In this article, I claim that “evil” is a useful category of moral philosophy, and we encounter its radical forms at the intersection of psychopathology, mythology, and power. People participate in different ways: there are architects, bureaucrats, implementers, followers, and beneficiaries. Ordinary people will commit extraordinary harm. In the second part, I will use this framework to examine Trump’s MAGA movement.
When I was a boy growing up in Germany, the ghosts were everywhere. Not literal ghosts, but the ghosts of questions haunting the silences of the older generation, lingering in bombed-out churches preserved as memorials, permeating the history books we studied in school. The central question was always the same: How could this have happened?
This was never an abstract, academic question. It was deeply personal—about our parents, grandparents, neighbors. How did ordinary, civilized people become complicit in something so extraordinarily destructive?
As I moved into my work in philosophy and psychotherapy, that question evolved from the historical to the clinical. We encounter evil’s components daily in our consulting rooms: the narcissist’s profound lack of empathy, the calculated cruelty of sadistic tendencies, the rigid paranoid thinking that fuels abuse. We sit with survivors of torture, with refugees fleeing from miserable conditions in their home countries, with individuals traumatized not only by what happened to them but by what they witnessed others endure.
Yet we have no DSM diagnosis for “evil.” Our clinical bible is designed to be descriptive, not normative—it catalogs patterns of distress and impairment but deliberately avoids moral categories. There is no diagnostic code for “knowingly violated the universal moral law.” This creates a complicated problem: the DSM is morally blind by design. When the only language we allow ourselves is medicalized and descriptive, we risk letting agency disappear — and with it, the capacity to name moral wrongdoing when we meet it.
The question becomes: How can we, as clinicians and academics, integrate clinical and moral judgment, keeping the categories distinct while recognizing they inevitably intersect in practice? How do we use our understanding of individual psychology to illuminate the darkest corners of collective human behavior, especially when those corners are not safely in the past, but emerging in real time before us?
Evil at the Junctions: A Framework
“Evil” is a philosophical concept that cannot be avoided, but it can be explained in different ways. (Here is a link to the Stanford Encyclopedia.) The most important claim I can make is this: Evil is not an “essence” or a single trait, but a mechanism at junctions: the convergence of psyche, narrative, and network. No single element suffices. A disturbed individual without a mythic story and institutional apparatus remains marginal. An ideology without a charismatic architect and organizational structure remains abstract. A powerful institution without political vulnerabilities and ideological permission simply functions bureaucratically.
Evil emerges at the intersection where three elements meet:
- Psyche: A leader exhibiting malignant narcissism—pathological grandiosity, lack of empathy, paranoid worldview, and ego-syntonic sadism. Someone for whom cruelty is not merely instrumental but intrinsically pleasurable, who sees the world as populated by enemies requiring domination.
- Narrative: Not just “ideas” but mythology: stories that organize collective grievance, promise salvation, name a pure “us” and polluting “them,” and grant explicit permission for transgression. As Ernst Cassirer warned us, modern political myths are crafted with contemporary techniques to mobilize obedience through affective binding rather than rational deliberation.
- Network: Institutions, media ecosystems, organizational structures that scaffold and reward transgression. These systems distribute responsibility, sanitize language, and convert individual moral failure into collective routine.
When these three elements converge, psychological “switches” activate – justification, euphemistic labeling, displaced agency, denial of injury, dehumanization – that suspend moral restraint. Only equally patterned “brakes” can interrupt the process: independent media, freedom of speech, separation of powers, accountability tracing agency, cross-cutting identities, procedures requiring justification, communal forms of inclusion and re-humanization.
This is not abstract theory. We are watching this junction activate in real time in the Trump presidency and the MAGA movement. The common thread weaving together so much of what he does, at home and abroad, is power. Whether he is seeking a cease-fire in Gaza or Ukraine, whimsically imposing more tariffs on Canada, bombing boats off the coast of Venezuela or deploying troops to American cities, the desired result is his personal aggrandizement and the empowerment of his presidency. He blends self-aggrandizing diplomacy with militarized shows of force, and his foreign policy approach cannot be separated from his assumption of ever-increasing powers at home. And given the enormous technological capabilities of the US, the question seems necessary: Are we witnessing the rise of a new and powerful version of political evil?
