This presidential election has crystallized my view on the nature of evil. [View all]

I believe in evil. Not the metaphysical variety being driven by a demonic spirit, but the more tangible variety. One might say that I believe in evil as the adjective and not the noun. Donald Trump and the strain of society he represents through his most ardent supporters are evil. I will not apologize for saying so.

Before you think I am being unduly harsh to people you know who are grudgingly supporting him, I do excuse them as simply being accomplices who are driven to vote Republican by inertia. Your typical Republican is not evil, but rather simply seduced by convenience and routine.

Trump and his most ardent followers are a different breed. They represent that strain of humanity that has brought us all of our greatest tragedies. Yes, it is fair to compare them to the Nazis or Stalinist Communism. That is not hyperbole. These are people who have so cultivated hatred and resentment that they have turned their souls over to malice and retribution. They want to stick it to somebody, or worse.

Trump himself is the worst of deceivers. How much of what he says he actually believes is not important. It's that he doesn't care if he believes it or not that is disturbing. He is willing to sink to any depths imaginable to further his own advancement. You can see this in things as mundane and provincial as his business dealings. He negotiates payments to vendors and then doesn't honor them, hoping that he can take advantage of their future desperation to pay them something less than they are owed. You can also see it in his behavior yesterday where he spread lies about voter fraud to encourage potentially dangerous voter intimidation. His behavior spreads regional and racial antipathy that could potentially result in violence on election day between his thugs and the decent people seeking to vote in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. He doesn't care. He doesn't even care if some of his people get killed in the process. In fact, I'm sure he would like that because it would be chaos he could cultivate. In the end, it's all about what benefits him personally. Other larger considerations are irrelevant.

However, he does go one step further. While he cultivates malice and hatred in his supporters, he also seems to give into it himself. Look at how he discusses torture. He gets a certain glee out of discussing that most vile of human endeavors. The same applies to his general discussions of the application of military force. That should be a solemn discussion since war always and everywhere brings untold suffering to the countless nameless victims it catches in its wake. Instead, he brags at how he think he'd be good at it. He even said, "I love war, in a certain way, but only when we win." He treats death and destruction like a track meet and it's ultimately all about his own glory.

His ardent supporters are sometimes even worse than him, openly indulging genocidal ideas, engaging in explicit threats (sometimes even violence), relishing the idea of revenge against...whoever they think it is who has wronged them, etc. Roger Stone, that malevolent dung pile, has encouraged the spread of lies about the election being rigged to justify post-election protests and violence. This isn't speculation. He said it explicitly. He isn't alone, either. Trump has a particularly awful cadre of hangers-on ranging from Jeffrey Lord to Carl Paladino, all of who are as vile as any I've ever seen. The morality of their actions matters not at all to them. Any deception or malevolent action is fine so long as it achieves their personal ends. Hell, they even think it's kind of clever when they stoop to depths that would frighten ordinary people.

Were these people to govern, we would live through a period that would be looked back upon as one of the darkest hours in this nation's history, not unlike when myopic and manipulative politicians in the Deep South whipped up a frenzy in their region that made secession and war unavoidable all because they wanted to protect slavery. Trump and his ilk stoke every fear, appeal to every prejudice, and indulge every dark desire of the human heart. They are vulgar. They are contemptible. They are evil.

Theologians and philosophers long debated the concept of evil in order to explain why it would be that people would engage in the sort of malevolent actions that we see out of Trump and Trump-like organisms. It baffled decent souls to consider why people would succumb to such urges. In more superstitious times, we blamed evil spirits who corrupted and poisoned our virtues. The truth of evil is something less than that. It happens when we indulge those base, self-serving, and cruel desires that we all know are wrong, but sometimes it just feels good to give in. What we see in the Trump phenomenon is what happens when people give themselves over fully to those impulses.

For the good of the country and for the good of humanity, this wave of deception, malice, and greed must be turned back. For America and the world, evil must be defeated.