Evil. The Only Word to Describe Trump and the MAGA Strategy to Divide and Conquer their Opposition

Donald Trump is a man incapable of feeling for others, or taking responsibility for his words and actions. You would think that over the past decade that Americans, even his supposedly “Christian” supporters might have learned.

But the same thing has been proven about them, time and time again.

Gustave Gilbert who served as a psychologist to the major war crimes defendants at Nuremberg noted:

“In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trails 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”

Trump, at least used to have a dark charisma which his devout followers found irresistible. Even if he no longer captivates them with charisma, they are still attracted by his power. Since Trump is not a fringe character, but the leader of one of the most powerful countries on the planet, this is not something that we can easily dismiss.

After ten plus years, we in the resistance should know better. One of the things that I have been going back to study is how the Nazis worked to splinter the opposition to them in the nations that they conquered by exploiting natural political and societal divisions in the political factions existing in those countries. Trump and his sycophants have been working to divide their domestic opponents, and split our allies in order to bolster themselves, and our real enemies.

How do they do this? It’s really not that hard. A skilled regime sees their opposition, and then begins to slice them into segments based on the existing tensions between them. One has to realize that Communists and Socialists have profound differences, the Nazis exploited that in Germany as well in the countries that they occupied. They also understood that resistance to their rule included conservatives, nationalists, monarchists, socialists, and communists. So they attempted, wherever possible to split and cause discord among them. In some cases, as was the case in Greece, this led to civil war following the Second World War.

In Nazi occupied Europe, the Nazi Sicherheitsdienst, the SD, the intelligence branch of Himmler’s SS, worked hard to exploit divisions in the countries the Nazis conquered. They played monarchists against nationalists, nationalists against republicans, republicans against communists, especially in the Balkans family rivalries.

That is happening in the United States since 2016. Trump and the MAGA Republicans have and continue to use the media, as well as their diverse right wing propaganda and social media machine to turn their opponents against each other. That has become evident in the 2026 Democratic Party primaries as traditional corporate Democratic leaders worked against progressives, be they progressive Democrats, and the so called a Democratic Socialists.

One has to know that is what is happening today. I am a historian, and one subjects that I studied from high school, college, and my two graduate degrees was the Nazi Regime, including its actions at home and abroad. While at home the Nazis felt free to stomp out opposition groups with little need to divide them, in the nations that they conquered and occupied they realized that it would not be so easy. Instead they worked to divide the local opposition based on the political, social, and sometimes ethnic “tribes” that already existed in those countries.

All one has to do today is look at how Trump, MAGA, and the GOP propaganda machine has exploited even small divisions among Democrats to win elections, beginning in 2016. Then, they peeled away just enough voters through Jill Stein and her otherwise useless Green Party, and people that they used James Comey’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails to win the presidency.

These were same kind of “dirty tricks”, pioneered by Richard Nixon and his “Committee to Reelect the President” (CREEP), in 1972. Nixon’s crimes against our Republic and Democracy were so great that to avoid impeachment he resigned while numerous members of his regime, including his Attorney General, John Mitchell went to prison. Back then Republicans still had enough courage to support the Constitution and law above a President of their own Party. Sadly, that hasn’t been the case since at least 2020. To be honest and for full transparency’s sake, I didn’t leave the GOP until I came back from Iraq in 2008. I became a Republican in 1976 to volunteer Gerald Ford’s campaign before I could vote, even though Ford had pardoned Nixon.

What I am saying tonight is that nobody, no matter how strongly they oppose Trump, can assume that they cannot be turned against people who also desire to see Trump and MAGA out of power. One cannot take lightly how the media, political office, and social media can divide people who otherwise would be standing shoulder to shoulder with each other. Likewise, as well as how it can encourage a core of absolutely committed “true believers” to remain impervious to the flaws, failures, and contradictions of those they support. Even with Hitler dead and Berlin in its death throes, the Nazi “true believers” murdered opponents, and anyone else considered as being a defeatist or traitor. Don’t think that something like that can’t happen again, especially with the true believers of MAGA who are armed to the teeth with military hardware, and sometimes with military and law enforcement experience.

It really doesn’t matter what the ideology of an oppressive regime is in the end. The fact of the matter is that all of them seek power for power’s sake, and will do anything that they can to divide and conquer their opponents while drawing people in institutions not necessarily allied with them into their regimes. One only needs to study how many former officers and officials of the Imperial Russian army and government joined the Bolsheviks after the revolution. Many later paid for that with their lives when Stalin purged the Red Army in the 1930s. The same can be said about the non-Nazi military officers and government officials who served the Nazi regime.

We now face a situation where people who we trusted who at one time swore a sacred oath to defend the constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, appear to have become willing participants in crimes against the constitution, the American people, and assisted or contributed to war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The American government is sanctioning the International Criminal Court, which was born of the work of Americans who prosecuted the war criminals of the Second World War, who understood that justice was justice was noteworthy a one way street. Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, Robert Jackson, who both helped to organize the war crimes trials in 1945 and was the lead U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg said:

“If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”

In the heady days after World War Two, few Americans could imagine such a world where the United States would violate almost every law that we charged the Nazis, and the Japanese with after the war. In the past 60 years we have seen our country violate those laws with impunity, perhaps more this year than any previous time. Unfortunately, we now have a government that seems more committed to breaking international laws and basic humanity than any before them.

So anyway. I needed to get that off my chest before I move on to other subjects or finish my series on how the United States Navy and our government have seemingly lost any idea of how to build and maintain warships, or how to sustain them.

I go back to work tomorrow in order to work with my school’s new administration on the classes that I will teach and the class schedule for the upcoming school year. So until next time I wish you all the best and please watch your six.

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