The Contemporary Case: Trump and MAGA
When over 200 mental health professionals published an open letter in October 2024 warning that Donald Trump exhibits “severe, untreatable personality disorder – malignant narcissism,” they were making a clinical observation based on thousands of hours of publicly observable behavior. But they were also making a moral claim: that this psychological profile, in this position of power, constitutes a grave danger to all of us.
The Psyche: Malignant Narcissism on Display
Let me walk through the clinical picture systematically:
- Narcissism: Pathological grandiosity: claims of being a “very stable genius,” knowing more than experts in every field. Insatiable need for admiration manifests in obsession with crowd sizes, ratings, loyalty oaths. Lack of empathy is documented by former officials and family members.
- Antisocial traits: As psychologist John Gartner notes, Trump has “a lifetime pattern of failure to conform to social norms and laws, repeated lying, reckless disregard for the safety of others, lack of remorse.” This is the behavioral checklist for antisocial personality disorder, publicly displayed.
- Paranoia: He constructs a world of enemies and conspiracies – the “deep state,” the “rigged election,” the “witch hunts.” This is not merely rhetoric but a paranoid worldview where persecution is perpetual, justifying any aggression as self-defense.
- Sadism: According to firsthand testimony from a former White House Press Secretary, during the January 6th Capitol attack, Trump watched violence “gleefully” from the White House dining room, saying “Look at all those people fighting for me,” hitting rewind to watch favorite parts repeatedly. For three hours, as police were beaten and lawmakers fled, he made no call for help. He exhibited pleasure in domination, pleasure in watching enemies (police officers!) under assault. This is ego-syntonic sadism—the fourth component of malignant narcissism.
Here’s where the integration of clinical and moral judgment becomes essential: The DSM might diagnose narcissistic personality disorder or antisocial personality disorder. But these diagnoses don’t capture the moral dimension – Trump made the culpable choice to utilize his psychological configuration to pursue power and to inflict harm. He seems to enjoy undermining democratic institutions. Illness can mitigate responsibility; it can also serve as alibi. We must hold both truths: this is a clinical syndrome and these are morally culpable actions.
The Narrative: The Big Lie as Mythic Capture
The MAGA movement demonstrates how destructive mythology functions. Consider how the “stolen election” narrative, what has come to be called the Big Lie, demonstrates the three psychological functions of destructive ideology:
- Simplicity: A complex election with 159 million votes, thousands of officials, multiple recounts, 60+ failed court cases—all collapsed into one sentence: “They stole it.”
- Scapegoat: Democrats, election workers, judges, the “deep state”—all become the polluting “them.”
- Salvation: Only Trump can save America, only he can deliver justice. “I alone can fix it.”
Despite zero evidence, despite recounts by Republican officials, despite rulings by Trump-appointed judges, 63% of Republicans as of late 2024 still believe the 2020 election was stolen. This is not simply misinformation, this is narrative capture. The myth has organized grievance, granted permission, created what psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee calls “shared psychosis.”
The social psychologist Albert Bandura identified mechanisms of dehumanization, and we can watch how they are systematically deployed within MAGA rhetoric:
- Euphemistic labeling: January 6th attackers become “patriots” and “hostages.”
- Dehumanization: Political opponents called “vermin” who must be “rooted out” – language historians immediately recognized from Hitler and Mussolini. Immigrants called “animals,” “they are eating dogs,” “poisoning the blood of our country” – what Yale professor Jason Stanley describes as “textbook Mein Kampf.”
- Displacement of responsibility: Claims of being victim of “weaponization,” framing future retribution as defensive response.
