What Trump Sells Is Impunity

On January 10, 2025, a 23-year-old woman was shot to death by her father after a heated argument about Donald Trump. Lucy Harrison, a UK citizen and fashion buyer, was visiting her father in Texas when they began arguing about the soon-to-be inaugurated Trump. According to testimony from her boyfriend delivered at a coroner’s inquest in the UK, Harrison had asked her father, “How would you feel if I was the girl in that situation and I’d been sexually assaulted?” The man then replied that he “had two other daughters who lived with him so it would not upset him that much.”

This crime is but one of the many crowdsourced little terrors that seem to define our era. It calls to mind the murder of Renée Good and the obvious, almost gleeful rationalizations for killing her. Consider Fox’s Jesse Watters whinging about Good’s poetry, how she had a “lesbian partner,” and her “pronouns in bio,” as if any of this implicitly justified an extrajudicial killing. Yet they revel in it.

So, is that all that is needed to explain Trump’s appeal? A licence to be cruel? The permission he provides the public on matters of bigotry is a huge part of the equation—and the mainstream press’ unwillingness to grapple with the intensity of MAGA racism is an enduring institutional failure on a par with media coverage in the lead up to the Iraq War. But there are many racists in office. Same with misogyny and its freight train of homophobic and transphobic obsessive hangups. There has never been a shortage of such vile, open bigots among the ranks of conservatives and Republicans. What is Trump’s value-add? What is the true, necrotised heart of his appeal? 

What he sells his legions of followers that no other Republican could was impunity.

You see elements of this in—where else?—the ravings of drunk white people threatening cops. In her piercing documentary on the virality of police bodycam footage, an understandably emotionally exhausted Lindsay Ellis notes the phenomenon of angry white people getting arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct while citing Donald Trump in some fashion. As they’re being arrested, some scream and cry that this isn’t what they voted for, or that they voted for Trump to support the police and how could cops betray ‘us’ like this, or, hilariously, some claim to know Trump personally. Again and again, they howl that the police have it wrong. They’re not supposed to apply consequences to people like them. White people. Right-wingers. Trump voters.

The viral appeal of these videos aside, they reveal a fundamental parasocial truth behind this aspirational impunity: Trump’s fans live vicariously through him, and it inspires imitation. They marvel at how he creates Content by never backing down, never apologising, always pushing the envelope with ever more offensive statements. He is the unbannable poster they aspire to be. For his wealthiest backers, the Epstein Class and lesser aspirants, he has been the surest guardian of the immunity they see as a birthright. In either case, Trump’s brand is impunity and the fans want some for themselves.

A licence to be cruel means nothing without emancipation from shame, responsibility, and duty. Lucy Harrison’s murder was an especially visceral severing of a fundamental bond: the first duty of a parent to their child to keep them safe. It is not inconceivable that her father, Kris Harrison, loved Trump because he offered the promise of liberation from such responsibilities. According to a UK-based inquest, led by coroner Jacqueline Devonish, Kris Harrison engaged in grossly negligent manslaughter, flaunting his Glock and pointing it directly at his daughter’s chest while drunk. Since no one else was in the room but him and his daughter, this was the most generous possible reading for Mr. Harrison. But even if one is inclined to accept this version of events, Harrison’s outraged sense of contempt and invincibility remains palpable. His unwillingness to see the world through his daughter’s eyes silenced her forever.

Meanwhile, the coroner’s inquest carries no legal force, and a Texas grand jury already declined to indict Harrison last year. Even on manslaughter charges.

It is by now a cliché to assert that Donald Trump is acting like a parody of a personalist dictator. But to get here, he had to sell Americans on a vision. Little about his politics offered a positive vision; instead, it was his very lifestyle that offered something worth aspiring to. Not a vision for society, but a vision for the individual: to say, do, and be whatever you want without consequence—not in spite of cruelty or selfishness, but because of those things. 

What Trump unleashed was, yes, a tidal wave of prejudice that has assaulted and corroded our civil society. But the real earthquake behind that tsunami was the promise of emancipatory irresponsibility.

This is also what inflects the GOP’s newly invigorated racism and misogyny and gives it such an especially heinous character. When we talk about them being “mask-off,” what is revealed by the shorn mask is nothing less than the face of impunity. A sense that there are no limits, no norms, no rules, not even a thin veil of politeness to hide the scowling, frothing bigotry beneath. Because now no one can make you say ‘sorry.’ 

