A year ago this week, I wrote an article in The Weekly Standard about “The New Cruelty.” The phrase was borrowed from the 1991 movie “L.A. Story,” but it seemed to me to be “an apt rubric for our own times; the New Cruelty is the Trumpian successor to the New Deal and Great Society.”

Trump minion Corey Lewandowski had just gone on Fox News to defend the policy of separating children from their mothers and fathers at the border. During his appearance, Lewandowski mocked a story about a 10-year-old girl with Down syndrome being separated from her parents. “Wahh, wahh,” Lewandowski cracked, making “a dismissive trombone-like sound effect,” as the Washington Post described it.

Lewandowski’s jerkitude was widely derided, but he was not an outlier. As I wrote, Trump himself has cultivated “a studied insensitivity, treating empathy as a sign of weakness or fecklessness.”The distinctive rhetoric of Trumpism isn’t merely the use of insult and invective against political opponents; it is also the brutal willingness to degrade and demonize others as “animals” and “rapists,” while unsubtly comparing them to the sort of vermin who will “infest” the country.

The distinctive rhetoric of Trumpism isn’t merely the use of insult and invective against political opponents; it is also the brutal willingness to degrade and demonize others as “animals” and “rapists,” while unsubtly comparing them to the sort of vermin who will “infest” the country. The embrace of swaggering callousness became a hallmark of Trumpism, with harshness masquerading as toughness and cruelty as a sign of strength. All the better if it triggers the libs.

Conservative columnist Kurt Schlichter (who moonlights writing white nationalist porn) exemplifies the callous pose. After the death of a Yemeni mother’s 2-year-old son, he tweeted out simply: “I don’t care.”

Because manliness, or #winning… or whatever.

Not surprisingly, that indifference now seems to be official an legal position of the U.S. government. Last week, a Department of Justice lawyer told a panel of federal judges that it was “safe and sanitary” to hold immigrant children in facilities under horrific conditions.

Attorney Ken White (who tweets as @Popehat) breaks all this down in this piece in The Atlantic.

The United States’s loathsome argument—that it is “safe and sanitary” to confine children without soap, toothbrushes, dry clothes, and on concrete under bright lights—is morally indefensible. It’s also a spectacularly foolish argument to raise in the famously liberal Ninth Circuit, where the United States should have expected exactly the reception that it got.

But he notes that the cruelty and indifference here did not start with Trump; it was very much a pre-existing condition.

The fault lies not with any one administration or politician, but with the culture: the ICE and CBP culture that encourages the abuse, the culture of the legal apologists who defend it, and our culture—a largely indifferent America that hasn’t done a damn thing about it. This stain on America’s soul will not wash out with an election cycle. It will only change when Americans demand that the government treat the least of us as both the law and our values require—and firmly maintain that demand no matter how we feel about the party in power.

Read the whole thing here.