The video was shared this week on the White House’s own X account: “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight,” its caption read, with accompanying footage of a man in chains, and of immigration officials laying out long coils of body shackles. ASMR? That stands for “Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response,” a popular category of social media content that uses soothing sounds to create a pleasurable, tingly sensation in listeners. The “soothing” sound in this video, apparently, is the jangle of chains.
This was the core message: Putting other human beings in chains makes us feel good. It relaxes us. It’s pleasurable to experience—a white noise machine of human suffering. “Who else drifted right to sleep last night?” asked South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace as she re-posted the video on X.
It’s hard to read anything other than a deep sickness into this. Taking pleasure in others’ pain should be seen as evidence of a serious personality disorder. Instead, it’s White House policy, and White House propaganda.
Enjoying and documenting such cruelty is not new. Hangings, beheadings and other forms of public execution are long-time staples of brutal societies; we’ve engaged in them here in the U.S. But we don’t need to turn to long-ago history to see human beings acting appallingly inhuman in their enjoyment of suffering, and documenting of their own horrors—and I have little doubt that many of President Trump’s supporters would flock to them today.
During Trump’s first administration, journalist Adam Serwer wrote an essay (and subsequent book) titled “The Cruelty is the Point,” which more than perhaps anything else written in that era clarified what was particular, and particularly disturbing, about Trumpism. It wasn’t just that the regime had cruel policies, Serwer wrote, although of course it did. It’s that there was a collective enjoyment of the cruelty, a misogynistic bonding over it—the kind of group sadism one associates with a lynching or a gang rape.
Now, the cruel laughter that characterized Trump rallies has broadened its scope to propaganda tool. “Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump,” Serwer wrote back in 2018 of participants in such spectacle. The joy in cruelty has evolved: It’s not just a fun collective experience, it’s a comfort blanket relaxing in its promise of safety, security, segregation and (white) superiority.
Truly shocking atrocities, of course, must be kept hidden. The Nazis weren’t disseminating photos of starving Jews in death camps. But they did make clear to the German public that the “Jewish problem” was being dealt with—no need to ask too many questions. The first step was to identify and fully demonize the enemy, as Trump has done with undocumented immigrants, among other groups. Once the public has been thoroughly riled up against this perceived enemy, one can start to disseminate propaganda of the regime humiliating, dominating, and yes, dealing with them.
Just how cruel the tactics to this effect can be seems to depend on the public’s tastes, and the mainstream’s tolerance for violence. (That tolerance, of course, can be heightened over time.) If your voting base can find enjoyment in a video of immigrants being taken away in chains, well, maybe the next time they’ll clap along for some whips and cattle prods.
There are typically limits on what the public wants to actually witness. But the further the population goes in accepting cruelty as public sport, the further the regime will go in engaging in acts of even more extreme cruelty in private. And immigration officials, like most humans when handed significant power, will behave in accordance with the culture of their workplace.
If there are clear and regularly-enforced penalties for abusing one’s authority, and if the norm is to treat those you have power over with dignity and decency, maltreatment will be less common. If the message from on high, though, is that the suffering of the people you’re detaining is to be reveled in, well—you can see how that would create the permission structure for horrifying abuses.
This deportation ASMR video is a sign of a depraved administration. It is hard for a person with a basic level of human decency and empathy to understand how anyone finds it enjoyable. But it’s also a signal, a green light to the everyday extremists who enjoy human suffering and have now been told their sickness is not just acceptable, but wonderful.
And it’s an attempt by the truly malevolent to weaponize their dangerous ignorance, to make their viciousness normal—and to implicate all of us in their inhumanity.
