Trump: the banality of evil

We have come to expect this President to fail Americans, catastrophically, and we have become accustomed to understanding these failures through two traits of his Administration: cruelty and militant incompetence. But there is a third one, characteristic of many, if not all, autocracies: indifference.

One of the best-remembered and most useful phrases from twentieth-century political theory is Hannah Arendt’s “the banality of evil,” born of her attempt to understand the motivations of Adolf Eichmann, an architect of the Holocaust. The phrase has been interpreted to mean that Eichmann, despite his high position, was merely a cog in a wheel that would have churned with or without him—that he was normal for his time, a shapeless man who would have conformed to any era. All of this is accurate. But what perhaps struck Arendt most when she was reporting on the Eichmann trial, for The New Yorker, was Eichmann’s indifference. She notes that he didn’t seem to remember some of his most consequential, murderous actions, not because he had a poor memory—and not, she assumed, because he was dissembling—but because he didn’t care, and hadn’t cared at the time. Eichmann had an excellent recollection of two things: perceived injustices perpetrated against him—during his trial in Jerusalem he showed himself to be a first-class whiner—and events that advanced his own career, as when important people noticed him and, say, took him bowling.

[...]

From what we know about Donald Trump, he will remember 2020 as a year when he was unfairly treated by the voters, the courts, and the media, and also a year when he golfed. In this year of the coronavirus, Trump has oscillated between holding briefings and acting like the pandemic was over, while recommending bleach and bragging about his own tremendous recovery. But what he has demonstrated consistently, while three hundred thousand people in this country have died and millions became sick, is that he couldn’t be bothered. Memorable news stories have focussed on the cruel and self-serving ways in which the Administration has addressed the pandemic, as when the President’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, reportedly found it to be politically advantageous that the virus was disproportionately affecting states with Democratic governments, or when Trump withheld resources from states whose governors had criticized him. Trump apparently wanted to lift COVID-19 restrictions because he wanted the short-term economic boost that might have helped his reëlection chances. But he also demonstrably, passionately, even desperately wanted a vaccine, and he wanted to take credit for it. His Administration poured money into Operation Warp Speed. And then they dropped the ball, for no reason that we can now see—likely because there is no real reason. Someone might have thought that it wasn’t his job. Someone might have wanted to spite Pfizer for refusing the money that Trump was so generously bestowing. Someone else might have assumed, overconfidently, that Pfizer could always be coerced later into producing the additional doses. Trump himself was most likely golfing.

  New Yorker

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.