By Timothy Egan
It passed with the usual shrug by the usual handmaidens of hatred when the president of the world’s most powerful democracy threatened to commit war crimes by bombing Iranian cultural sites — the kind of barbarism practiced by the Taliban and rogue-state thugs.
After being told that he would be in violation of Geneva Convention rules that the United States had helped to create back when America was actually great, President Trump relented, but still wondered: Why not?
The warlord in chief had already gone out of his way to protect a Navy SEAL member who’d been accused of committing war crimes. And what kind of man did the president upend the military code of justice for?
“The guy is freaking evil,” one fellow SEAL told investigators, referring to Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher, who was convicted of posing for photos with the corpse of a teenage boy who’d been killed in his custody. After the presidential intervention, the formerly shamed serviceman was posing at Mar-a-Lago.
On any given day, Trump is vindictive, ignorant, narcissistic, a fraud — well, his pathologies are well known. But it’s time to apply the same word to him as the brave Navy man did to the renegade in his unit. Under Trump, the United States is a confederacy of corruption, driven by a thousand points of evil. And that evil is contagious.
We all grew up hearing an ageless warning about public morality: that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.