Why do believe that Donald Trump’s project is essentially an evil one?
And how is it that this is so obvious to me and not to everyone?
How can it be, for example, that sincere religious believers can imagine Donald Trump is on God’s side and his opponents are aiding the forces of evil?
What makes Donald Trump’s political career fundamentally different from the normal arguing, tussling, biased, truth-bending US American politician?
It comes down to agreeing to be constrained by democratic standards, rules, and norms.
Before it was taken for granted that our politicians would submit to the fair fight of fair elections.
It had seemed impossible that the nation would let them not, so they weren’t really tested, but the politicians who thrived understood and embraced the concept of representative government: I will do my best to govern well for the entire nation, and then when my term is up, I will take my case to my constituents, and if I did a good job and had a little luck, I will win again. And if I lose: Well, who cares? It’s not like we live in a dictatorship, where only people who are actively ruling don’t have to worry about the rulers using the power of the state to intimidate, punish, and destroy their political enemies.
Trump was not comfortable with the checks on his power and worked against press freedoms and the independence of congress and the judiciary in his first term. Also, lying has always been a core part of his political strategy, and his reliance on this fundamentally anti-democratic tactic has increased as his political career has matured. In a healthy representative government where the people have the final say and everyone is protected with fundamental rights like the freedom to speak without government retribution, the free press calls you out on dishonesty and eventually your lies catch up with you. Well, at least that was the old idea; but in the fracturing of the nation into separate realities, the Republican Party had already become the party of rampant disinformation (Fox News has long relentlessly cherry picked and spun the news to suit conservatives, Breitbart repeats false narratives they I guess heard somewhere; and in the case of the Domino voting machines, Fox News let their hosts repeat conspiracy theories that Fox News knew to be false, was sued and lost — in which catastrophe Rupert Murdoch learned not that you shouldn’t let your hosts spread stories you know are false, but that you shouldn’t ever put anything in an email). And so lying worked amazingly well for Trump, and then, and then came the corruption of the Republican Party.
When did the Republican Party embrace political evil?
They did this when they silenced the voices who spoke out against Trump’s lie about the 2020 election and elevated those voices who echoed, or at least corroborated his lies.
At this point, they became a party of political evil — a party willing to use the tools of the state to commit crimes against their own citizens.
Why do I say this? Because we have hours and hours of testimony from members of Donald Trump’s own administration explaining how they thwarted his month-long crusade to overturn the 2020 election. And those people were not celebrated by the GOP, but sidelined. And who has risen to the top? People like Mike Johnson who first repeated one unfounded conspiracy theory after another before settling on a specious constitutional argument to call the entire 2020 election into questions, and who used that nonsense to justify Trump’s behavior, even though Trump was clearly not thinking in legal intricacies, but was merely attempting to find any way, legal or illegal and with morality not even a topic, to stay in power, to not lose, to not be a “loser”. [For more on this argument of Mike Johnson’s, please see What we Know, an essay maybe thirty entries back in this lonely blog.]
With the embrace of Donald Trump’s lies, the GOP has become the Russia of my youth. I remember Dad shaking his head in disbelief and saying, “The Russians just say anything, and then they repeat it, or maybe they change it, they just lie all the time.” Yes, they did then and they today. Why? Because then and now the government of Russia was an autocratic regime where the government uses its power to suppress dissent and force itself on the people, who cannot remove it, and who must live under it and can therefore chose to either acquiesce to a leadership that routinely and as a matter of policy commits crimes against its citizens, or they can risk their livelihoods, the safety of themselves and their loved ones. In Russia fear makes true. And in Trump’s GOP, the same upside logic holds. Truth is on its head; those who would stand up for truth are drummed out; those who embrace any ridiculous lie to support Donald Trump are raised up, are the “future”. This is evil. This is so clearly evil.

We will have to continue this essay later.