As Donald Trump veers from one pulled-out-of-his-ass policy to another, disclaims knowledge of key details of what's going on in his administration, and generally appears to be not all there, cognitively speaking, you sometimes see a debate between people who suggest that Trump is unaware of what's actually being done in his name and people who think that's letting him off the hook for an awful lot of evil.
But the answer can be both. Trump is doing evil things and he knows it and enjoys it. And Trump doesn't actually know what's being done in his name. These are not mutually exclusive or even particularly inconsistent reads of the situation.
Donald Trump thrives on malice and ego. He wants to unleash suffering in people he has decided are appropriate enemies and/or victims. He has put administration officials – Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, Kristi Noem, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – in place to inflict that suffering. He doesn't care about – and probably isn't cognitively equipped to track – the details.
Trump wants to feel powerful, and hurting people makes him feel powerful. He's generally aware that that's what his administration is doing in his name, so he's happy. The details of families torn apart, immigrants who have been doing their best to follow the rules only to be thrown in concentration camps, or trans kids left without health care? Those are irrelevant to him.
It's a both/and of depravity, and we don't need to debate exactly which details he knows or which specific policies he's even aware of to say that Donald Trump owns it all.
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