The Evil All Evil Aspires to Be — two essays on Satanic Washington

Contra Trump

道高一尺，魔高一丈

This chapter in Contra Trump, our series about the second presidency of Donald J Trump and its relationship with Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium, we feature two essays on evil.

In the first, Chris Hedges discusses Susan Neiman’s book Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era. The second, by Chris Lamb, focuses on Stephen Miller, a man ‘so dark he turns Satan green with envy.’

As Neiman writes:

‘Evil threatens human reason, for it challenges our hope that the world makes sense.’

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The rubric of this chapter is 道高一尺，魔高一丈, ‘the devil can always do you one better’. 魔 mó comes from the Sanskrit/ Pāli word māra मार, ‘malicious force, devil, demon’.

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
28 September 2026

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Related Material:

The Great Dicktator, by Mr. Fish

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Donald Trump and the Age of Evil

By any standard of morality, Trump is depraved. But adorned with the power of the state, he descends to another level — the level of evil.

Chris Hedges

25 September 2026

 

Donald Trump exhibits the classic traits of psychopaths — superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance, need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation and incapacity for remorse or guilt.

But is he evil?

If, as the philosopher Susan Neiman writes, evil is not simply the opposite of good but inimical to it, if the aim of evil is to destroy all moral distinctions, then Trump qualifies as evil. Morality, for Trump, is for losers. All life is transactional. Self-interest and self-enrichment usurp all other considerations. No one else matters.

In her new book, Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era, Neiman argues that evil “isn’t cruelty but something much worse: the ideas that allow cruelty to become ordinary.”

She continues:

There’s a difference between calling one action evil and calling another a crime. Crimes are things for which we have procedures—at least for punishing, if not for preventing. This means that a crime can be fit in some way into the rest of our experience. To call an action evil is to suggest it cannot—and that it thereby threatens the trust in the world that we need to navigate it. There’s no signpost on the border between evil and awful. Evil is what you say when your jaw begins to drop if you sense that a line has been crossed.

Trump crosses line after line. He declares wars on a whim. He enriches himself and his family in crypto schemes, from which he has made over a billion dollars. He orders assassinations and the kidnapping of heads of state. He uses billions of taxpayer dollars to sustain genocide in Palestine and since January 2025 has provided over $20 billion in new arms sales to Israel. He guts government departments designed to lift up the vulnerable and bloats the war budget. He builds rogue paramilitary forces to terrorize citizens and immigrants. He attacks and attempts to censor the news industry.

In short, he does what all who commit evil do.

He fosters a world where nothing is sacred and where democracy and civic virtues do not exist.

Concepts of fairness, decorum, justice and empathy are imploded by the Trump administration. His threat to annihilate Iran — i.e. carry out genocide — announced of all places at the United Nations, is greeted with indifference by a public rendered numb by his moral vacuity.

“Once the supremacy of self-interest is enshrined as commonsense realism rather than a philosophical idea, moral capacities like empathy and shame become not just naïve but suspect,” Neiman writes. “Sadists exist and cause no end of pain. But the most common forms of evil arise from the view that only fools believe in anything but their own advantage.”

The institutions designed to protect democracy, to safeguard civic virtues, to foster equality — including the courts, law firms, universities and the media, all of which have been captured by the billionaire class — swiftly fell to their knees to curry favor with the Trump White House. The titans in Silicon Valley showered him and his campaign with millions of dollars. The supposed virtues these institutions and individuals claimed they championed were jettisoned. These virtues, they illustrated, were nothing more than branding, performance art, a sham.

To an enraged public Trump’s transparent greed and cruelty is preferable to the slick hypocrisy of the politicians, Republican and Democrat, who preceded him. He does not engage in their faux empathy. In fact, he seems incapable of empathy.

Once morality is for fools, virtue makes no sense. Once we believe we should grab what we can, even at the expense of those around us, we surrender to evil.

“Unlike the rest of us, he permanently exhibits the combination of motives we are told are the true forces driving human behavior,” Neiman writes of Trump:

Nor does he appear to understand any other. Though he recognizes that other people, aka losers, have norms, he has no idea of how norms work, moving people to override self-interest in order to honor them. In acting on the international stage like Richard Dawkins’s ruthless genes, he has attracted millions of followers who tell us they admire his authenticity. This doesn’t mean his followers are deplorable. They may not be evil at all, but in a world where implacable self-interest is usually camouflaged in soft colors, they find his candor refreshing. They have so often heard that people conceal the raw self-interest that really moves things, they’re relieved to watch a man who never hides it.

