From torture to wars of so many kinds, cruelty seems to have been an essential trait of American ruling groups in this century and Donald Trump has been anything but an exception. He's kidnapped the president of Venezuela; used air power to kill so many on boats in the Caribbean Sea and the Eastern Pacific Ocean; regularly bombed Somalians (and now Nigerians, too); gone after Iran; and, of course, created grim detention centers (or, as Rebecca Gordon has written, concentration camps) across this country for any immigrant who doesn't happen to be a White South African. Hey, he's now trying to let 10,000 more of them into this country (while deporting almost anyone else imaginable, including mothers without their little children)! He remains very much in the tradition of the powerful of this century that Gordon had already written about in her book Mainstreaming Torture when she first arrived at TomDispatch in 2014. She ominously ended her initial piece this way: "If the structure for a torture system remains in place and unpunished, the next time fear rises, the torture will begin anew."
In some sense, though, you have to give Donald Trump credit. He's figured out ways to torture so many of us with a world that's little short of a nightmare in the making. After all, the man who thinks climate change is a hoax has, in torture terms, been doing everything he can to broil us all. In New York City, I lived through a mid-July day in mid-May (yes, May!) when it hit 97 degrees. And, of course, I was lucky, since only recently average peak temperatures in India's 50 major cities had reached 112.5 degrees Fahrenheit.
"Our" president does indeed have a knack, though, for catching our world and our moment in his own strange fashion. After all, as far as we know, he was the one who chose the all-too-grim name Operation Epic Fury for his (and Israel's) recent assault on Iran. The New York Times reported him saying, "They gave me, like, 20 names, and I'm like, falling asleep. I didn't like any of them." Then, he was offered another option: Operation Epic Fury. That woke him up. "I like that name," he told supporters at a rally in Kentucky. "I like that name."
And why shouldn't he have? Epic fury might as well be his middle name much of the time and he's certainly been taking it out on the rest of us. I mean, what a truly strange world we live in where Donald J. Trump could even be elected president of the United States not just once, but twice. There's certainly something epic and furious about that. (At least, it makes me furious, anyway!)
And with that in mind, let Rebecca Gordon, in her last piece for TomDispatch, consider whether the arc of the moral universe (a phrase that was so important to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.), and which seems to be bending in such an unnerving direction in the Trump years, might still, someday, head upwards again. Tom
About That Arc of the Moral Universe
Sometimes It's More Like a Meandering Sine Wave
This is my last article for TomDispatch. For over a decade, Tom Engelhardt has given me a platform to write about pretty much anything that grabs my -- I'll admit it, easily attracted -- attention. It's been a wonderful partnership for me, offering not just a place to publish, but a chance to think, talk, and often argue with the best editor I've ever worked with.
A rarity in the age of Internet insta-publishing, TomDispatch subjects every article to the scrutiny of three separate proofreaders. Not for Tom the misplaced apostrophe or the confusion between "their" and "they're." Unlike the New York Times in a May 12, 2026 headline, no article appearing in TomDispatch would ever go rogue and ask the question, "Did the Fifth Circuit Go Rouge With Its Abortion Pills Ruling?" (The face of the copyeditor who let that one pass should have looked as if some blusher had been applied.)
While over the last 12 years, I've written about a wide variety of subjects, a number of themes stand out to me for their recurrence: racial justice, war (and U.S. military misadventures), and the insistence of women on claiming our humanity. Mostly, I've tried to reflect the many ways that we human beings continue to struggle for a good life in a just world, despite all the forces ranged against us. More than once I've had recourse to a sentiment frequently attributed to the Reverend Martin Luther King (though it didn't originate with him): the idea that the arc of the moral universe is long, but invariably bends toward justice.
One Recurrent Theme
A couple of weeks ago, I had a conversation with a woman I'd met a few times before. She's a Black veteran in her 90s, the newish lover of an old friend of mine. We were reflecting on the fact that so much of what we've fought for in our lifetimes -- civil rights, women's rights, LGBTQ rights -- has been all but demolished in the first year of Donald Trump's second term. "People died for those victories," she said to me, "and now they've been undone so fast."
It was the Sunday after the Supreme Court finished dismembering the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) with its decision in Louisiana v. Callais. That prolonged judicial murder by the Roberts court began with its 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which snuffed out a key provision of the VRA. Prior to Shelby County, jurisdictions identified in the VRA as having a history of suppressing the vote in Black, Latino, or Native American communities had to obtain federal "preclearance" before changing their voting laws. In the Shelby decision, however, the court's conservative majority held that the passage of time had made such preclearance unnecessary, because voter suppression was no longer a problem in such places. In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously described that position as "throwing out your umbrella in a rainstorm because you're not getting wet."
As the Brennan Center for Justice put it 10 years later, it was clear that Ginsberg had been right -- that it was still raining in the southern states. "The effects of the ruling were immediate. The same day, Texas officials announced that they would implement the nation's most restrictive voter ID law, which had previously been blocked in the preclearance process." In fact, "without that 'preclearance' regime, the revival of discriminatory tactics was immediate: in the last 10 years, at least 29 states have passed 94 laws that make it more difficult to vote, particularly for communities of color."
Then, in its next major attack on the VRA, the court gave two of Arizona's laws its stamp of approval. As I wrote in 2022, a year earlier, a court that was by then already significantly shaped by Donald Trump "issued a ruling in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee upholding Arizona's right to pass laws requiring people to vote only in precincts where they live, while prohibiting anyone who wasn't a relative of the voter from hand-delivering mail-in ballots to the polls. The court held that, even though in practice such measures would have a disproportionate effect on non-White voters, as long as a law was technically the same for all voters, it didn't matter that, in practice, it would become harder for some groups to vote."
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