The Frenzied Leftist Search for Trump's Essential Evil

The political Left has for quite some time been on a witch-hunt to find the essential evil of Donald Trump that would eliminate him from the presidential race in the minds of voters. Trump has repeatedly been compared to Hitler and Mussolini in an attempt to irrefutably stigmatize him. But to assess the candidates on whether they are essentially evil we need to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate uses of power. Government is a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, coercion, deception and power; or a monopoly on the use of evil. We elect presidents to have the authority to use evil but we only want it used in extreme cases of national emergency and for non-partisan and non-gratuitous purposes. An example that comes to mind is Pres. Truman's dropping of A-bombs on Japan to end the war with Japan, saving lives on both sides. Winston Churchill refrained from warning the city of Coventry in Britain that the German Luftwaffe was going to bomb it on November 14, 1940, because to do so would have been to tip the Nazis that it had broken Germany's secret military codes. Pres. Ronald Reagan invoked "plausible deniability" that members of his administration sold military weapons to Iran to release American hostages and then used the proceeds of the sale to fund anti-communist Contras in Nicaragua.

Economist Tom Sowell says that it is better to choose the lesser evil we don't know, such as Trump, rather than the evil we do know, Hillary, when picking a president. But we do know how both candidates handle using power either for good or bad.

Hillary

Beyond the media characterizations of Trump as the incarnation of Hitler or Mussolini we know this for sure:

• Bill Clinton ordered the bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan in 1998 to cover up his sex scandals ("wag the dog" trick).
• We also know that Hillary backed the Muslim Brotherhood in taking over Egypt and in invading Libya (countries no threat to U.S. security) resulting in the deaths of countless Egyptian police officers, judges, Coptic priests, prosecutors and citizens killed by terrorist shootings and bombings by the Muslim Brotherhood.

And we know the Clinton's have created a repeated appearance of evil if not an outright selling out to interests other than for the good of the country through the Clinton Foundation. In my estimation, the above examples represent essential evil used for self-serving purposes and not for the national interest.

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And we know Hillary has been silent, and possibly complicit, as to the Obama administration's flagrant abuse of power:

• To use the I.R.S. against political opponents;
• In "Operation Choke Point" to use regulatory agencies to deny commercial banking services to "disreputable merchants" such as coin dealers, dating services, firearms sellers and tobacco sales; and
• The threat of cutting off federal tax exempt status to schools and churches that denied access to transgender persons and other politically correct categories of persons, among numerous other abuses.

Trump

Trump has been accused of getting a city in New Jersey to use eminent domain to take a widow's house from her for a casino parking lot. But Trump never acquired the property and the widow never lived in the property, as it was a rooming house on commercial zoned land. Moreover, Trump offered the owner four times market value and life long occupancy in one of his condos. The owner refused and lost the property twenty years later for half of what Trump offered and Trump lost his casino in bankruptcy. Yes, Trump is a proponent of eminent domain but he is upfront about it, not clandestine like the Clintons. Again, do we see essential evil here? I don't see essential evil but over-generosity. Trump has stated he would use waterboarding to extract information from terrorists to save citizen's lives. He has been roundly criticized as advocating war crimes for this. He has come out saying he praised "stop and frisk" police methods to protect minorities, despite the clamor that it is patently illegal. But this is what we uniquely elect presidents to do: to use power, coercion and violence (or "evil") but only when necessary and only in an emergency. This is what we elect presidents to do: fight wars, vet out terrorists, suppress insurrections, and reform corruption using force to do so only where necessary as a last resort. So again, does Trump's advocacy of waterboarding or "stop and frisking" reveal essential evil that his adversaries are so fervently looking for? Undoubtedly No. Presidents have to wield power and sometimes evil in extreme situations. We know that Trump has proposed to have all of those who work in his administration to sign pledges that they won't give speeches for lucrative fees for five years after they leave office. In contract, the Clintons have no unease with using power, prestige and political access for self-gain and do not tell us if they are paid off by certain interests to do the bidding of others for purposes not in our national interest.

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Excuses

The one thing we don't know about both candidates is whether they are willing to lose their souls by having to wield power and do evil to serve their country? A key behavioral trait is to look for the leader who would deny they use power for self-gain or outright lie and make excuses to justify the use of power compared to the leader who admits evil is evil and is willing to bear their soul for love of country. The more transparent a leader is with the use of power the more citizens can constrain the abuse of power. On that score, Trump has more political virtue than Hillary. The Christian writer C.S. Lewis once wrote: "The greatest evil is not done now in those sordid 'dens of crime' that (Charles) Dickens loved to paint. It is not even done in concentration camps and labor camps. In those we see its final results. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried and minuted) in clear, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice".