This is the Mother Jones Podcast. I'm Jamila King in New York.

On today's show, when the government decides to screw with your life, seemingly just for the sake of it.

After Donald Trump's election, I think like many folks in so many communities,

I had a crisis of faith.

What it's like when there's an administration-wide effort to single you out, curb your rights, even erase your identity.

Prejudice that again was always there, it's been emboldened.

Inside the trans rights movement at this critical moment for its future.

They can legislate and in some cases mandate discrimination in restrooms.

It becomes the closest thing to a silver bullet to legislating that community out of public life.

The fear and the fight.

You know, it kind of makes you think, okay,

this was a dream that I had that we were able to be ourselves,

but now we can't. Stories for Mother Jones listeners and readers.

That's all coming up.

There's a chilling phrase of former colleague of ours, Adam Surwer, who now works at the Atlantic,

came up with to describe one of the biggest lessons from the last two years of Trump. The cruelty is basically this.

Trump's policies help his supporters rejoice in the anguish of others.

And there's evidence for Adam's argument everywhere.

Here's Adam.

So the basic idea is that when people collectively perform acts of cruelty,

they are bonded to each other by that act. And what

Donald Trump has done is taking this to a national political level and those acts of cruelty against those people are

...