"Evil" is a hard concept to get your head around. We can get close to it when we say things like "The cruelty is the point," but that was truly about the first Donald Trump administration, with its scattershot acts of savagery, many of them mitigated by courts and by stronger Democrats and even a few Republicans who still had souls and spines. The cruelty had no real ideology behind it, just the sheer deranged pleasure of hurting people. Systematic, planned cruelty with a goal of hurting everyone who ever opposed you and your ideology? That's evil. We don't want to think that we are confronting evil now because it seems melodramatic and frankly unfathomable. If we have leaders who keep acting in ways that are evil, as in directly contrary to any concept of "good," then we need to acknowledge that we are in an evil country living through an evil age.
I just can't think of any other clearer way to describe what the Trump/Musk administration has done in this first month of its four-year (minimum) reign of terror. We want them to be stupid, and we need to think of them as incompetent, like when Musk's Department of Government Efficiency fired 300 workers from the National Nuclear Security Administration because they didn't understand that those workers are responsible for the safety of our nuclear arsenal, not a bunch of hippies inhibiting the nuclear power industry or whatever the hell they believed, and now they're scrambling to rehire them. But stupidity and incompetence lets them off the hook to an extent in a "they know not what they do" kind of way. Fuck that.
These motherfuckers know exactly what they're doing. They are seeking to undermine the functioning of the federal government, getting rid of any checks on the power of the president and wanting to privatize much of its work, in order to make the nation a de facto autocracy that exists for the benefit of a few wealthy patrons, with the population kept in line by an enforced Christian nationalist morality. In other words, Trump and his enablers are acting like just about every fucking totalitarian regime in history. And its goal is to harm anyone or any idea that opposes their power, from entire institutions and populations and on down to the lowest-level individual bureaucrat who didn't pledge their loyalty. It is a kind of coup, a willful abandonment of the protections of the Constitution while pretending to save the country from crises that simply don't exist.
I don't know how you describe the actions the administration has inflicted on the country in another way that makes sense. You have to remember that anything they say about why they're doing this gutting of the workforce is nonsense, not only in the amount of money DOGE and Musk claim they are saving, but also in the context of a proposed $4.5 trillion tax cut, which is something like 16 times the salaries of the entire federal workforce. If you fire a couple hundred thousand people who are doing well the jobs they were hired for, completely decimating their finances and upending they're lives and that doesn't help anyone else, that's evil shit.
No matter where you go, evil is at play. Firing people involved in the prevention of bird flu and other viruses. Firing those trying to find a cure for cancer. Freezing and eliminating funding for USAID, which helps people in poorer countries survive diseases like HIV, tuberculosis, and more. The firing of thousands of workers at the Forest Service and national parks. And so very much more. It's not just about the employees themselves, many of whom have been put through hell in the last couple of weeks, but it's about all the people who will be harmed and will die because of these cuts.
And this isn't even getting into the disappearing of migrants to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, or to countries where they have no connection; or the proposed complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza so the United States can build some resorts; or the Justice Department's attack on the rule of law in the Eric Adams case; or the move to erase the existence of transgender people' or the unhinged attack on anything that supports non-whites or women as "DEI," which, we should all be reminded, means "diversity, equity, and inclusion," as if those aspirational ideas are bad. Or a thousand other things that I could list and that I'm sure you thought of, all, all, all with a goal to directly harm people or force them to kowtow to Trump and Musk (or, really, Musk because Trump is just his fucking poodle now). I mean, this is some supervillain shit going on right now.
"Evil" provides us with a way of framing this in the easy, Manichean way that most people prefer to view the world. I acknowledge it's got a religious sound to it. That's okay. That helps. It's an explanation that needs no elaboration. As a term it has potency because it gives the opposition a moral dynamic: we're fighting against evil. I also think that it's a way of making those who voted for Trump to articulate the way they feel like he's fucked them over (and, I know, it's a small percentage who might actually pull their heads of his voluminous ass in order to breathe the fresh air of reality). And it gives us a way to label the people who do Trump and Musk's bidding. They're not just assholes bro-coding us to the apocalypse. They're evil assholes who want to see the rest of us hurting.
It also forces us to ask questions to anyone who supports them: What actual good has been done? Can you tell us one thing that's been accomplished that makes your life better or easier? What is being proposed that would make your life better or easier? Because the answer across the board is "Not a goddamn thing."
They are fucking up the lives of Americans. They are driving people to despair. I have said that I believe the real goal here is to provoke a violent response from a group or individuals, giving Trump the chance to declare martial law and just have his way with us as surely as if he were keeping us chained to a wall. We are in the midst of evil, awaiting to see what other evil will occur.
And now we need to respond as if evil motherfuckers have taken over our occasionally decent nation. Call it out as evil, protest, and kick your members of Congress in the ass. The time to act is now while we're still allowed to act.
