At the beginning of October, Adam Serwer of The Atlantic wrote the most important assessment of where we are under this president*, and of the damage being done by the mutual feedback loop between him and his increasingly mindless cultists. Serwer makes the point that the essential dehumanizing cruelty of the president* and of the meat-headed tribe that follows him is the whole purpose of the exercise.

Taking joy in that suffering is more human than most would like to admit. Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.

Me? I'd suggest some of them grow up and find another answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life. The corner saloon leaps immediately to mind. As does church, or lawn darts. Serwer continued:

The laughter undergirds the daily spectacle of insincerity, as the president and his aides pledge fealty to bedrock democratic principles they have no intention of respecting. The president who demanded the execution of five black and Latino teenagers for a crime they didn’t commit decrying “false accusations,” when his Supreme Court nominee stands accused; his supporters who fancy themselves champions of free speech meet references to Hillary Clinton or a woman whose only crime was coming forward to offer her own story of abuse with screams of “Lock her up!” The political movement that elected a president who wanted to ban immigration by adherents of an entire religion, who encourages police to brutalize suspects, and who has destroyed thousands of immigrant families for violations of the law less serious than those of which he and his coterie stand accused, now.

You can't have spent 15 minutes at a Trump campaign rally without knowing in your bones that Serwer is telling the truth. This is what "energizing his base" really means, and it's, well, really mean. This is what was built to serve somebody like Donald Trump by various conservative politicians, the people that worked for them, and the media outlets that informed all of the above. (Many of those same people are now making a nice living being appalled at what has managed to get out of the lab.) This is what "solidifying his vote" means. Cruelty. Nothing more.

Mark Makela Getty Images

Over the weekend, we got another nice bit of evidence supporting Serwer's theory. From The New York Times:

Now the Department of Health and Human Services is spearheading an effort to establish a legal definition of sex under Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bans gender discrimination in education programs that receive government financial assistance, according to a memo obtained by The New York Times. The department argued in its memo that key government agencies needed to adopt an explicit and uniform definition of gender as determined “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.” The agency’s proposed definition would define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with, according to a draft reviewed by The Times. Any dispute about one’s sex would have to be clarified using genetic testing.

What is this except cruelty toward fellow Americans who make you uncomfortable? What is this but pandering to religious-based ignorance? This decision serves no public policy purpose. How is this in the national interest in any way? These people really are the fcking mole people.

For the last year, the Department of Health and Human Services has privately argued that the term “sex” was never meant to include gender identity or even homosexuality, and that the lack of clarity allowed the Obama administration to wrongfully extend civil rights protections to people who should not have them.

I didn't know there were Americans who should not have civil rights protections.

Roger Severino, the director of the Office for Civil Rights at the department, declined to answer detailed questions about the memo or his role in interagency discussions about how to revise the definition of sex under Title IX...Mr. Severino, while serving as the head of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at the Heritage Foundation, was among the conservatives who blanched at the Obama administration’s expansion of sex to include gender identity, which he called “radical gender ideology.” In one commentary piece, he called the policies a “culmination of a series of unilateral, and frequently lawless, administration attempts to impose a new definition of what it means to be a man or a woman on the entire nation.”

The DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at the Heritage Foundation. If you want to play Bad Wingnut Policy Bingo, you're almost halfway home.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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