The Cruelty is the Point
“The cruelty is the point” entered U.S. political vocabulary through an essay by Adam Serwer, a staff writer at The Atlantic. Published on October 3 2018 and itself titled “The Cruelty Is the Point,” Serwer’s piece argued that Donald Trump’s political style—and many of his administration’s policies—deliberately united supporters through shared pleasure in the suffering of disfavoured groups. The phrase, which appears in the headline and serves as the article’s thesis, was new enough that readers immediately treated it as a coinage and a concise diagnostic of the moment.
Serwer had sketched the same idea a few months earlier, writing during the summer-2018 family-separation crisis that “the policy’s cruelty is its purpose,” but that June article did not use the now-famous wording. The October essay refined the thought into the seven words that would spread far beyond the original context.
By 2020, The Atlantic itself was referring to Serwer as having “coined the phrase,” acknowledging how quickly it had become a touchstone in discussions of Trump-era politics and of authoritarian impulses more broadly. ([The Atlantic][3]) Serwer then adopted it as the title of his 2021 collection, The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump’s America, cementing its place in the lexicon.
Searches of news archives and social-media databases turn up no sustained public use of the exact wording before Serwer’s work, so contemporary writers and scholars generally treat the October 2018 essay as the phrase’s point of origin.