The Bangor Daily News on how cruelty is becoming a defining quality of America:

Cruel.

There’s no other way to describe the priorities and policies of the Trump administration and the Republicans who support them.

The so-called Big Beautiful Bill Act (the ridiculous name given to a tax, spend and social services cut package to echo what President Donald Trump called the bill) that passed the Republican-controlled House and Senate this week will result in nearly 12 million people losing their health care over the next decade. More than 50,000 people are predicted to die unnecessarily each year because of provisions in the bill. Millions of Americans, many of them children, will see their food aid cut.

Support for clean energy, which will help address rising utility bills and avert pollution that is worsening climate change, will be eliminated.

At the same time, the richest Americans will get huge tax breaks and spending on immigrant round ups and deportations will increase more than three-fold. Funding for immigration detention facilities increased 13-fold.

And, despite all the cuts to needed services, the bill will balloon the federal deficit by more than $3 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

There is no description for a country with these priorities other than cruel.

“I’ve been in this business of public policy 20 years, eight as governor, 12 years in the United States senate. I have never seen a bill this bad,” Sen. Angus King, a Maine Democrat, told his colleagues in a speech on Sunday as the Senate debated the Big Beautiful Bill. “I have never seen a bill that is this irresponsible, regressive, and downright cruel.”

Yet, nearly every Republican lawmaker in Congress voted for this bill, with Vice President JD Vance casting the tie-breaking vote in the Senate. Sen. Susan Collins appropriately voted against it Tuesday, citing her concerns for the consequences for rural Maine hospitals and nursing homes from the massive cuts to Medicaid.

Collins did get a $50 billion relief fund for rural hospitals added to the bill. That was double the $25 billion in the original version of the Senate bill, but only half the $100 billion Collins initially sought.

After Sen. Thom Tillis, a Republican from North Carolina, warned of the horrendous consequences of the Medicaid cuts, Trump immediately attacked Tillis and threatened to back a primary challenger to the senator who was up for re-election next year. Tillis then announced he would not seek re-election.

This highlights the importance, and political risk, of challenging Trump, as Collins did with her no vote. When a solid Republican like Tillis is driven away from public service for speaking the truth about the many harms from this bill, we are in trouble.

Other Republicans, including former Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, simply dismissed the harms. “They’ll get over it,” he said about concerns about the bill’s deep cuts to Medicaid.

It’s hard to “get over it” if you’re dead. Or you’ve lost a child or parent who didn’t get needed medical care.

Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, shockingly said “we are all going to die,” when her constituents shared concerns about the bill. She then doubled down with a mocking fake apology video.

This lack of empathy and concern for fellow humans isn’t isolated to the Big Beautiful Bill.

Members of the Trump cabinet have scornfully wished harm on federal workers. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Trump’s budget director Russell Vought said in 2023. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

Federal workers fired or driven from their jobs now report contemplating suicide and other health consequences as they struggle to pay bills, afford health care and plan a new future.

Even before the massive funding increase in the bill, ICE has already been rounding up and disappearing people across the country. Not criminals or terrorists, but people who have lived in the U.S. for decades, many of them legally. People like 64-year-old Donna Kashanian, who lived in the U.S. for nearly 50 years after fleeing Iran. She was taken from her garden in New Orleans by ICE agents last month. She has no criminal record and was lauded for volunteering in her community.

Those who conduct raids, including at restaurants and worksites, often cover their faces, wear street clothes and arrive in unmarked vehicles. They may be members of a growing secret police force, or they may be mercenaries. We don’t know. And, it seems by their lack of questions or condemnations, most Republicans in Congress don’t care.

A detention center was built in swampland in Florida in a matter of days while communities in the state still struggle to rebuild after Hurricanes Helene and Milton, which hit the state last year. Trump joked this week when describing how those who may try to escape from “Alligator Alcatraz” may be eaten by alligators.

At immigrant detention centers around the country, men and women are suffering and dying, perhaps without needed medical treatment, and certainly without due process assessment of their immigration status.

The pro-life party has not condemned such treatment.

This past weekend, America marked the 249th anniversary of its independence. The country was founded on the ideals of liberty and equality, ideals we have sometimes struggled to meet. The Big Beautiful Bill and the Trump administration’s inhumane policies and attitudes are rapidly moving America away from those ideals. It’s as if the motivation is to make America cruel again.