In her recent book, philosopher Susan Neiman lectured Americans for embracing President Donald Trump and his moral depravity and for refusing to call it what it is: evil.
Neiman, the retired director of the Einstein Forum in Berlin, said Americans face real-world consequences for refusing to stand up to Trump. Over the weekend, the “No Kings” rallies drew anywhere from 5 to 7 million people to 3,000 local events nationwide.
Samuel Clowes Huneke, writing for The New Republic, reviews Neiman’s Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era, noting that the list of examples of destructive malevolence started early and Americans (politicians, in particular,) should have responded in kind.
In her book, Neiman argued that many Americans’ reluctance to speak in moral terms has almost ceded powerful language to the right. Discussions over “values,” for example, only happened on the left in reaction to the right, not as a proactive and coordinated effort to convey kindness by the left.
“Our culture’s reluctance to trade in moral ideas,” she said, “has left them to right-wing demagogues and brought us to this pass.”
She continued, saying that all Americans must face “the moral ideas that Donald Trump embodies and reinforces, ideas that are destructive enough to warrant the word evil.”
One of the best and earliest examples came from the March 2025 incident in which Trump’s administration shipped 238 immigrants to CECOT prison in El Salvador, which is known for disgusting and inhumane abuses and psychological torture. While then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posed outside a cage of prisoners, many Democrats struggled to muster a forceful response, Huneke writes.
He explains, the problem wasn’t a shortage of polling. It was a shortage of moral courage.
It’s as if Democrats saw Trump’s win in 2024 and threw up their hands believing “well, this is what the people want.”
Neiman explained that America’s political predicament expands beyond just Trump and it ultimately creates a kind of ideology that treats greed as rational and public goods or even as business opportunities. For those who act only out of self-interest, she said, eventually even morality starts looking like a sucker’s game.
Trump, in that account, is less the origin of America’s breakdown than its loudest expression.
Huneke agrees that the country needs moral clarity. He questions why a book about evil spends so little time confronting the people actually suffering.
The book fixated on conservatives’ obsession with “the woke,” and Neiman blamed identity politics for helping return Trump to power.
But Huneke argues that this targets the wrong people while overlooking centrists and prominent commentators who warned endlessly about the left but have offered little resistance to government repression.
He also challenged any suggestion that Americans have abandoned protest. That’s how several Americans have been shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, beaten and arrested by immigration agents over the past year. Huneke highlighted the Americans defending their neighbors, states protecting reproductive health and gender-affirming care, and progressives campaigning on human dignity this campaign cycle. They have already made the moral arguments, but through their actions.
“While contending we could all learn ‘impatience with clichés,’ [Neiman] resorts to her own clutch of them, arguing that we ought to start ‘defending truth’ and ‘renewing the moral concepts the right has trampled,'” cites Huneke. “I’m not sure moral handwringing is worth much to the hundreds of babies and toddlers who have been disappeared into ICE custody since the administration took office.”
For Huneke, cruelty cannot remain an abstract philosophical problem. He described “the decision to look away” as the biggest issue. Resistance also doesn’t have to wait for intellectuals to find the perfect vocabulary.
While the philosopher urged people to call Trump “evil,” Huneke wants a more nuanced approach that goes beyond just one man.
Name the cruelty, confront those enabling it and recognize the people already fighting back. That means judging moral conviction by what people actually do, not merely what they say.