photo by: Creators Syndicate

Keith Raffel

The rock musical “Hair,” a huge hit in the 1960s, is scarcely remembered today. Still, the first line of the play’s showstopper song, “Easy to Be Hard,” keeps running through my head: “How can people be so heartless?”

Each day when I read the news, when I listen to podcasts, when I pore over court judgments, that’s what I ask myself.

The Democrats never had a chance in the congressional standoff over the budget. Violating precedent and judicial orders, the Trump administration cut off the food aid provided to about 42 million Americans by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. A senior White House official promised, “We’re going to extract maximum pain.”

The administration was willing to use hunger as a political weapon. Those softhearted Democrats could not bear it.

“SNAP… is being used as a weapon, as a tool in this moment to try and leverage the hunger of millions to put pressure on us as a Senate to reopen,” Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., said. “It’s shocking that President Trump would say out loud his intention to defy court orders and to use whether or not to feed hungry children as leverage.”

I’m not certain why the senator would be shocked. When it comes to Trump’s political tactics, heartlessness is not a bug; it’s a feature.

On the campaign trail for a second term, Trump vowed, “We will begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” Since he assumed office in January, deportees have been sent to a prison in El Salvador. There, they were tortured with “constant beatings and other forms of ill-treatment, including some cases of sexual violence,” according to a report co-sponsored by Human Rights Watch. In recent months, we’ve watched videos of masked federal agents roaming city streets and manhandling people into vans. Some deported children were U.S. citizens, including at least one who was being treated for cancer. In a video posted by the Fox affiliate in Chicago, a peacefully protesting pastor was shot in the head by a projectile fired by federal agents. All this is intended to intimidate the law-abiding and demonstrate strength to the believers.

In the recent government stoppage, Democrats demanded an extension of subsidies for health insurance that the Trump administration had cut off. There was no denying the effectiveness of the policy. The number of Americans insured under the Affordable Care Act marketplace increased to more than 24 million people in 2025, up from about 11 million in 2020. The Urban Institute projects that the number of insured will sink by almost 5 million without subsidies. Public health studies indicate that would lead to over 6,000 deaths per year.

The administration’s attack on health care extends beyond the country’s borders. The Lancet estimates the U.S. Agency for International Development has saved 91 million lives over the past two decades, including 30 million children. The second Trump administration halted the public health aid provided by the agency in its first weeks in office. A model constructed by professor Brooke Nichols of Boston University estimates that, as of Nov. 12, USAID’s dismantling has already caused the deaths of 600,000 people, two-thirds of them children. Surgeon and Harvard professor Atul Gawande writes: “We have public man-made death. And the cruelty and lethality will only grow as the Administration expands its rollback of public-health advances to the homeland.”

The United Nations calls climate change “the single biggest health threat facing humanity.” How so? By its effect on “air pollution, disease, extreme weather events, forced displacement, pressures on mental health, and increased hunger and poor nutrition.” A study published by GeoHealth found there were roughly 12,000 heat-related premature deaths each year in the U.S. from 2010 to 2020. The Trump administration’s response? Withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, opening millions of acres of federal lands to coal mining and making plans for offshore oil drilling on the West Coast and in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska. By 2100, the number of annual deaths will increase to over 100,000 in a high-warming scenario that is made more likely by these policies.

The Romans called Attila the Hun “the scourge of God” in condemnation of barbarism that included torture, starvation, enslavement and attacks on Christian clergy. What does that make Donald Trump, whose brutality embodies similar tactics? Historians today estimate Attila’s campaigns caused several hundred thousand deaths. What does that make Donald Trump, who is on track to cause so many more?

At the beginning of this column, I mentioned a song echoing in my mind. Here at the end, it’s been pushed aside by the classic Elvis song from the 1950s reflecting my futile hope, “Don’t Be Cruel.”

— Keith Raffel is a syndicated columnist with Creators.