When you objectify and label humans, you prepare the ground for extinguishing moral obligations. When opponents are “vermin,” they’re not fellow citizens to be persuaded but pests to be exterminated. This is where clinical observation must become moral judgment: these are techniques for moral disengagement, and they are being deployed intentionally.
The Network: Institutions in Service of Transgression
- The Architect: Trump exhibits the clinical picture of malignant narcissism with grandiose-paranoid worldview, sacralized exception (“I alone can fix it”), revenge-seeking, and rationalized cruelty. But the clinical diagnosis must integrate with moral judgment: he is an agent acting out his psychological traits for destructive ends. And unfortunately, the Biden Administration failed to bring justice to his attempt to overthrow the 2020 elections.
- The Bureaucrats: The 147 members of Congress who voted to overturn election results even after the Capitol was attacked. The current cabinet, eager to fulfill Trump’s wishes. Attorney General Pam Bondi, weaponizing the Department of Justice for political retribution. Their motivation is not ideological zealotry but careerism, fear of primary challenges, political calculation—exhibiting Hannah Arendt’s “thoughtlessness,” unwillingness to think from democracy’s standpoint.
- The Implementers: ICE officers arresting people on streets, January 6th rioters, the broader MAGA base, driven by identity fusion with their leader, and humiliation-revenge scripts. Not monsters, but ordinary people captured by mythic narratives and enabled by permission structures.
- The Beneficiaries: Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, the Walton family, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg—optimizing for their own benefit while democracy crumbles. They helped Trump get re-elected, and they benefit enormously: They fit exactly what Immanuel Kant called “radical evil” – the willful, chosen inversion of moral law, consciously putting self-interest above all moral duty. They are enablers who won’t speak about democracy’s values because those values threaten their interests.
The Junction in Action
Since Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025, we’ve seen escalation, not moderation. Explicit promises of “retribution” are now underway. The indictment of a former FBI Director marks a dramatic escalation in political retribution efforts.
The brakes that stop us from moving into the direction of a totalitarian system are the federal structure, separation of powers, freedom of the press, accountability, cross-cutting identities, procedures requiring reasons, re-humanization . They are now under attack, they are being deliberately dismantled, or they have already failed.
This is what evil scaling at the junctions looks like: not in distant history or another country, but here and now, in America. A demagogue’s fragile ego seeking significance meets the “stolen election” myth granting meaning and permissionto go after their opponents. The whole movement is amplified by Fox News, social media ecosystems like “Truth Social,” Facebook and X, and political organizations that normalize transgression and provide financial cover for it (Republican Party apparatus, PACs, and billionaire networks). The brakes that might interrupt this process are getting systematically dismantled , and we are in for a wild ride. This is the junction model in real time: psyche + narrative + network = escalating destruction.
Why This Matters Now
Trump is already changing the world order, but what he brings is not peace — he ignores the order based on rules established after World War II. These rules were meant to prevent a return of the lethal mix of authoritarianism and aggression, and now, these forces are once again ascendant. This kind of world can seem orderly for a time; it might even appear peaceful for a while. But history shows that when might makes right, things will go terribly wrong.
From the ghosts of my German childhood, and from reading Freud, I learned that civilization is a thin veneer. Our most important work, as clinicians and human beings, is to understand the psychological forces that can tear it apart and to strengthen the forces that hold it together: empathy, critical thought, and moral courage. We need to reflect more thoroughly on the moral consequences of our actions, or non-actions. Right and wrong matters in this interconnected world, and we are sometimes confronting movements that are beyond “bad.” Evil is not a metaphysical essence, but a repeatable junction where psyche meets narrative meets network.
The current political moment, and the coming year 2026, has an existential quality for the United States. Abraham Lincoln warned in 1838: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time or die by suicide.” How do we stop the suicide of American democracy, before the whole system turns into a gigantic high-tech prison, run by a small group of oligarchs and power-hungry bureaucrats? The ghosts of history should not become the realities of our present.