Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Today’s American president surely does not merit a peace prize, but Donald J. Trump should be recognized as a great destroyer of the good. Like Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust, the U.S. President Trump seems to seek a great negation.

Mephistopheles appears in Professor Faust’s study and explains that he is “part of that force that would do evil evermore, and yet [at least sometimes] creates the good.” Mephistopheles elaborates: “I am the spirit that negates, And rightly so, for all that comes to be deserves to perish wretchedly; T’were better nothing would begin. “Everything people call “sin, destruction, evil” is what Mephistopheles sees as “my proper element.” The Devil concedes that he has failed to destroy everything, for water, earth, and even air........

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