Trump, the United Nations, and the Banality of Evil

World leaders meet every September for the United Nations General Assembly. There have been plenty of weird moments over the years: Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev banging his shoe on the table in 1960 to stop the leader of another country from criticizing him, Fidel Castro going on for more than four hours in a speech that same year, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez calling US President George W. Bush the “devil” in 2006.

President Donald Trump has had his odd UN moments as well. In 2017, he lashed out against North Korean leader Kim Jong-un as a “rocket man... on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.” The following year, Trump returned to the podium to claim that “in less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.” He was surprised to hear the audience laugh at this absurd boast.

Trump returned to the UN last week for an even more bizarre performance. For an hour, he berated the assembled leaders with his usual grievances and overstatements. As usual, he played up his rescue of the US economy (even as it teeters on a precipice because of his tariffs) and prevention of a “colossal invasion” at the border (though the numbers of migrants had been going down in the final year of the previous administration). He repeated his claim that he ended seven wars (he hasn’t). He claimed that he “has the highest poll numbers I’ve ever had” (at 39%, they’re actually at their lowest level).

But he also went on an extended riff on why he should have gotten the contract to renovate the UN headquarters, asserted that all countries are “going to hell” because of migration, claimed that Christianity is “the most persecuted religion on the planet today,” and insisted that he “was right about everything. And I don’t say that in a braggadocious way, but it’s true.”

It was as if he had stood up at a conference of astrophysicists and announced that the US government now believed that the Earth is at the center of the solar system.

All of this was disconcerting, but foreign leaders often come to the UN to tell lies.

It’s what Trump said in his UN address about climate change and renewable energy that went beyond mere lies.

Climate change, Trump announced, is “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world... All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people... If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.”

The “green scam” involves clean energy, which Trump has steered the United States away from. “We’re getting rid of the falsely named renewables. By the way, they’re a joke. They don’t work. They’re too expensive.”

Climate change predictions, in fact, have been all too accurate. Last year was the warmest on record. The glaciers are melting faster than ever before. Superstorms are intensifying around the planet, even in the United States.

Renewable energy, meanwhile, works very well. I discovered just how well renewable energy works just this week when an accident caused an interruption in the electricity grid in our neighborhood and our solar panels kept our refrigerator humming. Solar and wind power now produce electricity at rates much cheaper than the lowest-priced fossil fuels (41% cheaper for solar, 53% for offshore wind).

The UN, of course, has identified climate change as a major—if not the major—threat to humanity. You can’t fault Trump for not being bold. But it was as if he had stood up at a conference of astrophysicists and announced that the US government now believed that the Earth is at the center of the solar system. He would not only be wrong; He would be proposing to destroy all of the industries based on the science of astrophysics—satellites, space stations, and the like.

Similarly, Trump’s ideas about climate change are not just wrong or even just unworkable. They are evil. By pushing for the return of fossil fuels in the United States and elsewhere, Trump is putting the effort to arrest climate change beyond reach. The planet is heading toward a brick wall, and Trump has not only taken his foot off the brake, he has pushed down hard on the accelerator.

Trump once criticized the Obama administration for not doing enough to address climate change. Now, because of the political and financial support of the fossil fuel lobbies, he has executed a U-turn. As a result, more and more people will die as a result of heat, flooding, and famine. One recent study in Nature estimates over 240,000 deaths per year because of heat, disease, floods, and other direct effects of climate change. Trump’s claims, in other words, amount to the denial and perpetuation of a mass murder.

Climate change can only be stopped by everyone pulling together and acting in concert. But that flies in the face of Trump’s boast that he alone can solve the world’s problems.

In her essays about Nazis and genocide, the philosopher Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil.” She rightly identified the faceless bureaucrat as the modern era’s personification of crimes against humanity. These bureaucrats were not motivated primarily by ideology or the will to power. Incapable of empathy, they were doing their job as just another cog in the machinery of evil.

There are many such banal personifications of evil in modern society—the CEO of a nuclear weapons production facility, the judge who signs off on the deportation of a Russian dissident back to the country that will imprison or execute him, the flak who writes the government press release about Israeli military actions in Gaza. You will not read about these people in the newspaper. They are just doing their jobs.

Trump is not like that. He wants to be in the public eye 24/7. He wants to be heralded as the person responsible for dramatic change in the United States and the world. He thinks that he’s not only doing good in the world but that he is the best person in the world.

This is evil in the age of social media. It is evil committed by people who believe that they are the stars of their own movies and the rest of us are just extras.

Trump’s evil, of course, resides in his actions. But it is also because he denies collective action. Trump’s evil is that of extreme narcissism.

Climate change can only be stopped by everyone pulling together and acting in concert. But that flies in the face of Trump’s boast that he alone can solve the world’s problems. His bragging is not just a personality quirk or even the sign of a personality disorder. It is an essential element of his particular form of evil.