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The president’s vilification of political opponents and journalists seeds the ground for threats of prosecution, imprisonment and deportation unlike any modern president has made.
By Peter Baker
July 16, 2025 | Updated 10:36 a.m. ET
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/16/us/politics/trump-political-enemies-evil.html
This is an interesting development. It was a staple of 1980s political discourse
that liberals called the Reagan administration "evil," while conservatives were content to call liberals merely "wrong." Relatively reasonable conservatives like George Will and James Kilpatrick (but not necessarily those two; just reasonable conservatives like them) used to complain about that difference. I remember that era very well, and liberals *did* used to call the Reagan administration "evil."
The difference today is that the criminal fascist filth Trump regime *truly is* evil. The racial profiling by the ICEstapo is evil. Taking food and health care away from very poor Americans, leaving them to die, is evil. Banning books is evil. Talking about stripping citizenship from natural born citizens is evil. Turning the presidency into a monarchy is evil. The One Big Hideous Bill is the enactment of evil. Ballooning the national debt is evil.
Some time back, Governor Swill coined the expression "Every Republican accusation is a confession," which I helpfully amended to "Every Republiscum/QAnon accusation is, in fact, a confession." That is ironclad truth.
Trump is confessing that his fascist filth regime is evil.
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