The provision of TB and malaria treatments was also pulled. This, too, is entirely destructive from a global public health perspective, and it’s entirely murderous in terms of its impact on patients. Quite literally, without these treatments over the coming years, millions of people will die. For doctors working in the field, there’s no way to square this monstrous order with the Hippocratic Oath. But that was already true, say, for American doctors in states with extreme abortion bans in the post-Roe world, having to wait for their pregnant patients to get close to death before they were able to treat them. The cruelty is the point—it’s a measure of absolute dominance and control—when it comes to acts like this.

Then there’s the cessation of funding for mine-clearing operations in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. A half century after one of America’s most unjustified and bloody of wars ended, a whole new generation of war victims is likely to be created as mines are left in the ground. To be entirely clear: When young children lose limbs to these mines, the fault will lie with the American government—and, by extension, with the American voting public that, eyes wide open, has given its imprimatur to this agenda.

Talking of US wars, thousands of refugees, already vetted and with travel booked, were summarily denied entry last week as the US abruptly closed its refugee programs. Many thousands of these men, women, and children are from Afghanistan—people who put their lives on the line to help the US in the post-9/11 years and who are now being locked out of the country that had promised them safe harbor. The word “shameful” doesn’t even begin to capture the immorality of this action.

Trump, Stephen Miller, and the other Third Reich–styled protectors of the Fatherland view refugees as vermin. In fact, as anyone who has ever bothered to spend time talking with and learning about refugees knows, they include many of the best, the brightest, the most courageous, and the most moral from around the world. Countries that admit refugees aren’t simply doling out charity and mercy—though those are fine things in and of themselves—but they’re also opening their doors to a vast pool of talent and human potential. Think of all the scientists and artists, the businessmen and writers, the musicians and the inventors, who in escaping the Nazis or the Soviet Union or the Chinese Communists or the Taliban or any number of ravaged countries, have made America their home over the past 90 years. Ending the refugee program isn’t just vastly selfish; it’s also extraordinarily shortsighted.

So, too, is the idea of barring refugee resettlement agencies from funding any services for refugees recently arrived in the United States. Again, under what mad vision does it make sense to deprive newly settled refugees of access to rental assistance, help with navigating the healthcare and school systems, ESL classes, mental health services to deal with the traumas they experienced in war, and so on? Unless you quite simply view these people as the enemy, as the front line of some mythical Great Replacement occupying force, why would you set up to fail and to fall into homelessness people who have already undergone unfathomable trauma?

But that’s the rub. Trump is putting into positions of vast power white nationalists, Christian nationalists, and fascist sympathizers who do indeed regard outsiders as, definitionally, the enemy, and who don’t really distinguish between asylees or refugees and the “dangerous criminals” they repeatedly demonize in their anti-immigrant tirades. For them, the spectacle of cruelty, be it the televised ICE raids in immigrant neighborhoods of New York or Chicago, or the denial of rental assistance to refugees, or the blocking of the distribution of life-saving medicines, is precisely the point: If, since World War II, America has been a proud home to millions of refugees, and a proud disperser of aid to countries around the world, today they want it to be a foreboding place that bars entry to new refugees, humiliates existing refugees, and makes it clear that the rest of the world somehow “owes” America and that that debt will be repaid if not in money then in lives lost as American aid disappears.

After all, Trump is promising trillions of dollars in tax cuts to America’s wealthiest individuals and corporations; that money will have to be found somewhere, so, in the Trumpian imagination, why not start by stiffing some of the world’s most vulnerable human beings?

It’s the same impulse to cruelty that has resulted in undocumented immigrants being swept up, put onto military transports, their hands and feet shackled as if they were terrorism suspects being removed to Guantánamo Bay, and forbidden even to use the toilet or drink water, during long flights to countries around Latin America. It’s the same vile world view that led Gauleiter Trump to declare he would send 30,000 immigrants to what can only be thought of as a concentration camp at Guantánamo Bay.

And it’s the same will-to-dominate that led America’s 47th president to threaten Colombia, and its population, with economic ruin for daring to deny landing rights to the above-mentioned military transports.

Trump is a man who believes he has a God-given right to break whatever he wants to break and to harm whomever he wants to harm. And, as shown by the past 10 days, he is now in the process of making such sociopathic impulses official American policy.