their own feedback loop algorithms, it is hard to understand exactly how Trumpism developed and why. It is crucial not to dismiss Donald Trump as a sinister fever dream that will all wash away in due time. He and his administration are actively reestablishing the use and abuse of executive power and setting a loosening standard for accepted cruelty.
Isabella Ehring is the 2025-2026 Opinion Editor. She can be reached at iehring@uci.edu.
Edited by Casey Mendoza and Joshua Gonzales.