The worst evil, Neiman argues, “may be the denial of evil — as well as disdain for any goodness that might oppose it. When self-interest becomes the basis of reason, evil no longer needs to justify itself. It’s already been mistaken for rationality.”

This evil leads us down the familiar road to fascism. It was Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during Trump’s first term, who warned us, calling Trump “fascist to the core.”

The media — too spineless to label Trump a fascist — prefers the word “authoritarian,’ which Neiman notes may be a more bearable word, but “will not make fascism more bearable.”

Authoritarianism, she notes:

[I]s a word that can be useful for describing certain German professors, and the softer sort of Latin American military regime. But a country where masked men deport people to wastelands they’ve never seen? Combat troops occupy major cities and shoot peacefully protesting citizens? A government that coerces media, universities, and other countries to suit its will? A military that blows fishermen to bits with the meagerest of justifications, then begins the kind of wars the International Military Court at Nuremberg condemned? As it wrote in 1946, ‘To initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.’ It would be easy to go on, but counting crimes is pointless. Before these words are printed, the administration will have found countless new ways to flout the rule of law.

We are in deep trouble.

The moral rot in our society preceded Trump. He is its logical conclusion. He is the apotheosis of a culture where greed, exploitation and self-interest, the core tenets of neoliberalism, are held up as the defining forces of human existence.

We must fight back while we can. But to do so requires that we recapture the language of good and evil. It requires us to make moral choices and to accept self-sacrifice. It requires us to name the bleakness before us, not turn our faces from the fascist monolith being cemented into place.

Denying these truths and refusing to defy evil will ensure our enslavement.

Speaking these truths and standing with the oppressed and the marginalized, even at the cost of our own financial and physical security, will set us free.

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Source:

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Is Stephen Miller a Nazi? Ask his Jewish family. Miller’s isn’t just evil; he’s the evil all evil aspires to be. He’s so dark he turns Satan green with envy.

Chris Lamb

22 September 2026

Vanity Fair called Stephen Miller “one of the most evil people to have worked for Donald Trump.”

This isn’t true.

Stephen Miller is the most evil person to have worked for Donald Trump.

No president has ever employed as many evil people as Donald Trump, who is the most evil people to serve as president.

Trump knows evil. He learned evil from his father Fred Trump and from Roy Cohn.

Stephen Miller isn’t just evil, he’s the evil that other evil aspires to.

Here is a drawing of Miller by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes.

Ann Telnes, 19 July 2026

The Guardian newspaper said three days ago that Miller, who is Trump’s deputy chief of staff and homeland security advisor, “is leading an unprecedented and intense White House drive across a host of government departments to accelerate the removal of undocumented immigrant children from the US, using tactics that critics say are cruel and racist and, in some cases, flout federal law.”

The Times of Israel described Miller during Trump’s first term as of one the administration’s “biggest cheerleaders for a policy that some people compared to the actions of Nazis and supporters said was an essential tool in securing America’s borders.”

The article quoted a White House senior advisor who compared Miller, who is Jewish, to a “Nazi,” after witnessing Miller respond gleefully to photos of families separated at the border by Trump’s draconian immigration policy.

“Stephen actually enjoys seeing those pictures at the border,” the outside adviser told the magazine. “He’s a twisted guy, the way he was raised and picked on. There’s always been a way he’s gone about this. He’s Waffen-SS,” a reference to the military branch of the Nazi Party’s SS organization during World War II.

Miller’s Jewish family also compares him to the Nazis.

Miller’s uncle, David Glosser, told the story in Politico about his Jewish ancestors, who happen to be Miller’s ancestors.

Wolf-Leib Glosser lived on a dirt-floor shack in the small town of Antopol in what is now Belarus.

“Beset by violent anti-Jewish pogroms and forced childhood conscription in the Czar’s army, the patriarch of the shack,” his descendant David Glosser wrote in Politico, “fled a village where his forebears had lived for centuries and took his chances in America.”

Glosser landed on Ellis Island in early January 1903. He had $8 in his pocket. He neither spoke nor understood English.

His son Nathan followed him to New York. They worked in sweatshops and peddled goods on the street. They sent home enough money so the rest of their family could come to America.

Persecution — and perhaps death — awaited them as Jews in Belarus faced violent pogroms from 1903-1906. When the Glossers approached New York harbor, they saw the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor that said:

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

The Glosser family, through sheer grit and determination, sold goods from a horse and wagon and then opened a haberdashery in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and became part of the American dream, the rags-to-riches story that defines us as a country.

Stephen Miller and Donald Trump want to destroy this narrative once and for all because it refutes the ideology of their demented vision of what America should be — a vision shared by the Ku Klux Klan and other white-supremacist organizations.

