Joy Reid: Trump Treating Migrants with 'Cruelty' Because 'Base Wants to See This'

July 6th, 2019 1:29 PM

This is "deplorables" on steroids . . .

On her MSNBC show this morning, Joy Reid slurred Trump supporters as a bunch of sadists who want to see people at the border cruelly mistreated.

Here was Reid.

"I think I quote you every week, Adam: the cruelty is the point. That’s why they’re doing it, right? His base wants to see this. And so he’s showing them that he can dehumanize them. Isn’t that message coming from the White House, that essentially you don’t have to treat these people like human beings. Who cares?"

 

Reid's mention of quoting Adam Serwer every week was a reference to his article in The Atlantic, "The Cruelty is the Point."

Note: after agreeing with Reid that the White House is sending a message that the people at the border are "not real human beings," Serwer added the caveat that the Trump admin is concerned, for PR reasons, about images of children allegedly being mistreated.  

Here's the transcript:

MNSBC
AM Joy
7/6/19
9:53 am EDT

JOY REID: You know, the dehumanization of these folks, it did remind me, you know, Chris Hayes put up a post, it brings back sort of the memories of the way people treated others during the invasion of Iraq. The sense of, these aren't even people. Or in our own past. The way that people were able to treat others, whether it’s from enslavement on. They’re just not people so we don’t have to think of them as human beings. 

. . . 

I think I quote you every week, Adam: the cruelty is the point. That’s why they’re doing it, right? His base wants to see this. And so he’s showing them that he can dehumanize them. Isn’t that message coming from the White House, that essentially you don’t have to treat these people like human beings. Who cares?

ADAM SERWER: I do think the message is coming from the White House that these people are not real human beings and you don’t have to treat them properly.