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Power for What? [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-09-04
Trump’s nightmare reign offers at least one compensation: he reveals with stark clarity the link between Evil and Power that has warped human civilization from its beginnings.
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It would be difficult to exaggerate the price America is paying for the electorate’s 2024 failure to maintain the moral compass a democracy requires.
Roughly half the nation chose to give power to a man who had already shown—blatantly and consistently—that he was the very opposite of one to whom power should be entrusted, precisely the kind who does great damage when given the means.
It could not have been clearer by late 2024 that this man — Donald Trump — was a human monster, who lied as a matter of habit, who bullied others cruelly, who has been found liable in court for sexual abuse and defamation, who has no respect for anything that would constrain his freedom of action, who roused an insurrection to seize power against the will of the American people in 2020, and who never showed any interest in using his power to serve the good of the American people or the nation.
Something clearly went wrong in the American people. Either they could not perceive what was obvious about Trump’s consistent alignment with ‘Evil,’ or that half of America who voted for him saw what he was and supported his destructiveness.
Either way, the moral compass necessary for a healthy democracy had been lost.
And the result has been catastrophic damage to everything within reach — to the Rule of Law, to America’s network of friends and allies, to the independence of free institutions, to the system of checks and balances, and even to the nation’s public health.
The monstrosity of Donald Trump can teach us something important: we can become better at recognizing Evil when it shows up even in more disguised form.
Donald Trump is remarkably pure in the brokenness of his character.
We can depend on him not trying to unify the nation behind any good purpose when he speaks to the nation.
We can depend on him not to speak truthfully about whatever we are dealing with.
And we can depend on his grabbing for more power at every opportunity.
Because the pure case makes clear the essential characteristics of Evil, Trump offers us an opportunity to become better at recognizing such destructive moral defects when they appear.
With Nixon, the destructive elements in his character were mixed with other, more constructive elements that served the nation. But with Donald Trump, we are confronted with the pure case: a man whose relationship with power reveals the essence of the pathology, much as Homer used Achilles to embody the essential warrior, or as mathematicians study the perfect circle even though no perfect circle exists in the physical world.
Take the issue of “What is Power For?” There is a spectrum in the world running from the ideal to the morally monstrous, where
the ideal is for those who seek power to want it so they can make the world a better place;
the morally monstrous is someone like Donald Trump who has now shown that he wants power to get the gratification of getting everyone to submit to him.
I am not aware of anyone ever being as extreme as Trump in wanting power to keep enacting having the world submit to him.
He stages ‘deals’ – like empty tariff deals -- to display dominance rather than produce substance.
He pressures institutions (like Harvard) to bend the knee on pretexts.
He compels businesses (like ABC and CBS) and allies to signal deference.
Trump’s attacking on all fronts affords us a clear view of a man who is unable to be content with how much power he has, and who wants to use that power to intimidate and subordinate the rest of the world.
We can look upon Trump – and his utterly pathological relationship with power – and learn about an essential reality in the human world:
Trump is like the “perfect circle” in demonstrating to us the evils we should be on the watch for, if our democracy survives to let us – the American people – choose our path forward again. He embodies the Tyrant, the Gangster. Trump can teach us to recognize this profound pathology that has plagued the history of civilization. Such have been the social evolutionary dynamics of the rise of civilization made it inevitable that the Spirit of the Gangster would have a disproportionate say in how civilization operated and how it developed.
Now, in a way unlike anything before in American history, that Spirit has gained a disastrous level of power in the country. Never again should it be possible for the American people to look at that kind of ugliness around the issue of power and make the disastrous decision to give power to someone whose relationship with power is so wrong in so many ways.
We as a people should learn the lesson: This is what evil looks like, these are the disastrous results to a nation when such Evil gets control, and we should never as a people make the disastrous mistake -- or sin — of empowering such ugly brokenness.
(Mistake if it’s “I can’t see the Evil”; sin if it’s “Evil is what I want.”)
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I may choose to use this soon as my weekly op/ed in newspapers in a very Trumpy region of Virginia.
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