Speaking Evil
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Evil is a moral concept that refers to immoral people, acts, or affairs of an especially egregious or gratuitous nature.
The English word evil comes from the Old English yfel, a term that described anything bad, harmful or unpleasant, without necessarily implying moral wrongdoing.
Between 1066 through the early 1500s, use of evil aligned with moral and theological senses, denoting wickedness, sin, or active opposition to the good.
But in modern uses, evil’s primary meaning has become one of severe moral condemnation, according to the scholar Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen.
In an article in the International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, Professor Kjeldgaard-Christiansen investigated President Donald Trump’s invocations of evil across speeches, interviews, official statements, and on social media.
But first he tracked the modern use of evil through past U.S. presidents, who he found primarily invoked the evil of foreign nations and terrorists.
For example, Richard Nixon called Nikita Khrushchev an “apostle for evil”; Gerald Ford used evil to describe “hunger in countries less fortunate than we”; Ronald Reagan coined the phrase “evil empire”; Bill Clinton said that the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was an “evil act of terror”; and Barack Obama frequently emphasized the evil of domestic terrorists and mass murderers, including the “unconscionable evil” of the Sandy Hook school shooter in 2012.
Unlike previous U.S. presidents, the data revealed that Trump’s targeting of domestic political antagonists as evil is both striking and unprecedented.
And that usage of evil under Trump has grown more insistently demonizing in condemning actual people rather than actions, situations, institutions, or ideologies.
However, while Professor Kjeldgaard-Christiansen acknowledges Trump has explicitly aligned himself and the Republican Party with the Christian right, he does not believe Trump’s partisan use of evil is another symptom of political polarization.
“What it expresses is a form of moral exclusion, whereby political adversaries are no longer seen as fellow citizens holding competing visions of the common good but as ‘enemies from within’,” he writes.
Professor Kjeldgaard-Christiansen says if Trump continues to face criminal investigations or new impeachments, these trends may continue.
“Conversely, if there are no more impeachment efforts, and if talk of classified documents, hush money, and incitement to insurrection begins to fade, then so too may this rhetoric.”
The full article can be downloaded here or requested through your school or library using this citation: Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, J. Speaking “Evil”: Quantifying Donald Trump’s Demonization of Political Opponents and Other Targets. Int J Polit Cult Soc (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-025-09550-4
D.L. Lee is the author of SISTERLY LOVE, a novel about two sisters who grow apart.