What president has ever talked like this? Speak for yourself Trump! You alone!
When the Pentagon decided not to send anyone to this week’s Aspen Security Forum, an annual bipartisan gathering of national security professionals in the Colorado mountains, President Trump’s appointees explained that they would not participate in discussions with people who subscribe to the “
evil of globalism.”
After all the evils that the U.S. military has fought, this may be the first time in its history that it has put globalization on its enemies list. But it is simply following the example of Mr. Trump. Last week, he denounced a reporter as a “
very evil person” for asking a question he did not like. This week, he declared that Democrats are “
an evil group of people.”
“Evil” is a word getting a lot of airtime in the second Trump term. It is not enough anymore to dislike a journalistic inquiry or disagree with an opposing philosophy. Anyone viewed as critical of the president or insufficiently deferential is wicked. The Trump administration’s efforts to achieve its policy goals are not just an exercise in governance but a holy mission against forces of darkness.
The characterization seeds the ground to justify all sorts of actions that would normally be considered extreme or out of bounds. If Mr. Trump’s adversaries are not just rivals but villains, then he can rationalize going further than any president has in modern times. Last month, he told a cabinet secretary to consider throwing her Biden administration predecessor in prison because of his immigration policy. Last weekend, Mr. Trump said he might
strip Rosie O’Donnell’s citizenship for the crime of criticizing him.
Demonization, of course, has been at the core of Mr. Trump’s politics since he took the national stage in 2015 to announce his first successful presidential campaign and disparaged many immigrants crossing the border without permission as “
rapists” and vowed to block all Muslims from entering the country. His rallies during that campaign rang with “lock her up” chants aimed at his opponent, Hillary Clinton.
But in returning to power, Mr. Trump has been more focused on rooting out the “
enemy from within,” as he put it during last year’s campaign. He has devoted enormous energy in his second term to prosecuting perceived enemies, purging career officials deemed disloyal and destroying what he calls “the deep state” that he believes thwarted his policies last time and then persecuted him through criminal prosecutions after he left office.
During the first six months of his first term in 2017, according to a search of the
Factbase compendium of his speeches, Mr. Trump regularly used the word “evil” to describe terrorists, immigrants, Nazis and bigots, much as other presidents might have. He used it in a domestic context only once, when complaining about news coverage. In the nearly six months of his second term, he has used it 11 times to describe Democrats or journalists.
Mr. Trump has said that former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was “
an evil guy who wasn’t very smart” and ran a “
very evil regime” surrounded by advisers and prosecutors who were also “
so bad and so evil, so corrupt.”
“I knew that running was very dangerous, because I knew how evil these people were,”
Mr. Trump said of Democrats on May 12, during an interview on Air Force One with Sean Hannity of Fox News. “I knew how they cheat, they steal, they lie. They’re a horrible group of people.”
Speaking with visiting foreign ministers in the Oval Office on June 27,
he said: “We had a president that was incompetent. We had bad people circulating around this desk, this beautiful Resolute Desk. They had, I guess, evil intentions. They would — you couldn’t be that stupid. I mean, they had evil intentions.”
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