John Feffer, Common Dreams

One Trump rant displayed the true banality of evil

World leaders meet every September for the United Nations General Assembly. There have been plenty of weird moments over the years: Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev banging his shoe on the table in 1960 to stop the leader of another country from criticizing him, Fidel Castro going on for more than four hours in a speech that same year, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez calling US President George W. Bush the “devil” in 2006.

President Donald Trump has had his odd UN moments as well. In 2017, he lashed out against North Korean leader Kim Jong-un as a “rocket man ... on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.” The following year, Trump returned to the podium to claim that “in less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.” He was surprised to hear the audience laugh at this absurd boast.

Trump returned to the UN last month for an even more bizarre performance. For an hour, he berated the assembled leaders with his usual grievances and overstatements. As usual, he played up his rescue of the US economy (even as it teeters on a precipice because of his tariffs) and prevention of a “colossal invasion” at the border (though the numbers of migrants had been going down in the final year of the previous administration). He repeated his claim that he ended seven wars (he hasn’t). He claimed that he “has the highest poll numbers I’ve ever had” (at 39 percent, they’re actually at their lowest level).

But he also went on an extended riff on why he should have gotten the contract to renovate the UN headquarters, asserted that all countries are “going to hell” because of migration, claimed that Christianity is “the most persecuted religion on the planet today,” and insisted that he “was right about everything. And I don’t say that in a braggadocious way, but it’s true.”

All of this was disconcerting, but foreign leaders often come to the UN to tell lies.

It’s what Trump said in his UN address about climate change and renewable energy that went beyond mere lies.

Climate change, Trump announced, is “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world ... All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people... If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.”

The “green scam” involves clean energy, which Trump has steered the United States away from.

“We’re getting rid of the falsely named renewables. By the way, they’re a joke. They don’t work. They’re too expensive.”

Climate change predictions, in fact, have been all too accurate. Last year was the warmest on record. The glaciers are melting faster than ever before. Superstorms are intensifying around the planet, even in the United States.

Renewable energy, meanwhile, works very well. I discovered just how well renewable energy works just this week when an accident caused an interruption in the electricity grid in our neighborhood and our solar panels kept our refrigerator humming. Solar and wind power now produce electricity at rates much cheaper than the lowest-priced fossil fuels (41 percent cheaper for solar, 53 percent for offshore wind).

The UN, of course, has identified climate change as a major — if not the major — threat to humanity. You can’t fault Trump for not being bold. But it was as if he had stood up at a conference of astrophysicists and announced that the US government now believed that the Earth is at the center of the solar system. He would not only be wrong; He would be proposing to destroy all of the industries based on the science of astrophysics — satellites, space stations, and the like.

Similarly, Trump’s ideas about climate change are not just wrong or even just unworkable. They are evil. By pushing for the return of fossil fuels in the United States and elsewhere, Trump is putting the effort to arrest climate change beyond reach. The planet is heading toward a brick wall, and Trump has not only taken his foot off the brake, he has pushed down hard on the accelerator.

Trump once criticized the Obama administration for not doing enough to address climate change. Now, because of the political and financial support of the fossil fuel lobbies, he has executed a U-turn. As a result, more and more people will die as a result of heat, flooding, and famine. One recent study in Nature estimates over 240,000 deaths per year because of heat, disease, floods, and other direct effects of climate change. Trump’s claims, in other words, amount to the denial and perpetuation of a mass murder.

In her essays about Nazis and genocide, the philosopher Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil.” She rightly identified the faceless bureaucrat as the modern era’s personification of crimes against humanity. These bureaucrats were not motivated primarily by ideology or the will to power. Incapable of empathy, they were doing their job as just another cog in the machinery of evil.

There are many such banal personifications of evil in modern society — the CEO of a nuclear weapons production facility, the judge who signs off on the deportation of a Russian dissident back to the country that will imprison or execute him, the flak who writes the government press release about Israeli military actions in Gaza. You will not read about these people in the newspaper. They are just doing their jobs.

Trump is not like that. He wants to be in the public eye 24/7. He wants to be heralded as the person responsible for dramatic change in the United States and the world. He thinks that he’s not only doing good in the world but that he is the best person in the world.

This is evil in the age of social media. It is evil committed by people who believe that they are the stars of their own movies and the rest of us are just extras.

Trump’s evil, of course, resides in his actions. But it is also because he denies collective action. Trump’s evil is that of extreme narcissism.

Climate change can only be stopped by everyone pulling together and acting in concert. But that flies in the face of Trump’s boast that he alone can solve the world’s problems. His bragging is not just a personality quirk or even the sign of a personality disorder. It is an essential element of his particular form of evil.

John Feffer is the author of the dystopian novel "Splinterlands" (2016) and the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. His novel, "Frostlands" (2018) is book two of his Splinterlands trilogy. Splinterlands book three "Songlands" was published in 2021. His podcast is available here.

