October 9, 2017gence agencies rebirthed after 2001 with the label “wa-
terboarding”). When this method failed to extract the
desired response, Torquemada’s team moved on to more
drastic methods, such as the strappado, in which the vic-
tims had their hands bound behind their backs and then
were hung by them from a rope; and the infamous rack,
on which the victims were stretched slowly, dislocating
joints and destroying muscles, ligaments, and bones. The
list of the Inquisition’s torture techniques is long, and its
legacy wafts through the centuries—a potent reminder
of the horrors that a handful of fanatics can unleash on a
civilization. More than five centuries later, Torquemada’s
name still evokes cruelty and extremism.
In the 18th century, Enlightenment philosophers like
Cesare Beccaria and Voltaire sought to discredit torture
as a legitimate tool of the state. It was, they argued, a relic
of barbarism, both unjust and ineffective. In the demo-
cratic age that was then dawning by fits and starts, torture
would have no official place. It could not be a formal part
of the legal system, nor could it be publicly defended by
those claiming their right to govern from the people and,
as their reason for governing, to serve the people.
This didn’t mean that torture disappeared; far from it.
But the Enlightenment critique did lead to a public rejec-
tion of the practice. When it did continue, it was either
in dictatorships or, in democracies, hidden deep in the
shadows, used in extreme situations but never publicly
acknowledged. The legal and linguistic wiggle room that
democracies created to insulate themselves from charges
of torture speaks to the grave moral opprobrium that was
directed toward the practice.
Which is why Donald Trump and his supporters’
extraordinary embrace not just of acts of torture but
of the word itself was a watershed moment. Here was
a man vying for the highest office in the United States,
as a candidate of one of the two major political parties,
who wanted to turn into a moral good, to romanticize,
acts of savage violence that for hundreds of years had
been regarded as beyond the democratic pale. In speech
after speech, Trump’s rhetoric normalized the extraordi-
nary, making torture simply one more part of the state’s
standard tool kit, as run-of-the-mill as fingerprinting or
booking. This truly was the banality of evil described by
the philosopher Hannah Arendt.
In front of his adoring crowds, Trump played the
tough guy well. They wanted theater, and he provided it.
They wanted cathartic violence, and he offered it up to
them in spades. He was like the Mafia figure in cinema
who intimidates and thrills his audiences by talking about
his enemies “sleeping with the fishes.” But for all the bra-
vado, the reality-TV star turned presidential candidate
never actually got down and dirty and explained to his au-
diences—especially those people in the military—exactly
what he would be asking them to do when, as president
and commander in chief, he authorized “the torture” and
a “hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.”
Would he make them dismember ISIS recruits limb
from limb? Would he order them to impale suspects
slowly on spikes? Would he have them, as the Nazi Ge-
stapo did with their victims, hang terrorism suspects
from meat hooks? Would he have enemy fighters dis-
emboweled, as partisans did during the brutal Russian
civil war that followed the 1917 revolution? Would he
order psychiatrists to break the minds of dissidents and
terrorists, as Soviet medics did under Stalin? Would he
order soldiers to throw young men and women out of
helicopters and airplanes into the ocean, as Argentina’s
military dictators did in the 1970s and ’80s?
Or would he ask them to force confessions out of
suspects, like the rogue police unit on Chicago’s South
Side that I wrote about in the 1990s, by tying them to
scalding-hot radiators, by mock-executing them, or
by using the Vietnam War–era “telephone” torture, in
which electrodes are clipped to the victims’ genitals and
a windup device, like a field telephone, is then cranked to
deliver devastating electric shocks?T
hese are not the kinds of questions that
one normally asks a leading presidential hope-
ful. But then again, no serious candidate for the
American presidency—or for the leadership of
any other functioning modern democracy—
had ever fetishized torture the way Donald Trump did.
No modern presidential candidate had declared entire
races and religions to be the enemy. And no leading can-
didate had sung the song of fear as perfectly as did Trump
to his angry, vengeful, and deeply fearful throngs.
As the real-estate mogul’s campaign gathered steam,
one saw in Trumpism the interweaving of a host of
fears—of immigrants, of Muslims, of domestic crime
and criminals, of changing cultural mores, of refugees, of
disease—and a host of deeply authoritarian impulses. In
such a milieu, it became acceptable to bash refugees flee-
ing appalling conflicts, and even to argue—as did several
GOP hopefuls during the party’s presidential primary—
that only Syria’s Christian refugees should be admitted
into the country.
Less than two months after the November 2015 ter-
rorist atrocity in Paris, Trump released a half-minute
television commercial. “The politicians can pretend it’s
something else,” a narrator intoned, “but Donald Trump
calls it radical Islamic terrorism. That’s why he’s call-
ing for a temporary shutdown of Muslims entering the
United States until we can figure out what’s going on.”
After another few seconds devoted to the candidate’s
plan to build a wall to seal off the United States fromBeyond the pale:
This etching depicts a
priest supervising his
scribe while prisoners
are tortured during the
Spanish Inquisition.Trump has
legitimized
bigotry and
given the
imprimatur
of a major
political
party to
criminal
violence.