Bad People
September 26, 2025
My humanism is human-centered. Most people are good, even ones facing tough lives. It’s why I love humanity.
Empathy is key — feeling for others. In Philip K. Dick’s famous novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the defining difference between humans and otherwise humanlike androids was empathy.
But some people are exceptions. Recognizing and dealing with those was vital to our early ancestors, living in tight socially cooperative groups, so we evolved detector senses. Unfortunately they’re failing in America — in our politics.
Many demonize all politicians, but that’s not right. Sure, they do have personal motives — ambition, power, fame, greed. That’s just being human. Yet most respect ethical limits in seeking that self-aggrandizement; and seek to do good as well, serving some larger purpose. I myself started in politics spurred by personal ambition, but also idealism.
There have been villains in U.S. history. Benedict Arnold. Roger Taney of Dred Scott infamy. Aaron Burr, who killed Hamilton in a duel, then fell into some bizarre frontier conspiracy, and died a pariah.
But surely American history’s worst villain is the one who attempted a violent coup to overturn an election.
Yet we elected him president again. Bringing in a veritable rogues gallery: Vance, Bondi, Miller, Hegseth, Homan, Noem, Patel, RFK Jr, Stefanik, Rubio, Bove, Gabbard, the list goes on and on.
Some are actually victims of Trump Derangement Syndrome. The real one, seducing people, like moths to a flame, to lose their humanity. Giuliani a prime sad example. Rubio another — to think in 2016 I donated to his campaign. Now things he says make me puke.
A core hallmark of Trump world is dishonesty. Saying “all politicians lie” is also wrong, and serves to enable Trump’s mauling of truth. This nation used to be harshly unforgiving toward politicians caught lying. That was another thing inimical to survival of our ancestral bands, so the cooperative brain software we evolved included lie detectors. Which Trump has disabled.
Republicans called liars shrilly hurl the same taunt at Democrats. Take your pick? Half the country believes one side, half the other. But one side is divorced from reality.
Look at the biggest lie, the 2020 “stolen election.” Devoid of evidence, obviously concocted because Trump’s twisted psyche couldn’t accept losing. Yet Republicans brand this lie on their foreheads.
At least maybe many believe it. While much of their flouting of truth is just cynical. Like the “ballot integrity” crusade, whose real aim is not election fairness but the contrary: to prevent as many non-Republicans as possible from voting.
The deepest dishonesty is telling “forgotten” working class Americans Trump has their backs. While stabbing them there.
And crucially, this regime flunks the empathy test. Cruelty another hallmark. As in the child separation policy; deporting people (many innocent, shorn of legal recourse) to hellhole countries like South Sudan; the war on DEI, really upon human groups they hate. Trump recently told a reporter, “I’m full of hate.” A weird lapse into honesty.
These are bad people.
That half of America refuses to see it is unnerving. Indeed, many almost literally worship this monster. Hard to square with their nominal Christianity. There’s also a bloody-minded nihilism operating, seen in other (otherwise) advanced nations. Some Americans actually love Trump not in spite of his transgressiveness but because of it. (Like some women are attracted to “bad boys.”)
Thus we get sick spectacles like a three-hour cabinet meeting with no agenda but toadies outdoing each other in heaping adulation on the dear leader. Welcome to North Korea. At least the insufficiently obsequious aren’t shot.
Yet.