DOMINIC LAWSON
Trump can’t help loving his big brother in cruelty
Like Putin, the US president knows his people are excited by brutality
Dominic Lawson
Saturday December 20 2025, 11.00pm GMT, The Sunday Times
After the director of When Harry Met Sally, Rob Reiner, and his wife, Michele, were found with their throats slit in their Los Angeles home, Donald Trump immediately declared this to be a consequence of Reiner’s own behaviour. The film-maker’s death, wrote the president on his Truth Social account (even though the couple’s son Nick had been arrested), was “due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME … he was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J Trump”. In other words, Reiner, who indeed in 2017 pronounced Trump “mentally unfit” to be president, had it coming (shame about the wife, though).
This combination of extreme narcissism and considered cruelty is the distilled essence of Trump. As ever, those who rushed to declare he had finally gone too far were mistaken. I mean mistaken politically, not morally. Trump was precocious in understanding how social media was the ideal instrument for wielding cruelty as a political weapon. He is the apotheosis of all those self-obsessed men in their parents’ basements, raging against the injustices perpetrated upon them. Trump’s “base” will not hold against him this latest paranoiac effusion and doubtless regard those who denounce it as, yes, suffering from TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.
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And which men does Trump most admire and identify with, himself? Those who, with unsparing brutality, bend their own countries to their will. Thus, President Xi of China is, according to Trump, “a brilliant guy. He controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist”. Above all there is President Putin, of whose invasion of Ukraine in 2022 on the pretext of saving the lives of Russian-speakers Trump declared at the time: “This is genius.” Few who saw the US president excitedly clapping as Putin walked towards him across the red carpet at their Alaska summit in August will have failed to perceive Trump’s genuine admiration. Mere diplomacy, this was not.
Putin’s cruelty is also, in his own domestic political terms, an asset — and in this case it is not measured in words on social media but in piles of corpses, mass physical destruction and sadistic poisoning of his personal enemies. Not that Putin is incapable of communicating his sadism in words. As long ago as 2002, when he was regarded in the West as some sort of enlightened technocrat, Putin responded to a French journalist who questioned Russia’s conduct of the war in Chechnya: “If you want to … become a Muslim radical and are ready to get circumcised, I invite you to Moscow. We are a multi-confessional country: we have experts in this field, too. I will recommend that they carry out the operation in such a way that nothing grows back.”
This would have gone down well with millions of Putin’s voters (as he surely understood). The cult of cruelty has been, unfortunately, a characteristic of Russia over many centuries. And, unlike in most other nations, which have gradually evolved out of such a mindset — not least through escape from oppressive material poverty, which remains startling in much of Russia — it is still a feature.
It was a great Russian novelist, himself a survivor of abject poverty in his youth, who provided the most compelling account of this characteristic. I speak of Maxim Gorky, and specifically his 1922 essay “On the Russian peasant”. This was written in the wake of the Russian civil war, in which Gorky had been on the side of the revolutionaries. One section, especially, is worth quoting: “It seems to me that the most striking feature of the Russian national character is exceptional cruelty, just like for the English is sense of humour. The most interesting feature of the Russian cruelty is its devilish sophistication … I am not talking here about cruelty which appears sporadically, like an explosion of a sick or perverted soul. These are exceptions that will chill a psychiatrist: here I am talking about mass psychology, about the nation’s soul, about collective cruelty … it can be said with certainty that those who have the most energy and power in their hands are the most cruel.”
That is the point: in a society based on cruelty as a principle of power, those at the top are the most skilled practitioners, the most implacably merciless. We can be equally sure that many of those Russian soldiers who carried out atrocities in Ukraine were the impoverished graduates of a system in which they themselves had been — again, purposively, not randomly — brutalised.
• We’re under the guns — and in Putin’s sights
Those graduates in cruelty received an accolade from the supreme sadist. In April 2022, after the Ukrainian army liberated Bucha and found hundreds of bodies of civilians with their hands tied, executed, and basements in which others had been tortured, Putin gave a collective award to the brigade responsible, the 64th Motor Rifle Brigade, for “mass heroism and valour, tenacity and courage”.
In his book Berlin: The Downfall 1945, the military historian Antony Beevor described how Soviet soldiers did not merely mass-rape Germans (citizens of an exterminatory regime that had slaughtered Russians in their millions) but also “the Russian women and Jewish women and Ukrainian women and girls who had been sent back to Germany for slave labour”. As Beevor told the Telegraph more recently: “With the Russians, the attitude has always been that conspicuous cruelty is a necessary weapon of war — and we’re seeing that in Ukraine.”
Not least of the objections of the European nations to Trump’s original 28-point “peace plan” for Ukraine was that the White House’s recipe included a “full amnesty for actions committed during the war”. Unfortunately for the US president’s prospect of the Nobel peace prize he covets, Putin’s implacability goes well beyond such demands. Trump, for all his cynicism — some would say realism — has not grasped or does not care that Putin seeks permanent subservience from Ukraine: it must be the slave, he the master.
Yet Trump’s supporters in the Maga movement insist on seeing the poisoner in the Kremlin as a fellow warrior in the battle to reimpose “Christian values” on a sick society. The fact Putin has wreaked death and destruction on a Christian Orthodox nation, as frequently pointed out to me by the Ukrainian mother who has lived with us along with her son since 2022, bothers them not at all.
I’m no expert; but that both Trump and Putin purport to be exemplars of Christian values, and are seen as such by millions of their own people, is the cruellest joke of all.
It only serves to illustrate the wisdom of the observation, after Voltaire, that “those who make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”.