Donald Trump’s language of evil
How does evil talk to itself? This is a rhetorical question. I do not expect to arrive at an actual answer. But how does evil talk to itself? When I do wrong I am usually aware of it. To be sure, I occasionally automatically soften my wrongs with a certain level of justification and rationalisation. But how do people who do evil all the time, who do it for a living as it were, face up to it when no one is around, in the quiet of their own thoughts?
For example, how did Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby do it? Year in and year out they raped, abused and disrespected women. Did remorse, regret or the ordinary sense of decency, or simple awareness of the difference between right and wrong, ever play a role?
At a news conference in Helsinki in 2017, Donald Trump was asked if he believed his own intelligence agencies or the Russian president when it came to the allegations of meddling in the elections. With Vladimir Putin himself at his side Trump said, “President Putin says it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be.” When he was later confronted by the press he equivocated, he even did something he almost never did and admitted he misspoke. He said what he meant to say was he didn’t “see any reason why it WOULDN’T be.”
Of course, it later became clear to even the thickest people that Trump meant what he originally said. Trump has no conscience. He lies and breaks the law and cheats people without any internal shame. But back in 2017 he still had a sense of a bridge too far. He still had a sense of how much the public would tolerate, and in 2017, brazenly siding with Putin against his 16 law enforcement agencies, WAS a bridge too far.
No more. Trump doesn’t merely openly side with Putin, he literally shouts at people using Putin’s words. But Donald Trump doesn’t merely do evil, like Putin, Trump is evil personified. And he no longer cares what America’s allies or the public think. He even takes common cause with Putin when he screams at the press that he and poor little Vlad Putin had to endure too long the “RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA” horror perpetrated by the evil Hillary Clinton and Joe and Hunter Biden.
But this little disquisition into evil isn’t really about Trump. We already know he has no internal dialogues about the legality, fairness or morality of anything he does. This is about the people around him. This is about people who mere days ago were defending Ukraine and proclaiming Volodymyr Zelenskyy a hero, suddenly joining Trump in the most shameless exhibition of victim blaming ever witnessed in American history. How the hell do they do it?
Some of them actually volunteered to display their shameful solidarity with Trump publicly. They could have remained silent and no one would have noticed. But they now openly defend Trump’s despicable attacks on a man whose country is daily assaulted by a rapacious and illegal invader.
Is universal condemnation of nearly every nation on earth, the American press and more than half the nation worth it? Do they really value the evaporative good opinion of the most evil and disloyal man who ever lived that much? Are they not aware of the near certainty that posterity will treat them with open disgust, not unlike the way anyone who capitulated with the Nazis later became social lepers? How do they sleep at night? How do they look themselves in the mirror?
We already know what many of them will eventually do. One day, in a brighter future, they will line up behind the John Boltons and Bill Barrs and Cassidy Hutchinsons and Michael Cohens and admit they were wrong, to one degree or another.
If anything, that’s the difference between MAGA and the Democrats in Congress. There are no real defectors from the Democrats. If they come over to MAGA it’s for corrupt reasons, not with mea culpas but with sheepish, embarrassed shrugs, like Rod Blagojevich or Eric Adams. People defect FROM Russia. Lee Harvey Oswald was the exception that proved the rule.
But what do they do in the meantime? How does so much evil talk to itself in the quiet of the night? How do they defend a monster who routinely orders the murder of journalists, who invades and destroys nations without provocation, who orders his soldiers to rape Ukrainian women and kill Ukrainian children? How do they attack a leader who heroically stands at the front and fights with his troops to protect a peaceful and prosperous democracy? I honestly don’t know.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.