Miller’s and Trump’s ancestors both emigrated to the United States — from Antopol and Bavaria, respectively. The Glossers and the Trumps found wealth. Trump’s grandfather Frederick reportedly made his money with a restaurant and brothel serving those seeking gold and other things during the Klondike gold rush in the 1880s.

The family business continues.

Donald Trump continues to make his money screwing people.

Wolf-Leib and Nathan owned a chain of supermarkets and department stores in Johnstown.

Sam Glosser, one of Leib’s sons, and his own son, Izzy, joined the family business, which, in time, was listed on the AMEX stock exchange and employed thousands of people, David Glosser said.

“This family emerged from poverty in a hostile country to become a prosperous, educated clan of merchants, scholars, professionals, and most important, American citizens,” Glosser said.

David S. Glosser, a retired neuropsychologist, is the son of Izzy Glosser.

David’s sister is the mother of Stephen Miller, a burden no mother should carry.

Miller is, of course, Donald Trump’s violently anti-immigration advisor who reportedly once advocated violating international law by using drones against unarmed migrants trying to come to America.

“I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, an educated man who is well aware of his heritage,” David Glosser said, “has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country.”

“If my nephew’s ideas on immigration had been in force a century ago, our family would have been wiped out.”

David Glosser then added the following:

“I shudder at the thought of what would have become of the Glossers had the same policies Stephen so coolly espouses — the travel ban, the radical decrease in refugees, the separation of children from their parents, and even talk of limiting citizenship for legal immigrants — been in effect when Wolf-Leib made his desperate bid for freedom.”

If the Glosser family had survived the pogroms and continued to live in Belarus for another three or four decades, they probably would have been murdered by the Nazis, David Glosser wrote.

David Glosser’s essay refers to his nephew Stephen Miller as a hypocrite.

Miller, like so many who inherited their wealth, confuses what he inherited with what he earned on his own — very little of what he possesses he achieved on his own — with the exception of his cruelty and odiousness.

Miller is a hypocrite, but he is so much worse than that.

He is the evil that other evil aspires to.

Miller, among other things, wrote Trump’s first inaugural address, which was so dark it made Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness look like a merry romp through a village of laughing children, banjo-playing minstrels, singing seniors, ice cream shops, and strawberries fields.

Sleeping upside down in a cave and receiving no sunlight probably has something to do with Miller’s vision of the world.

I’ve seen corpses with more color than Stephen Miller.

Jean Guerrero, in her book about Trump, Hatemonger, calls Miller the “architect” of Trump’s restrictive immigration policies, and his “mind meld” with the president has produced executive orders and rhetoric heavy on exclusion, cruelty and “prejudicial white patriotism,” the Washington Post said in a review of the book.

Some people are born bigots. Some achieve bigotry. And some have bigotry thrust upon them.

Miller achieved bigotry on his own.

Miller taunted his darker-skinned classmates while he was in school.

While running for class president in high school, he said: “Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us?”

Miller’s views were then shaped and hardened until they found a home in the Trump White House, where he sent hundreds of emails to Breitbart writer Katie McHugh that “promoted racist fears of demographic replacement of white people by non-whites (and) disseminated conspiracy theories positing a United Nations-inspired plan to colonize America.”

McHugh said in an interview that Miller radicalized her as a white supremacist but she has since repudiated those views.

“I was a white nationalist,” she says. “Whatever you want to call it — white nationalist, white supremacist. But that part [of me] is dead.”

This is not the case for Miller who has made racism his brand.

His emails suggest, among other things, that a bipartisan organization sponsored by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was promoting illegal voting, The Guardian reported.

None of these conspiracies has any basis in truth.

More than 50 civil rights organizations wrote Trump telling him that Miller must be ousted from the White House.

“Stephen Miller has stoked bigotry, hate and division with his extreme political rhetoric and policies throughout his career,” the letter said. “The recent exposure of his deep-seated racism provides further proof that he is unfit to serve and should immediately leave his post.”

Tiana Lowe, a columnist for the conservative newspaper, the Washington Examiner, agreed.

“It’s long past time for Trump to dump Miller,” Lowe wrote.

More than a hundred Democrats in Congress sent a letter Trump demanding Miller’s removal.

“A documented white nationalist has no place in any presidential administration, and especially not in such an influential position,” the letter said.

It is not clear whether the letter was referring to Miller or Trump, who has filled his administration with white nationalists.

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Source

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魔 mó, ‘demon, devil, malign force’, in the hand of the Ming-dynasty scholar official Dong Qichang 董其昌