This is why Elon Musk is way more dangerous than Trump

There are always worse political figures waiting in the wings.

In Israel, for instance, Benjamin Netanyahu is a relative moderate compared to some members of his cabinet, like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who believes that letting two million Palestinians die of hunger in Gaza is “justified and moral.” In Russia, ultranationalists to the right of Vladimir Putin espouse racist and anti-immigrant views, while the country’s Communist Party recently declared that Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin was “a mistake.”

And then there’s Donald Trump, whom scholars consistently rank as the worst president in U.S. history. Even here, in a country of only two main parties and a blanderizing political discourse, worse options abound. Imagine if Trump’s successor actually believed in something other than his own enrichment and self-aggrandizement? What if Trump is simply preparing the ground for an authentically far-right leader to take over, someone even more extreme than Vice President J.D. Vance or Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR)?

Elon Musk is prepared to use a lot of his considerable fortune to test that proposition.

What Musk believes

It’s tempting to believe that Elon Musk decided to create a new political party in a fit of pique because of his personal falling-out with Trump. In public, however, Musk links his decision to the recent passage of Trump’s legislative package and the several trillion dollars that the measure will add to the national debt. After bonding with Trump over eviscerating government, Musk was no doubt appalled to discover that the president, in the end, turned out to a more conventional tax-less-and-spend-more Republican.

Either way, Musk announced last week the creation of his new America Party. The details of the party platform are scant, as you might guess from a party created by tweet. Musk has naturally emphasized “responsible spending,” debt reduction, and deregulation. He has also added pro-gun and pro-crypto planks to his expanding platform along with “free speech” and “pro-natalist” positions.

These preferences might qualify the America Party as a typical libertarian project — if it weren’t for Musk’s Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration, his support of the neo-Nazi party Alternative für Deutschland, and his fantastical accusations of “genocide” against the South African government for its treatment of white farmers. Not surprisingly, Musk entertains extreme views on race, genetics, and demography. As The Washington Post reports:

He has warned that lower birth rates and immigration are diluting American culture and the cultures of other majority-White and Asian countries. “We should be very cautious about having some sort of global mixing pot,” he said earlier this year. He has called unchecked illegal immigration “civilizational suicide” and “an invasion,” though he himself was working illegally, in violation of his visa, after he deferred his enrollment in a Stanford University graduate program to launch his career in the United States in the 1990s. He also warns that declining birth rates are leading to “population collapse,” and, having fathered over a dozen children, stresses the importance of “smart people” having more kids.

In his latest sign of malign intent, Musk removed controls from the artificial intelligence component of his social media platform. The newly unshackled Grok — named after a verb in Robert Heinlein’s sci-fi novel Stranger in a Strange Land that means a deep, intuitive understanding — began to rant antisemitically. As they say in Silicon Valley: garbage in, garbage out.

You might argue that it doesn’t really matter what Musk says or does, given that his approval rating plummeted to 35 percent during his tenure as DOGE-in-chief. Even his popularity among Republicans has dropped from 78 percent in March to 62 percent after his break with Trump in June.

But Americans are political amnesiacs. The ravages of DOGE, the insults traded with Trump: all of that could disappear down the memory hole once Trump’s economic program starts to hurt the blue-collar constituents that supported his 2024 candidacy. That’s when Musk will likely dust off his earlier criticisms of the “big and beautiful bill” and start promoting his new party in earnest.

Billionaires gone wild

Trump, a billionaire who has consistently overstated his assets and his importance, proved that an idiot with a big bank account could buy the presidency. Now along comes Musk with even more money, a bigger ego, and a comparable lack of shame.

Musk’s political trajectory resembles Trump’s in other respects as well. They’re both supreme opportunists who have changed their political views to suit the moment. Musk used to donate to both Democrats and Republicans, considered the prospect of a Trump presidency to be an “embarrassment,” and believed in the importance of addressing climate change. He was always something of a libertarian in his embrace of the free market, but there was little indication in the early 2000s that he would veer off into extremes.

If historian Jill Lepore is right, however, Musk is just returning to his roots. His current views uncannily echo those of his grandfather, J.N. Haldeman, who moved from Canada to apartheid South Africa where his racist views were more the norm. Lepore writes that Haldeman, in the 1930s,

joined the quasi-fascistic Technocracy movement, whose proponents believed that scientists and engineers, rather than the people, should rule. He became a leader of the movement in Canada, and, when it was briefly outlawed, he was jailed, after which he became the national chairman of what was then a notoriously antisemitic party called Social Credit. In the 1940s, he ran for office under its banner, and lost. In 1950, two years after South Africa instituted apartheid, he moved his family to Pretoria, where he became an impassioned defender of the regime.

