There is rarely a day that passes without a news headline—such as recent reports of President Donald Trump walking back commitments to assist Ukraine’s defense with Patriot missile systems to save the lives of innocent civilians—that prompts an instinctive reaction: this is evil. Yet for an applied microeconomist, invoking the word "evil" initially feels out of place. Historically, evil is considered the domain of moral philosophy or theology, not empirical social science. Economists prefer critical judgments like inefficiency or adverse distributional impacts that can be verified by widely agreed-upon criteria.
However, a rigorous academic framework does not require us to abandon analytical precision when confronting severe policy degradation. In moral philosophy and common understanding, actions are characterized as evil when they reflect profound immorality, extreme malice, and predictable, widespread, unjustified harm and suffering inflicted on others. Applied microeconomics is fundamentally concerned with welfare economics—evaluating how policies alter human well-being, resource allocation, and social equity. When evaluated through this lens, President Trump’s microeconomic program is not merely a set of policy preferences that are occasionally aligned with some conservatives’ views; it represents a systematic, welfare-destroying trajectory that aligns with the substantive criterion of severe societal harm embodied in evil.
The core justifications for microeconomic government policy interventions rest on accomplishing two goals: correcting market inefficiencies (known as market failures) and pursuing foundational social goals, such as reducing poverty. Across both domains, Trump’s pronouncements eschew those goals, and his actual policies systematically exacerbate market failures while actively undermining social objectives.
Beginning with market failures, the bedrock of competitive market theory is that free market competition lowers prices, incentivizes innovation, and maximizes consumer benefits. Trump actively opposes competitive mechanisms in favor of crony capitalism. His most egregious wound on the country’s market economy is imposing broad tariffs to shield favored domestic industries from foreign competition. By choking off international trade, those tariffs harm consumers, disrupt producers’ supply chains, and inflict costs across the economy. American consumers are likely to seethe when they soon learn that Canadians across the border are driving low-cost and high-quality electric vehicles as their fuel costs and automobile purchase prices rise.
Trump doesn’t stop with misguided tariffs; he directs exclusive government contracts to corporate allies, penalizing disfavored firms and wasting billions in taxpayer funds. Notably, the firms involved in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool renovation were awarded no-bid, exclusive contracts. Within weeks of completion, the sealant began to peel severely, and algae blooms broke out.
Efficient markets depend on accurate, transparent, and symmetric information. As the chief executive, a president's communication serves as a primary input for market expectations, price discovery, and private investment. Trump compulsively disseminates misinformation about the justification for and effects of his policies and systematically attacks news reporters who set the record straight. This reflex to fabricate claims rather than admit policy or management failure was on full display when he blamed "deranged" vandals for the peeling sealant on the reflecting pool and sought prosecution of individuals accused of damaging it. Worse, he has tried to monetize market-moving policy insights by charging investors exorbitant fees to obtain policy-related information before ordinary investors could access it. This pay-to-play scheme transforms presidential communication into institutionalized insider trading at the direct expense of the public.
Concerns are growing that unaddressed negative externalities—the most critical of which are carbon emissions and environmental pollution—pose an existential threat to civilization and impose massive, uncompensated costs on current and future generations. Yet Trump denies climate science, dismantles environmental protections, and discourages alternative energy development, knowingly shifting severe environmental costs onto vulnerable populations. He is even attempting to block congestion pricing—a rational, market-based policy to reduce gridlock in New York City—based on the false claim that it reduces patronage of local businesses.
Fundamental research, technological innovation, and higher education generate vast positive spillovers that drive long-term productivity. Because the vast majority of those benefits accrue to society rather than to individual inventors, efficient government support generates a huge social return. Yet Trump’s policies—from restricting high-skilled visas for international talent to draining resources and levying political threats against research universities—endanger this innovation engine, threatening a future of stagnant growth and diminished living standards.
Trump extends this disregard to public goods, where public stewardship is justified to the extent that private markets underprovide them. But Trump treats non-excludable national treasures as speculative assets to be liquidated or opened for commercial extraction—evidenced by his drastic rollbacks of national monuments like Bears Ears—ignoring their ecological, intergenerational, and collective value.
Finally, market outcomes do not automatically guarantee equitable distribution. Rather than expanding economic mobility or mitigating systemic discrimination, Trump’s agenda has actively entrenched or worsened inequality. Consider the administration dismantling without credible justification the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, which required local governments receiving federal funds to address racial housing segregation and combat discrimination.
At the same time, Trump’s policies focus on weakening or eliminating anti-poverty safety nets like Medicaid, SNAP, and HUD assistance, compounding disadvantages for vulnerable populations without offering efficient market-based alternatives. Furthermore, his fiscal choices—marked by sizable tax cuts combined with wasteful defense outlays, including non-competitive industrial subsidies for legacy defense contractors, unproven weapons platforms, and earmarks for the military-industrial complex—generate unprecedented budget deficits. From an applied microeconomic perspective, these inefficient expenditures threaten long-term fiscal stability, ultimately harming citizens by endangering the solvency of social insurance, basic healthcare, and public education.
When the chief executive of the United States systematically undermines market efficiency and innovation, corrupts public information, accelerates environmental destruction, and erodes protections for the most vulnerable, economists should not hide behind neutral technical concepts. When economic policies predictably inflict severe, avoidable, and widespread suffering on society, welfare economics provides a clear framework to determine that the result is a deliberate destruction of human welfare. A U.S. president who inflicts such significant damage on the nation meets every practical and analytical definition of evil—and those who aid and abet the president are aiding and abetting evil.
