The worst of the worst in the whole wide world

by David Benjamin

 

“We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.”

—Vladimir Putin

“When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same.” 

― Donald Trump

 

MADISON, Wis.—For a while, I’ve been thinking about who deserves a Top Ten spot among the Worst … er, Malefactors in the World (WMFW). I hesitated partly because there are so many candidates, and also because creating a credible rogues’ gallery struck me as a lot of work. 

Also, everyone would disagree with my rankings. Some would even complain that these bastards are swell guys trying to make the world a better place. 

But, this morning over coffee, I went through my notes, shuffled a few numbers and realized that my Top Ten is actually a Top Twelve—which, if you really care, you can rearrange according to your own outrage meter. 

First, I had to develop criteria that would establish a public, political or media figure as a world-class dick. Three words popped to mind: “rich and mean.”

But that’s not nearly enough, To merit inclusion in this exclusive fraternity of scoundrels, gonophs and tyrants, you must be afflicted with a colossal vanity that you deploy to camouflage an infantile and pathological insecurity. You are, in sum, a compulsive mirror-gazer and lifelong bedwetter.

You lie, habitually, voluminously, shamelessly. You give off the eerie aura that you swallow your own bullshit,

And you kill people.

Further, to merit status among the WMFW elite, your position, wealth, power and impunity from any significant accountability must render you a clear and imminent threat to life, liberty and peace in your own nation and beyond, affecting the world. You are above the law.

Personally, you are amoral to the point of sociopathy, with no discernible shred of compassion, introspection. mercy or regret—although, when nothing is at stake except the preening of your ego, you can convincingly fake sincerity in short, bursts, preferably televised. 

You are obsessed with power above all other considerations. Your greatest, most debilitating weakness—and the source of your impulsive and ruthless cruelty—is your worship of strength, a quality you’ve never begun to understand. 

As the underpinning of your power and popularity, you thrive on sowing hatred and mistrust, cultivating division, promoting bigotry and modeling ignorance. You are a demagogue of monstrous dimensions.

You see enmity and malice in all opposition. You seek not to defeat your opponents, or even to “lock them up,” but to destroy them—and their families—and salt the earth over their graves.

Last but hardly least, you instill fear in your allies, who live in dread of your capriciousness and in terror of banishment from the exaltation of your inner circle. Think of De Niro as Capone with the baseball bat in The Untouchables.

Here then, my twelve choices for Worst, um … Malefactor in the World.

1) Vladimir Putin meets every qualification. He bestrides a mountain of dead bodies with blood on his hands and a foot planted on the corpse of Alexei Navalny.

2) Donald Trump is a Putin acolyte with an ego even more diseased and a moral compass pointing perpetually toward the sewer. His cultists might object that he has not killed anybody, but they overlook the hundreds of thousands who died of Covid-19 while he denied and minimized the existence of the virus and then dithered homicidally over quack cures, conspiracism and lies about his dithering, With designs to return to the White House and mimic Putin’s autocracy, he poses the greatest danger that American democracy has faced since the Civil War. 

3) The tag team of Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel and Yahya Sirwan, leader of Hamas, two self-serving despots waging a war that neither can afford to end—lest they relinquish the power that is their only motive—have joined together to annihilate a fragile society in Gaza, kill, rape, maim and terrorize thousands of blameless people and turn the Middle East, more than ever, into a tinder box that could trigger a world conflict. A pox on both their houses. 

4) Narendra Modi, the anti-democratic democrat in charge of the world’s most populous nation, has laid the foundations of a theocracy by exacerbating the religious hostility between a Hindu majority and 200 million Muslims in India. He has revived and refined a caste system that has consigned countless people to lifelong poverty and ostracism, at the expense of an economy that could be—if not for Modi—the most vibrant in the world.

5) Beyond the fact that Xi Jinping is a poor man’s Putin, Xi has restored the Communist dogmatism that crippled the growth of China for decades. He has crushed the embryonic freedom of the Chinese press. He has rattled sabres throughout the region, threatened Taiwan with invasion, killed the vitality of Hong Kong, restored the murderous bigotry of the ruling Han ethnic group and turned Xinjiang province into a concentration camp.

6) Kim Jong Un, the North Korean butterball, murders his relatives, starves his people, operates the most fanatic propaganda mill in the world—focused on his own glorification—and flings nuclear warheads into the sky, to come to earth he knows not where. He is king of the darkest realm in the world.

7) Rupert Murdoch. His media empire would be a crime against humanity if he had merely yellowed the escutcheon of two great newspapers, The Times of London and The Wall Street Journal. But by foisting onto the United States Fox News, a pseudo-journalistic rectum spewing a constant flow of lies, disinformation, racism, slander, xenophobia and misogyny, Murdoch has made the destruction of American democracy a credible objective for the nation’s enemies in the pulpit and in the corporate corner office.

8) Elon Musk, a technological whiz kid and the richest man in the world, has the moral fiber of a housecat whose mission in life is to scent-mark every surface in the house that he hasn’t already peed on.

9) Ayatollah Mostafa Khameini, ruler of the world’s most oppressive theocracy, has reversed the modernism of the nation that had been the most prosperous, educated and progressive in the Arab world. He has dispatched morality police, crushed dissent, supported terrorism across the region and will soon threaten his neighbors, his foes and the West with the Bomb.

10) Viktor Orban, dictator of Hungary, has ravaged his own nation in the name of illiberalism and given comfort to such fellow neo-fascists as Vlad the Invader, Donald Trump, and …

… 11) Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whose motto for national leadership is “The only good Kurd is a dead Kurd.” He is slowly dragging Turkey, Kemal Atatürk’s richly diverse, beautiful and cosmopolitan crossroads of the world into economic doldrums and geopolitical irrelevance. 

12) Clarence Thomas, America’s foremost “shane” (self-hating Negro), is the linchpin of extremism and corruption on the Trump Supreme Court. If he is not the worst justice since the days of Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson, he’s still got time, the talent and the absence of scruples to do stuff even uglier. 

I know I’m leaving out a lot of solid candidates in a world crawling with tinpot despots and Huey Long wannabes. But for the moment, these boils on the world’s ass are more than worthy of being recognized as the lowest that mankind can sink.