This is why, in many ways, the real dawn of the MAGA movement as we know it today was not Trump’s descent down that golden escalator, but the moment he refused to step down from his campaign after the Access Hollywood tape was revealed. It was a signal to so many people—men, in particular—that even the most vile misogyny, that even openly admitting to sexual assault on camera, could not keep you from sitting behind the Resolute desk. Something had changed. And they wanted in.

It is impossible to understand Trump without understanding the marrow-deep bigotries that animate his resentment. He is the elemental embodiment of a YouTube comment complaining about bitches and [insert ethnic slur here], and this is the key to understanding how Trump shifted from an 80’s lifestyle influencer peddling get-rich-like-me-quick schemes to someone selling impunity.

As Jamelle Bouie recently wrote in the New York Times:

Let’s suppose you’re the spoiled son of a self-made man. Let’s suppose that, despite your flash and bravado, you’ve failed at virtually everything you’ve tried. You’re the laughingstock of polite society, a punchline for the privileged. You think you’re superior enough to be the president of the United States — the highest honor in your country — but the actual president is a man of humble origins, a minority of the kind your family didn’t even rent to when you were in the landlord business. And he is claiming power that rightfully belongs to you. He’s even mocking you, ridiculing you for all the world to see.

But as I observed earlier, there are so many people already in power that this describes. Stephen Miller is absolutely one of them, for instance. He is now president in all but name; yet why can’t he be president in-name? To say he lacks charisma is laughably obvious and yet also beside the point. Trump’s charisma requires a darker magic; it’s hardly what we think of as straightforward political charisma, after all.

Rather, it’s the glossy ‘charm’ of a car salesman, skillfully seducing you into believing that the hole in your heart can only be filled by a no-money-down 100k loan on a brand new Ford F-450 with all the trimmings. But with Trump, it’s vastly worse. He is not just selling the masses on his resentful bigotries; he’s selling them on the fact that has not been punished for them.

Trump’s resentments animated his ascent, making him the avatar of many such bitter, mostly white, mostly male Americans who felt thwarted by having to live in a society where other people had competing needs and ideas. What if you bottle the lightning of a rich man’s resentment and then sell the idea that it’s risk-free? That the wielder would never face a single consequence for unleashing it?

This, Trump says implicitly, is what will solve MAGA’s problems. The final, most precious, compensation for electing him God Emperor is that he will relieve them of duty and responsibility. There will be no ‘love thy neighbour’ any longer, for that is weak and gay. 

This is the keystone that holds together a political base defined by resentment over not being ‘allowed’ to say the n-word, that treats spewing rape threats on Xbox Live as an essential civil right, that demands speech for me but not for thee, that declares empathy itself a sin.

The aura of impunity around Trump, granted by both his brazenness and the utter cave-in of cowardice in every institution that could easily stop him, adds to his appeal. 

Yes, he is indeed the Everything is Gender president, but that means nothing unless you can be a violent misogynist and also get away with it. One wonders if that thought lurked somewhere in Kris Harrison’s mind as he waved a gun at his mouthy daughter, or in the mind of Jonathan Ross as he fired four shots at a woman he called a “fucking bitch” as she lay dying. For them, Trumpism did not just put the gun in their hands: the promise of Trump’s immunity to accountability induced them to pull the trigger.

What Trump offers the bigot is not merely affirmation of their bigotry. They can find that anywhere online these days. He offers the promise of a solipsistic order defined by you, where you get to say what you want and no one can tell you no. The increased virulence of their prejudice—the sneer with which, say, Megyn Kelly says ‘the Latinos’ in a viral clip where she’s angry about the existence of Spanish—is merely in direct proportion to their hope that they will not be punished.

In this way, by pardoning the January 6^th insurrectionists, Trump was fulfilling the only real mandate MAGA has given him: to spread some of his Teflon around. 

He can’t, of course. Not really. As the re-arrest of several of those insurrectionists for other crimes shows, Trump is once again peddling an illusion. It is also noteworthy that the plague of ‘little Trumps’ in the GOP who think that Trump’s success will enable any conspiratorial jackhole to waltz to an electoral victory have precious few victories to their names. 

Even in 2024, when Trump’s coattails helped some embattled Republicans beat expectations, people like former North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson could not overcome scandals and the radioactivity of their reactionary politics. A prolific poster on the porn website “Nude Africa,” he identified as a “Black Nazi” while expressing pro-Hitler and pro-slavery sentiments, for example. Thus, in a bad year for Democrats, in a swing state that voted for Trump himself, Robinson still lost by 14 points. 

