Many years ago, I knew a woman who had escaped an abusive husband. But not before he beat her numerous times, usually where the bruises and abrasions wouldn’t show. She never wore short sleeved or sleeveless tops because her arms and shoulders were almost always discolored and swollen. She never showed her legs because there were usually welts on them. One night, he went farther – he broke her arm. That was it – the moment when her strength returned, the moment when she found the courage to leave and report him. But, she said, it wasn’t really the broken arm – it was the way he laughed at her pain. The obvious pleasure he took in her suffering was what tipped the scales and ended his tyranny over her. His sadistic pleasure was the memory that crowded out all the others.

I thought of her the other night when I was watching Don Lemon’s show on CNN. Michael d’Antonio, author of The Truth About Trump, was one of the guest panelists and the subject was the border crisis – specifically the horror of children being ripped from their parents and put into cages. Donald Trump likes this “separation policy” a lot and wants to continue it. Michael d’Antonio, in speaking about the cruelty of it, said about Trump, “He is a sadistic, cruel person.” He said that Trump “takes pleasure” in things like this, when people suffer as a result of his actions.

If that’s true, and there is no reason to think it’s not – Michael d’Antonio has spent a great deal of time with Trump – it’s the link that ties everything together. Trump’s clear affection for brutal dictators, the glee he takes in belittling people, calling them names, his ebullience in jacking up his crowds at rallies to taunt and hurl obscenities at the media, praising acts of violence. In all these instances, he’s clearly having fun. He was positively glowing when he said that he and Kim Jong Un “fell in love.” A dictator whose cruelty apparently has no limits is who the current President of the United States has fallen in love with.

Most dictators take pleasure in exacting sadistic punishments on those who they see as less than, even including torture and death. It’s a characteristic that unites all of them, no matter what part of the world they rule or what chapter of history they inhabit. To think that the man occupying the White House finds happiness through sadistic measures should chill all of us, no matter what side of the political fence you’re on.

And it should, in an ideal world, make us say, This is not who should be running America. America was not created on a foundation of inhumanity, although we have had many dark chapters in our history when inhumanity and cruelty became established norms. The decimation of Native Americans, slavery, the Japanese internment camps, are shameful parts of our history. They should both haunt us and stand as warnings.

Let your mind linger on the brutality of ripping children away from their parents, putting those children in cages and telling the parents they can’t get them back. Reflect on a president who thinks it’s just fine, who really likes this way of treating people. And then ask yourself how history will record these times we are living in.