Call It Evil: Neiman's Case for Moral Language Toward Trumpism, and McManus's Qualification That It Is Continuity, Not Rupture
Source: Matt McManus. "The Trump Era Is Bad. But Is It Evil?." November 7, 2026. jacobin.com
The Gist
The author agrees with Susan Neiman that Trump's politics deserve to be called evil, and that we shouldn't let cynical behavior become normal. But he argues Trump is less a break from American history than the extreme version of tendencies that were always there, and that the left should embrace universal moral principles while recognizing America isn't evil as a whole.
Conclusion
Trumpism is rightly describable as evil, but it is best understood as an intensification of long-standing American right-wing and imperial tendencies rather than a wholly new break, and the left should recover moral idealism and universalism to resist the normalization of cynicism without condemning America as a whole as evil.
Premises
- Modern evil is typically 'banal': it arises from selfishness, indifference, and willingness to accept whatever makes life easier, not from Satanic malice.
- Trump's administration openly embraces Schmittian friend/enemy politics and unbridled self-interest, dropping even the liberal hypocrisy that formerly cloaked US foreign policy (e.g., 'to the victor belong the spoils' over Venezuelan oil).
- The danger of this open cynicism is normalization: if people come to see it as inevitable or typical, it ceases to be morally objectionable, so it must be named as evil and not normalized.
- Neiman herself says US foreign policy has been largely Schmittian since 1945 and that a century of imperialism is evil, which implies Trump is a further step down rather than a new kind of wickedness.
- Historians such as David Austin Walsh show the American right has always included racists, conspiracy theorists, Pinochet apologists and fascists; Trumpism moved them from the back seat to the driver's seat.
- A dialectical view of history shows that although many Americans have done evil things, the country as a whole is not evil, since progressive movements have repeatedly defeated wicked practices.
- The left's retreat from universalism into identity politics and postmodern skepticism has weakened its capacity for moral idealism, so recommitting to universalism (while staying sensitive to particular subordination) would be beneficial.
Assumptions
- Evil is a meaningful and useful category for evaluating political structures and leaders, not only individuals.
- Naming something evil helps resist its normalization rather than merely expressing disapproval.
- Open cynicism about power is morally worse than hypocritical liberal imperialism, or at least a meaningful degradation.
- The moral character of a country can be separated from the actions of many of its citizens and governments.
- Historical continuity with earlier right-wing currents does not diminish the evil of the present administration.
- Universalism can be reconciled with attention to particular forms of oppression.