Donald Trump Is Not a Monster

A Reply to Robert Reich

Today, I got a message from a friend, Dan Steinberg, about a recent Substack essay by Robert Reich that’s titled “Decency in a time of monsters.” I can’t speak for Dan, but I generally like what Reich says. I believe that in criticizing the likes of Trump, he is on the right side of history. Our broader political views are more similar than not. But Dan found the essay disturbing, and so did I.

Reich’s eight hundred sixty nine-word essay mentions monsters no less than sixteen times. On average, that’s around one reference to monsters every sixty-nine words. When he mentions monsters, he’s not talking about fictional entities like Count Dracula and Freddie Kruger. He’s talking about Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and J. D. Vance.

The first reference to monsters is in the second paragraph, where Reich says, “Trump increasingly resembles a monster — a creature that’s extremely powerful and dangerous and is inflicting extraordinary harm on human beings.” To be fair, he doesn’t claim that Trump is a monster, only that he resembles one. In the third paragraph he says, “Elon Musk is also behaving like a monster” and then claims that “JD Vance is a baby monster in waiting” (emphasis added). And then:

The monstrous Trump-Vance-Musk regime (I can’t in good conscience call it an “administration”) has appointed a Star Wars cantina of other monstrous people. Monsters abroad are eager to work with them. Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban, and the neofascist parties in Europe — which Vance and Musk are actively urging Europeans to support — would like nothing better than for the world to succumb to their monstrosities…. The rise of these monsters raises a profound challenge for the rest of us: How do we maintain common decency when monsters are in charge?

You might wonder why I disapprove of these words. Trump. Musk, and Vance (not to mention Putin, Orbán, Hitler, and Stalin) are monsters, aren’t they?

No, they’re not. None of them are or were monsters.

Monsters are fictional. Nobody is a monster. People who do terrible things, and stand for appalling ideologies, are nonetheless human beings. In referring to these people as monsters, Reich yields to the impulse of representing political enemies as evil, subhuman creatures, rather than as human beings who behave destructively.

This is a very tempting error. It’s tempting because it is reassuring. In denigrating people as monsters, we implicitly assert that they are categorically different from ourselves. They are “other”—essentially different from “us” and (unlike us) bad to the bone.

This is precisely the wrong way to think. Trump, Musk, Vance and company are human beings, just like you and me. They are human beings who stand for terrible ideas, and who commit atrocious acts, but they are human nonetheless. They hold up a mirror to humanity, revealing what we human beings are capable of doing. It’s not a flattering image, but its one that should be acknowledged.

You might think that I am making too much of Reich’s choice of words. Wasn’t his monster talk merely his way of expressing disapproval of people who wield power in toxic ways.

No, it’s more than that.

Nazi image of the monstrous Jew

I document in my books On Inhumanity and Making Monsters that characterizing others as monsters has a horrific pedigree, and has often paved the way to violence and atrocity. For centuries, European Christians represented Jews as monstrous beings, culminating in the Holocaust. During the Jim Crow era, Black males were represented as ravenous semi-humans, a trope reincarnated in the notion of the superpredator. And just last year Benjamin Netanyahu painted a picture of Hamas as “bloodthirsty monsters,” paving the way for the destruction of Gaza, and the callous extinction of countless innocent lives. Sadly, there are many more examples of what happens when we imaginatively transmute humans into monsters.

Black males as monsters

Reich concludes his essay saying, “We can maintain decency in the time of monsters. We must. It is the first step in resisting the monsters, and the prerequisite for overpowering them.” I disagree. We maintain decency by refraining from dehumanizing the dehumanizers. We can morally condemn them in the strongest possible terms without stooping to their level and recreating ourselves in their repellent image.