Evil

The one thing we're always *not* supposed to do is to attribute a kind of supernatural or theological proximate cause to any speech or action of someone we are criticizing. It just seems over the top. But I've got to say, I'm pretty much there when it comes to Trump and those in his administration who are aiding him .... they and their acts do seem evil to me.

It isn't just that they are doing what's expedient and they don't care about collateral damage. They are doing this stuff on purpose - the cruelty is the point of their choices, not a byproduct. From The Atlantic ...

The Cruelty Is the Point

The cruelty of the Trump administration’s policies, and the ritual rhetorical flaying of his targets before his supporters, are intimately connected. As Lili Loofbourow wrote of the Kavanaugh incident in Slate, adolescent male cruelty toward women is a bonding mechanism, a vehicle for intimacy through contempt. The white men in the lynching photos are smiling not merely because of what they have done, but because they have done it together.

We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era. There were the border-patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant children separated from their families, and the Trump adviser who delighted white supremacists when he mocked a child with Down syndrome who was separated from her mother. There were the police who laughed uproariously when the president encouraged them to abuse suspects, and the Fox News hosts mocking a survivor of the Pulse Nightclub massacre (and in the process inundating him with threats), the survivors of sexual assault protesting to Senator Jeff Flake, the women who said the president had sexually assaulted them, and the teen survivors of the Parkland school shooting. There was the president mocking Puerto Rican accents shortly after thousands were killed and tens of thousands displaced by Hurricane Maria, the black athletes protesting unjustified killings by the police, the women of the #MeToo movement who have come forward with stories of sexual abuse, and the disabled reporter whose crime was reporting on Trump truthfully. It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump ....

The Lincoln Project ad above deals with the fact that Trump and Jared had actually come up with a plan to lower the death rate from the virus, but they decided not to use it because it seemed that the virus would mostly kill Democrats (Kushner's coronavirus team shied away from a national strategy, believing that the virus was hitting Democratic states hardest and that they could blame governors, report says). I call that evil.