The Evil Next Door
Or: A cautionary tale of the wicked who walk among us.
When I think of people who are truly terrible, awful people, Donald Trump generally tops the list. He’s self-centered, narcissistic, bigoted, power-hungry, and just generally an example of the worst humanity has to offer.
Trump is making another naked grab for absolute power via a naked attempt to create an American Christo-fascist state so he gets to pull the levers of power in a much more absolute sense. This cannot be allowed to happen.
We have fought several wars against fascism in the 20th century, and every time, the fascists were the bad guys. The fact that Donald Trump wants to build America into a new fascist state under the guise of Evangelical holiness is both anti-American and absolutely disgusting to me. The fact that tens of millions of people support him is downright awful to imagine.
That’s the thing, though. Of Americans who voted in the 2020 election, 74 million of them supported the Trump ticket. That’s roughly 44% of registered voters who supported him in spite of (or because of) his nakedly fascist and dictatorial policies.
Look, I don’t care for fascists, bigots, or anyone who would support them, and that means I don’t have much sympathy for Trump supporters either. Whether or not they fully agree with him or not, they are putting their support behind them in the form of their votes, and I do not tolerate that crap.
I don’t care if you agree with him 100% or don’t agree with him on most things but are just voting R because that’s what you’ve always done. A vote for Trump is a vote for bigotry, racism, fascism, and injustice everywhere, and voting for him is showing your support for those things.
Even if you’re not any of those things but voted for Trump anyway, you are still supporting them. You looked at Trump and all the things he’s said and done, seen all of the awful stuff he’s spouted, all of his anti-democratic actions, and decided that those were not dealbreakers. I will have no sympathy for you when the leopards eat your face.
My positions on this matter are not new, nor are they unique to me. Quite a few people will give no quarter to a Trump supporter regardless of how nice or pleasant or anti-racist they might be for the reasons I outlined above. They might be a perfectly nice, reasonable, rational person, but if they voted for Trump, they’re evil and are not to be trusted.
But that’s just the thing: loads of Trump supporters are not the whacko Evangelical nutjobs who are clamoring for their god-king to assume the throne and rule this country with an iron fist. They’re not Nazis or KKK members, they don’t march through the city carrying tiki torches and spouting racist garbage, and they don’t attend Trump rallies wearing shirts full of profanity and implicit threats.
They’re our neighbors, our coworkers, our family members, the people we hold the door for at the gas station. They’re everyday people we encounter on an everyday basis, people who don’t actively parrot Trump’s nonsense or broadcast their vile beliefs from the rooftops or from their t-shirts. They’re people who are kind and polite and say “please” and “thank you” and round up their change to support the children.
Yes, they support a vile, disgusting man who is emboldened by a vocal minority of alt-right nutjobs on cable TV and social media, who in turn are boosted by Russian trolls and bots. They’re just not vocal about it. And honestly, most of them aren’t vocal about it. They go about their lives like all of us, only deviating periodically to vote for fascists every few years.
The thing about evil is that, by and large, it isn’t flashy or loud. It’s quiet and mundane, normal people who live normal lives and do normal things who nonetheless support those who would destroy America as we know it.
Their reasons are as varied as they are. Maybe they truly believe that Trump is the best candidate, or they think that America should be a Christian theocracy, or they really do want a strongman making all the decisions without checks and balances, or they just vote R in every election without a second thought. They just support Trump and his cronies for whatever reason, then they go about their lives.
The 24-hour news cycle is more than happy to show us loud Trump rallies full of exuberant supporters and racist-sounding signs and t-shirts. They’ll broadcast the latest nonsense out of CPAC, where some supporter or another will shout their intentions to destroy democracy in 2024, the quiet part out loud so to speak.
However, they rarely talk to regular, everyday supporters of Trump, those who like him and want him to win the election but don’t go to rallies or broadcast their beliefs. Those kind of stories don’t drive views and clicks and don’t generate ad revenue like the extreme, sensationalist stuff does.
Again, there are tens of millions of Trump supporters nationwide, and again, they are our neighbors, our coworkers, the people we encounter every day. We might even be friends with some of them without ever knowing that they support the kind of evil that would extinguish democracy as we know it.
Yeah, Trump is aggressive and says outlandish, disgusting things all the time, and there are quite a few of his supporters who are not afraid to do the same thing, but many — if not most — aren’t quite so loud. They are the evil next door, the people who are more than willing to throw democracy under the bus because they like one candidate over the other for whatever reason.
This is how strongmen come to power — they have a bunch of quiet supporters who might not shout their support from the rooftops but nonetheless help put them into positions of power. Regardless of their intentions, they will support a wicked man and his wicked policies and desires, and they do so quietly and happily. That is, until the leopard eat their faces, and by that point it’s too late.
There is a third part to this that tends to get overlooked in the whole “creeping evil” messaging that we hear a lot about, and that is the fact that those on the right regard those of us on the left in the same way I just described.
