Rage Descends From The Top

Fear, cruelty, and blind obedience are no longer whispers behind closed doors. They spill into courts, streets, and hearts, showing how violence spreads when hate becomes permission.

Guest article by Michael Cohen. Follow him on Substack for more by clicking here.

Donald Trump doesn’t just contaminate the air with his words; he builds an ecosystem of rage. That rage trickles down. It seeps from his pulpit into the bloodstream of his inner circle — people like Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, Pete Hegseth — and then into the lowest rungs of federal law enforcement. And once it’s there, it metastasizes. You can see it in a courtroom hallway in New York, where an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer, caught on video, shoved a woman — already crying, already broken by the system — into a wall and down to the ground. That officer didn’t act in a vacuum. He was parroting the culture he’s been steeped in: Trump’s America.

The Department of Homeland Security says the officer has been placed on administrative leave. That sounds like accountability, but it’s not. It’s a Band-Aid over a bullet wound. Because here’s the truth: this is not the end. This is just the beginning.

Let’s not kid ourselves. Trump’s rhetoric — his constant talk of “animals,” “invasions,” and “vermin” — isn’t some sideshow. It’s the main event. And his disciples repeat it like gospel. Stephen Miller, the architect of cruelty in immigration policy, has never met a family separation he didn’t like. Tom Homan snarls on television about immigrants as if compassion is a disease. Pete Hegseth, Trump’s Fox-propagandist-turned-confidant, riles up the base with the kind of language that dehumanizes whole populations. Their words give permission. They license the violence. They create the environment where an ICE officer feels emboldened to shove a woman onto the ground in front of cameras and still sneer “adios” like it’s a punchline.

This is not rogue behavior. This is systemic. The officer’s shove is the logical endpoint of a presidency and a movement that treats immigrants not as people but as props in a political performance of dominance. I know this playbook well because I know the man who wrote it. And that’s why I’m telling you: do not look away. Stay focused.

The cruelty doesn’t stop when Trump steps away from the podium. It echoes. It mutates. It finds new hosts. When DHS says, “Our ICE law enforcement are held to the highest professional standards,” forgive me if I don’t choke on the irony. Standards mean nothing when the fish rots from the head. And the stench has lingered through every institution it touches.

What happened in that New York courthouse was not an isolated explosion. It was the product of months of escalating tension as ICE increased its footprint in the immigration courts: officers loitering in waiting rooms, shouting matches with observers, dragging advocates into custody for daring to watch. Each time, the rhetoric ratchets up. Each time, the space for decency shrinks. And each time, another officer decides that maybe shoving a crying woman to the floor is acceptable because, after all, hasn’t the Commander-in-Chief himself said worse?

Some people will dismiss this as the misconduct of a single officer. That’s the wrong lens. Look closer. This officer was also the one who arrested a court observer last month — an observer whose only “crime” was paying attention. In that case, too, anger spilled over into violence. One man, two incidents, weeks apart. The throughline isn’t coincidence; it’s culture. A culture created, nurtured, and defended by Trump and his loyalists.

The scariest part? We are nowhere near the bottom. As Trump continues to lash out — at immigrants, at the courts, at the media — the permission structure grows stronger. Agents, officers, bureaucrats, even judges: they all take their cues from the top. Violence becomes less an aberration and more a reflex. What we witnessed in New York is a preview, not a finale.

Despite the DHS statement, despite the administrative leave, despite the headlines, this won’t end with one officer’s career. Because the machine that produced him is still humming. Trump built it, others maintain it, and it is fueled by fear, cruelty, and the intoxicating promise of unchecked power.

I spent years close enough to see how the system worked from the inside. I know the language, the signals, the way loyalty gets twisted into permission to cross lines that should never be crossed. I watched people I once considered decent lose themselves, as harshness and blind obedience replaced compassion and judgment. That’s why I’m telling you plainly: pay attention. Don’t let them normalize this. Today it’s a shove in a courthouse hallway. Tomorrow it’s something worse, something deadlier, and they’ll still call it “law enforcement.”

The question isn’t whether more of this is coming. It is. The question is whether we, as a society, are willing to admit the obvious: that the violence isn’t a glitch. It’s the plan.

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