WHY EVIL MEN NEED NOBLE SPIRITS

At Charlie Kirk’s memorial service in Arizona on Sunday, September 21, 2025, his widow forgave his killer, but not Trump, who characterized Kirk as “a missionary with a noble spirit and a great, great purpose,” and then went on:

“He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents. And I don’t want the best for them.”1

This apparent inconsistency is a key feature of the Trumpian universe. Trump is, of course, not a “noble spirit”: he hates his opponents and considers them trash to be annihilated. However, in order to somehow justify his brutal hatred, he needs a figure like Kirk as a good man who wants the best even for his enemies. (It’s a little bit like Christians who need the good Christ, whose death justifies brutal persecution of anti-Christians.) This is why Kirk needs to be elevated into a figure of martyrdom of almost divine proportions: this elevation is just the obverse of the brutality of the Trumpian ethos. The standard hypocritical logic claims that we are attacking a country or a people to help the victims of its oppressive regime. In the 1930s, even Japan argued that it occupied most of China to civilize its people – the Chinese are like naughty children who have to be disciplined for their own good… In the ongoing Middle East war, Bernard-Henri Lévy tried to follow this line: Israel is doing what it does in Gaza and on the West Bank to help Palestinians, to liberate them from the grip of Muslim fundamentalists who oppress them…

With Trump and Israel, the masks have fallen; the enemy is simply to be destroyed, and again, for this a figure like Kirk is needed. Trump is not original here – on the very first page of his Republic, Plato wonderfully depicts how the Trumpian populists (here represented by Polemarchus) treat their opponents (here represented by Socrates, the narrator):

“Polemarchus said to me: ‘I perceive, Socrates, that you