But still the myth endures and has spread to other cultic figures. Elon Musk sells a similar myth to a more specific demographic: young technophilic men who treat STEM like a fandom rather than a discipline. Musk’s naked bigotry comes across as “based” to some of them, but what really cements his appeal is the fact that he keeps appearing to win. Making more money, getting more deals, making ever bigger, more absurd promises that no one can shame him for. Tesla stock continues to soar, meanwhile, based on nothing but Musk’s inimitable vibes, even as the company’s profits post record year-on-year declines. His fans want some of that action too.

Musk’s limited appeal is like Trump’s: never having to say you’re sorry.

They voted for impunity for themselves and authoritarian brutality directed at everyone they hated. Lesbian feminist bitches, dirty job-stealing immigrants, evil perverted trannies, on and on and on. The brutality of state violence was supposed to only ever be directed at their ideological foes. And in exchange, the Trump voter would never again have to live with the mortifying ordeal of responsibility.

All while consuming the endless assault on our dignity as so much entertainment. As memes. That parasocial dimension is also participatory: you get to crow as ‘your guy’ gets away with it, all while the libs wring their hands and go ‘ah, well, nevertheless…’ It’s all an echo of how we root for the antihero in prestige TV; the transgressive thrill of watching a bad guy slip the bonds of propriety and accountability because the only law he follows is the Rule of Cool. Combine this with the mediating, dissociative interface of social media, and you have the suffering of millions turned into content that enhances the allure of their tormentor’s impunity.

When we talk about the decline of duty and responsibility, about how even the supposedly manly virtues thereof are nowhere in evidence amongst the parodic avatars of roided-up insecurity that constitute Trump’s cadre, we are seeing the wages of Trump’s appeal. It is not a side effect, it is what he is selling.

Alex Pretti was murdered for doing his duty to his neighbours. His last words were asking after a woman also being brutalised by those same CBP agents. Meanwhile J.D. Vance grins and sneers at the idea of even respecting the man in death and preaches to the Pope and Catholic Bishops about how empathy is a sin and secret police are Christ-like. There was a version of patriarchy that attempted to sell people on men having a duty to protect others—this is part of the patriarchal bargain that thinkers like Andrea Dworkin wrote about in such detail. Her Right Wing Women is a landmark analysis of what drove the titular women to embrace men who hated their freedom. Protection from other men, of course, was front of mind.

Now Trump doesn’t even offer that. Because even that much duty, with all the selfish compensations of a woman of your very own to possess, is still too gay. All he offers is liberation from responsibility. From even having to pretend, from even paying lip-service to the idea that you have a duty to anyone you didn’t choose.

This, indeed, is what is at the heart of the new anti-empathy theology, which has to find a way to rip the Sermon on the Mount to shreds in order to justify itself while still clinging to the majesty of a millennia-old religion for legitimacy. To hear Vance and others talk about it, one only has a Christly responsibility to those in one’s immediate circles, to those you (ostensibly a white, property-owning man) have chosen to protect. You’re not obliged to, of course. Even here. Look at Kris Harrison. But it’s your choice. Right up until you choose to protect people outside your household—then it becomes weak, gay, enfeebling, destructive to the nation.

This solipsism is at the core of who Trump is, a man who always acts as if he is the only person in the universe who matters. As he moulders into senescence, this fundamental instinct of his is increasingly unrestrained; he increased tariffs on Switzerland because the then-Swiss President Karin Keller-Sutter “just rubbed [him] the wrong way,” to name one of a thousand possible examples. This, in turn, feeds the monstrous void of an administration’s social media-driven impulses, where All Is Content. For what could be more solipsistic than social media use, where the only thing that matters is your satisfaction? What could be more free of responsibility or duty to anything other than one’s own appetites?

Consider the strange, evil tenure of Kristi Noem: a twisted mosaic of viral videos, cosplay press conferences and private jets where her boyfriend tried and failed to fire a Coast Guard pilot for forgetting Noem’s favourite blanket. The Cabinet is a reflection of Trump’s solipsistic entitlement and sense of invincible impunity, with responsibility only to one’s phone camera.

This, finally, is the essence of Trumpism, and what is guiding the spasms that pass for policy in this administration. Do it for social media, for your self-satisfaction, with no sense of obligation to anything or anyone else. If it feels good, do it. 

After all, you’ll get away with it. Right?

Header image is "Donald Trump," CC-BY-SA 2.0 Gage Skidmore 2023.