Like his grandfather, Musk escaped his country of birth, in this case a South Africa just then shrugging off the apartheid system that had drawn J.N. Haldeman there. Eventually in Silicon Valley, Musk found a like-minded community. He palled around with Peter Thiel — and created PayPal together — before eventually falling out over artificial intelligence. Thiel, too, has uber-libertarian beliefs, as do other Silicon Valley disrupters like Marc Andreesen who have shifted rightward. They all have a fondness for the latest avatar of the Technocracy movement, Curtis Yarvin, himself a refugee from saner realms of the political spectrum, who has waxed rhapsodic over replacing a democratically elected president with a CEO-in-chief.

And that, perhaps, is the position that Musk imagines for himself. So what if the Constitution forbids a foreign-born president? As Trump has made clear, the Constitution too is ripe for disruption.

Anticipating Musk’s next move

Vladimir Putin was once a fairly conventional apparatchik before he donned the costume of a Russian nationalist. Viktor Orbán was an ego-driven liberal before he found political opportunity in Hungary as an illiberal autocrat. Musk’s political evolution could be compared to the trajectory of these two opportunists.

Musk has indeed cultivated a relationship with Putin over the last two years — after initially supporting Ukraine following Russia’s 2022 invasion — and has floated pro-Russian peace plans to end the conflict. Musk met Orbán at Mar-a-Lago, along with Trump, and has tweeted support in the Hungarian leader’s direction from time to time. But the illiberalism of Putin and Orbán is not really a model for Musk.

Instead, he has gravitated toward something even less palatable: Alternative für Deutschland. The AfD, founded in 2013, built its base on anti-immigrant sentiment, attracted extremists with its anti-Muslim and antisemitic rhetoric, and capitalized on anti-elite anger by railing against heat pumps.

Musk has framed his support of the AfD as a defense of “free speech,” a familiar tactic of those who routinely engage in hate speech. In an op-ed in the German Welt am Sonntag newspaper that was calculated to influence the German elections, Musk wrote that only the AfD could save Germany by “ensuring that Germany does not lose its identity in the pursuit of globalization.” This was a particularly rich observation from one of the most powerful promoters (and beneficiaries) of globalization.

Musk himself lost his earlier identity as a globalizer to become today’s xenophobe. It’s a new type of “whitewashing” whereby internationalism somehow loses its prefix in the laundering process.

Trump and Musk Donald Trump and Elon Musk watch a SpaceX launch in Texas last November. Brandon Bell/Pool via REUTERS

The center, however, is not giving up so easily. Even as a larger portion of the electorate is supporting the AfD, the German establishment is mobilizing against the right-wing party. The country’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution determined in May that the AfD is an extremist organization. More recently, the Social Democratic Party began the process of banning the AfD, which requires that a qualifying group meet two criteria: it must threaten Germany’s democratic order and it must be sufficiently popular to pose such a risk. If, after a lengthy legal process, the party is deemed unconstitutional, it is dissolved.

Obviously, such a process can’t dissolve public support for the party’s positions. Currently the AfD is polling at 23 percent, behind the Christian Democrats (28 percent) but ahead of all other parties. For the time being, these other parties are refusing to collaborate with the AfD at a federal level, though there have been some cases of collaboration at the subnational level. A ban — of a party or of collaboration with that party — may be satisfying, but it doesn’t address the reasons that the party is flourishing.

The Musk Effect

In the first flush of Brexit and Trump’s electoral victory in 2016, Steve Bannon attempted to build a National International out of far-right governments, parties, and movements. He largely failed. Now, Musk has stepped up to the plate, with his media platform and his deep pockets.

As NBC reports:

Musk has posted online in support of right-wing street demonstrations in Brazil and Ireland. He has welcomed a new conservative prime minister in New Zealand and expressed agreement with a nationalist right-wing politician in the Netherlands. He’s met in person several times with the right-wing leaders of Argentina and Italy. His social media app X has complied with censorship requests from right-wing leaders in India and Turkey.

As Bannon discovered, the obstacles are many to creating a far-right network. Simply put, entities devoted to the politics of hate often end up hating each other as well.

Musk faces numerous speed bumps at home as well to the creation of a third party. The administrative hurdles are enormous, which is how the Democrats and Republicans have managed to preserve their duopoly.

“I was on a Zoom call yesterday with people talking about this,” one political analyst told The New York Times. “A lot of them predicted that he’s the kind of person who, when he finds out how hard this is, he’ll give up.”

But Musk, like his Silicon Valley buddies, knows how to apply maximum pressure to weak points in a system in order to make it crack. He has promised to focus on just a few races where he might have the greatest likelihood of winning. It’s the opposite of Trump, who was interested only in building a vehicle for his own self-advancement.

Musk is far more dangerous. He actually has ideas. They’re terrible ideas, to be sure. But they are motivating him to build something more durable and, in the long term, potentially more disruptive.

It’s too terrifying a prospect to grok.

John Feffer is the author of the dystopian novel "Splinterlands" (2016) and the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. His novel, "Frostlands" (2018) is book two of his Splinterlands trilogy. Splinterlands book three "Songlands" was published in 2021. His podcast is available here.