The Fatal Flaw of Believing You Can Negotiate With Evil Without Becoming Its Victim

by | Jan 16, 2025 | Opinions & Commentary

Image: The Hartmann Report

The Fatal Flaw of Believing You Can Negotiate With Evil Without Becoming Its Victim

by | Jan 16, 2025 | Opinions & Commentary

Image: The Hartmann Report

Evil doesn’t negotiate—it devours. That is the peril of trusting Republicans with America’s future. The GOP isn’t interested in Democracy, and it’s time to wake up.

Republished with permission from Thom Hartmann

There’s no compromising with evil, although some Democrats apparently think they can. Evil, by its very nature, will always win in such situations, even when it appears to have compromised or cooperated.

“Evil” is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “a force that causes bad things to happen.”

In a democracy—derived from the Greek root demos, meaning “the people”—the core principle is governance that serves the collective well-being of its citizens. When decisions or actions prioritize the interests of a small, privileged group or industry over the needs of the majority, they undermine this principle.

Such actions can be rightly viewed as “a force that causes bad things to happen” for the broader population, eroding trust and equality within the system. Evil, in other words.

Today’s Republican Party is now fully in the service of:

  • The fossil fuel industry, which is threatening all life on Earth and just this week helped light Los Angeles on fire.
  • The for-profit health insurance industry, which is (according to The Lancet) responsible for over 65,000 Americans dying unnecessarily every year.
  • A group of rightwing billionaires who appear committed to replacing American democracy with oligarchy, which, as noted before, eventually morphs into tyranny.
  • The gun industry, responsible for terrorizing and psychologically scarring our nation’s schoolchildren with active shooter drills, not to mention the highest gun homicide rate in the developed world.
  • For-profit movements to end/privatize public school and keep college unaffordable.
  • An investment industry financializing housing, which has caused a crisis of affordability and widespread homelessness.
  • The predators in the banking industry who crashed our economy on George W. Bush’s watch and then walked away with hundreds of billions in taxpayer money.

The list, of course, goes on (including the GOP’s loyalty to the military/industrial complex and Putin), but the point is that all of these portend such dramatically terrible consequences for average Americans that they could realistically be termed “evil.”

And now a few Democrats apparently think they can “compromise” with these proudly in-the-service-of-evil people. It’s a terrible mistake.

Take the Laken Riley Act. It contains a provision that would give Trump the power to detain any undocumented immigrant in America who’s accused of a crime, including such minor crimes as shoplifting, with life imprisonment.

As Michelle Goldberg wrote this week for The New York Times:

“It mandates federal detention without bail for migrants who are merely arrested for any theft-related crimes, with no provision to free them if the charges are later dropped. …

“The bill applies to many immigrants who are authorized to be here, including Dreamers and those with temporary protected status. And the legislation contains no exemption for minors. As Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, told me, the Laken Riley Act could mandate the indefinite detention of a juvenile child of asylum-seekers arrested for swiping a candy bar, even if he or she didn’t do it.”

And yet John Fetterman and Ruben Gallego — who both ran for office as principled progressives — have jumped on board, co-sponsoring the legislation.

Presumably they haven’t done their homework, which is problematic itself, but they also should have known that any legislation that includes explicit attacks on President Biden (“victims of the Biden administration’s open borders policies”) as part of its original language is a GOP stalking horse.

You can’t compromise with evil.

That’s not to say that Democrats and Republicans can’t have interests that overlap where they can work together.

But this illustrates the very real danger of collaborating with people who are not operating in good faith, and whose allegiance is to billionaires and predators instead of to their constituents and the people of the United States. Who will do or say just about anything to please their funders and/or Donald Trump.

Like yesterday when Mike Johnson, whose state got $1.7 billion in federal aid to deal with Hurricanes Laura, Delta, and Ida, just told CNN that if California — which Trump hates, and whose governor he wants to prevent from ever becoming president — wants disaster aid:

“I think there should be conditions on that aid.”

Historically, disasters brought Americans together. It’s a human instinct, among normal people, to reach out to care for other humans in crisis.

But not with Trump and today’s GOP: they are absolutely set on exploiting this climate-change-driven disaster in California to destroy Democrats. Trump is leading the charge, and elected Republicans and rightwing media are enthusiastically jumping on board.

And for some inexplicable reason, outside of Gavin Newsome, most Democrats are not aggressively fighting back. They should instead be using his and the GOP’s outrageous efforts to exploit this disaster to hammer them.

As Steve Schmidt wrote in his The Warning newsletter:

“Being nice to Trump means being capitulant. When it comes to kneeling in front of the man whom Scarborough called Hitler, there is nothing civil about it. In fact, it is as indecent an act as there is.”

The preeminent advantage evil people have when they go into politics, after all, is their willingness and ability to lie without compunction. Trump is the master at it, and now it’s demanded of every Republican every time they show up on a Sunday show.

Normal humans always want to give the benefit of the doubt, to trust others, to assume the best, and evil liars actively exploit this for their own gain.

Like when Republicans said that cutting taxes on billionaires will help average people, that a national healthcare system and free college won’t work in America, that more guns means less violence, or that Iraq played a role in 9/11 and had weapons of mass destruction.

Or look at how Trump has endorsed Putin’s attack on Ukraine and Xi’s designs on Taiwan — complete violations of the post-WWII rules-based-order — by proclaiming that America would consider using military force to annex Panama and/or Greenland.

We’re already seeing the evil that Republicans have embraced this new year being actively normalized by our media; yesterday’s Senate hearings with Pete Hegseth were a great example. In any other era, any other incoming administration in American history, a man who broke trust with three wives and was repeatedly accused of drunkenness on the job wouldn’t get past the first interview and would shock the press.

But this incoming administration is being run by a man with 34 felony convictions, a credible allegation of rape, who himself cheated on each of his three wives just like Hegseth allegedly did. Evil, it turns out, flows from the top down.

Next up, to fund their tax cuts for billionaires, Republicans will most likely attach a debt-ceiling suspension or increase to must-pass legislation favored by Democrats or disaster aid. And if it’s held up by principled opposition, the media will probably bow to Republican framing, blaming Democrats.

The next two years are going to be very dangerous for Democratic legislators. They’ll be wined and dined by evil people, threatened and vilified if they don’t cave in, and praised in the media when they do.

Billionaires and their agents will reach out to some the way they did with Kyrsten Sinema, and a few Democratic senators will probably fall under their sway. It looks like John Fetterman is already leaning in that direction.

They need to remember Winston Churchill’s sage advice:

“You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”

Evil never surrenders: It’s time to stand up and fight.

Thom Hartmann

Thom Hartmann

Thom Hartmann, one of America’s leading public intellectuals and the country’s #1 progressive talk show host, writes fresh content six days a week. The Monday-Friday “Daily Take” articles are free to all, while paid subscribers receive a Saturday summary of the week’s news and, on Sunday, a chapter excerpt from one of his books.

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