EVIL

          I strongly disliked Donald Trump long before he ran for President. I always thought he was an arrogant blowhard, even back in the days when he gained fame for repairing the Wollman Skating Rink in New York. When Trump aired his “birther” beliefs, that Obama was not born in America, George F. Wills, to my delight, called him a “Bloviating Ignoramus.” When Trump declared for the presidency, I assumed he had zero chance. I believed that the American people thought of Trump as a publicity-seeking clown, and when asked what I thought of him as a candidate, I said that he was a joke.

            Like most intelligent persons, I was totally stunned when Trump won the election. I didn’t realize that there were so many uneducated, disaffected, stupid people in America. I didn’t know what to think of Trump. In my mind he was still a joke, and it was going to be a strange four years with this clown as Commander in Chief. I couldn’t imagine what kind of cabinet he would appoint or how he intended to carry-out his promise to “Make America great again.” I doubted he would greatly improve the economy, create jobs, defeat ISIS, halt illegal immigration, build his stupid wall, or repair the infrastructure of the country.

            With the exception of Steve Bannon, I was not particularly alarmed at the people he appointed to his cabinet. I should have seen Bannon as a red flag. From what I read, Bannon was a racist and alt-right-winger. But I did not look deeply into it. Some of Trump’s appointments bothered me, but I assumed that that was what you would expect of a conservative. I was not alarmed until the Charlottesville riots.

            The riots in themselves were not what alarmed me the most. I knew that those hate groups were out there and that they occasionally demonstrated, carrying automatic weapons, wearing swastika tattoos, and waving Confederate flags. I knew that their demonstrations would bring-out counter-demonstrations. What alarmed me were Trump’s statements about the riots. To him, there was wrong “on many sides.” He said that there were “fine people” on both sides. This balancing of denunciation was not just the stupidity of an incompetent chief executive. This was a statement of support for those low-life people who admire Adolph Hitler and the evil he perpetrated.

            I know that it is common for people of a political persuasion to accuse their opponents of evil, and I do not do it easily. You do not call your opponents evil for tax increases or cuts, military or domestic spending, welfare reform, or most social issues. Rather than accuse Trump and his henchmen of evil, I would prefer to accuse them of ignorance, malefaction, and mendacity. But here there is something much more serious. Here there is evil.

            I have spent my life studying the Nazis. I have found myself stunned and occasionally in tears reading about the Holocaust. I have found myself baffled by the horror of a so-called civilized nation setting out to imprison, starve, torture, murder, gas, and burn an entire race of innocent people. And yet, to my disgust, I have seen the mindset of those Nazi murderers copied and admired by some modern American people.

            I have examined the kind of people who were Nazis in World War II Germany. The major enforcers of Nazi horror, the Gestapo and the SS, were thugs and losers without education or societal respect. The anti-Semitic conservative masses went along with the Nazis. Hitler and his thugs started-out small, but gradually grew into a dangerous power.

When you look at the American hate groups you see the same kind of unrefined, crude, angry, bitter, ugly, stupid, uneducated thugs that supported Hitler in the 1930s and 1940s. I guess there are many such people all over the world. Educated, intelligent people have to work to prevent these thugs from gaining power. It will be much harder when you have someone like Trump in power. As I look at the Neo-Nazis, KKK, and White Supremacists today I see an evil that could grow into real political power if supported by people in high office.