I am not quiet about my beliefs here, nor am I quiet about them among familiar groups of people, but I don’t tend to broadcast my politics via colorful shirts or the like. The closest I come to that is the two pins I wear on my work badge, one declaring my pronouns (he/him) and the other reading “I’m an LGBTQ+ ally and I vote.” I don’t wear my badge most places, though, and since I work in the nonprofit field, most of my coworkers agree with me.
I don’t talk politics with my neighbors, of whom many are older folks and of whom many probably support Trump. Without knowing their politics, I rather like most of my neighbors, and I wonder how finding out about their politics would affect things. Could I remain friends with a Trump supporter?
What’s more, would they want to remain friends with me?
To many on the right, I am the ultimate evil in America — a non-Christian socialist who believes in separation of church and state, LGBTQIA+ rights, BLM, and social justice. I think that Christianity’s influence has done untold damage to 21st century America, and I think that Trump is an absolute monster, even if many (or even most) of his supporters aren’t.
To my Trump-supporting neighbors, I am the evil next door. That’s a weird thing to know.
That said, I don’t think that evil is a relative thing in this instance. I support justice and equity for all, and I have a firm definition of what that means. I am anti-racist, anti-bigot, and anti-fascist (as I feel all people should be). I tend to think that moving toward freedom, justice, liberty, and equity are good things, and moving toward fascism, dictatorship, oppression, and stripping rights from people is bad.
In that vein, I tend to see myself as a good person who is fighting evil and injustice in the world. That said, those on the other side feel the same as I do, except for them, I am the evil and injustice.
They believe that their religion (in this case Christianity, but it varies depending on where you are in the world) is the only true, correct way and that it should dictate the lives of all Americans. They firmly believe that America is a Christian nation and that all opposition to it should be eliminated. They believe that feminism and BLM are movements designed to actively take rights away from white men and think calls for social justice are too “woke” and, by extension, anti-American.
They believe that America is the best country in the world. They also believe that America is God’s chosen nation, and that He has chosen us to be the most powerful nation in the world because we are unequivocally the best in His eyes.
Needless to say, I disagree with damn near all of that, and I think it’s pretty clear based on what I’ve already described of my viewpoints. Still, the idea that I am considered “evil” to those on the right, particularly Trump supporters, is somewhat uncomfortable.
Of course, this whole “good versus evil” narrative is hyped up by both the news media and opinion pieces, including my own. I have written a lot about the potential fall of American democracy and the rise of Trumpist theocratic fascism here, and my view of those things is that they are unequivocally bad. In those pieces, I tend to not mince words.
Still, even though I do think of Trump and many of his cronies and enablers as wicked, evil people, I don’t think that the vast majority of his supporters are evil or wicked at all. I may not agree with their viewpoints, opinions, or choice of candidate, but they are, generally speaking, decent people, even good people.
They are just facilitating a madman, and that is something I cannot abide.
To paraphrase the saying, evil men prosper when good men do nothing, but they are often enabled by a quiet, if misguided, populace. Trump’s supporters and enablers might not think of themselves as evil — quite the opposite, as many of them think of themselves as the ultimate good fighting the evil leftists and their “woke mind virus.”
But, for many of them, they’re just everyday folks who don’t agree with people like me but don’t necessarily hate us either. They may have been misled into voting for a conman, as many have been; they may dislike the man but support his policies and politics; or, as I’ve said several times, they may just be lifetime R voters. They don’t actively and explicitly hate people like me, they just like Trump and/or the Republican party more.
I have a lot of empathy for people like that. They tend to get lumped in with Trump as extremist alt-right whackjobs who are drip-fed a constant stream of Fox News and OAN. After all, who else could vote for someone like Trump?
The answer, of course, is a lot of normal, everyday folks like you and me. They’re not evil people, sitting in their homes plotting to violently overthrow democracy while twirling their villain mustaches and cackling maniacally. They go to work, pay their taxes, give to charity, obey the laws, and live their lives just as most of us do.
However, while they might not be actively and explicitly evil, they support a man who is, by all accounts, a terrible human being. That man must be stopped, and while I have a lot of empathy for his supporters who have been taken by him and his massive con, that only takes me so far.
My Trump-supporting friends and neighbors might be perfectly good people whom I relate to and empathize with, but their support for him is untenable to me. I might not end friendships over it, especially with my neighbors who I am stuck living next to for the foreseeable future, but it won’t stop me from fighting their politics tooth and nail.
I encourage you to look at Trump supporters in this light. We tend to get wrapped up in the outspoken ones — whether it’s the raucous crowds at his rallies or arguments over Thanksgiving dinner — but he’s got tens of millions of supporters, and not all of them put up yard signs or scream racial slurs.
Have some empathy for them. Trump’s supporters are often scared of an uncertain future and are lashing out, looking for someone to blame for their lot in life. They may be misguided and wrong, but their support of Trump often comes from an honest, vulnerable place, however awful it might seem.
Still, we cannot be complicit in their takeover of the Republican party, and we must defeat them at the ballot box. It’s currently our best chance, our final hope, and our last line of defense against the creeping evil in America right now.
Let’s just hope the leopards don’t eat a bunch of faces come 2025.
Be well out there.
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