A New Book Examines The Wickedness Of Trump. Sort Of.

There is a cottage industry in publishing dedicated to understanding Donald Trump and his followers. Since his election in 2016, a spate of books have attempted to contextualize, deconstruct, and analyze the President’s ascendency. The second Trump term has been no less prolific. This year alone has seen juggernaut bestsellers like Regime Change by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan and the upcoming Profiles in Cowardice by Jacob Weisberg. “Trump 2.0 is all about this break with the stylistic norms, rules, and traditions that governed the Presidency in the past,” Susan B. Glasser wrote in a 2025 New Yorker column. Over the years, Trump’s been called a number of epithets. Cruel, heartless, old, stupid. There remains a collective nervousness around calling Trump a fascist, and few writers avail themselves of words like “evil.” Susan Neiman has been interested in the problem of evil for most of her career as a moral philosopher. Her 2002 book, Evil in Modern Thought traced the history of philosophy as a matter of different responses to the existence of evil. So it’s surprising that her latest book, Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era, is curiously cagey about the current President’s alignment. Neiman has written multiple books about theodicy, the problem with woke culture, and why progressives would benefit from more moral clarity. Her new book allows her to play the hits under a provocative title, but with little novelty. She never quite gets around to taking on Trump directly despite the little book’s title. Across seven chapters, Neiman considers the importance of discussing morality, the empty ideology the Trump admin has used to justify its actions, and how we must shift away from identity politics and liberalism and towards socialism. She argues that the left has ceded moral ground by claiming materialism instead of ideology—though her thinking about both seem muddy. Her ideas about ideology contain a lot of materialism and her ideas about materialism are undergirded by ideology. She dives into the discourse with a lot of cynicism around Marx, communism, Judith Butler, and big woke. “Many progressives were sick at heart about it, though they confessed it only to close friends, preferably after a glass of wine,” she quips about the latter. Identity politics is tribalism, rather than materialism. Like many philosophers, she seems to let the distortions of identity politics on both the right and the left distort the idea of standing up for minorities as not just a social issue, but a civic one. Whose materialism matters?

Read it at Defector ↗

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