Terrifyingly normal by Ruth Neuwald Falcon

I’m having a lot of trouble sleeping these days. The image that has kept me awake the last couple of nights is of the Senate floor during the vote on Pete Hegseth. It was all very casual. Senators wandering here and there, or standing in small groups chatting, in the center those tallying the votes. It looked like all concerned were involved in the most banal of activities, all very ho-hum. Except, that is, for Elizabeth Warren who gave an emphatic thumbs down when it was her turn to vote.

Only three Republican senators — Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, and Mitch McConnell — voted no. Nothing will convince me that all those other Republican senators who voted for confirmation actually believe that this man is fit to run the military operations of the United States. As Public Citizen wrote in an email today: “Pete Hegseth isn’t qualified to be shift leader at a Dairy Queen (nothing against Dairy Queen). Putting him in charge of the entire United States military is a perversion — and every one of the 50 senators who voted for him knows it.”

I was a teenager when Hannah Arendt coined the expression, the banality of evil. Though I’ve been familiar with those words for a lifetime, I think I’m only beginning to fully understand their meaning. The term originally appeared in 1963 in her articles in The New Yorker about the trial of Adolf Eichmann for Nazi war crimes.

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines banal as Drearily commonplace and often predictable. The matter being voted on Friday night was not the former, though you wouldn’t have known it from looking at your TV screen. Unfortunately, it was the latter, though I kept a flicker of hope alive – until Thom Tillis (R-NC) tweeted out that he would be voting for confirmation (not coincidentally, Tillis will be running again in 2026). For only the second time in our history, it took the vote of the vice president to break the tie for a cabinet nominee. The first was Betsy DeVos.

On Friday, Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat put out an article called Resistance Isn’t Futile, as Seattle reminds the nation once again. In it, he quotes U.S. District Judge John Coughenour, who ruled on Trump’s attempted evisceration of birthright citizenship. Judge Coughenour, a Ronald Reagan appointee, stated that Trump’s decree was “blatantly unconstitutional.” The judge went on to say,“There are other times in world history where we look back and people of goodwill can say, Where were the judges, where were the lawyers?”

“That sure seems like a nod,” wrote Westneat, “to how the Germans acquiesced their way into a dictatorship prior to World War II. He’s bringing that up and we’re only in Week 1 of the new Trump presidency.”

This inability to think created the possibility for many ordinary men to commit evil deeds on a gigantic scale… The manifestation of the wind of thought is not knowledge but the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And I hope that thinking gives people the strength to prevent catastrophes in these rare moments when the chips are down. — Hannah Arendt