This political climate has done something unexpected. It has made it nearly impossible to ignore malevolent personality traits. And that, as painful as it is, might be the best thing that has happened to you in years.
You’ve been here before. Not exactly here with these headlines, but in this feeling. The slow, creeping discomfort of noticing something dark in someone you love and telling yourself it was a bad day, a phase, or a misunderstanding. You’re good at extending grace because it’s one of the things that makes you, you.
But grace has a limit. And a lot of people are finding that limit right now.
This article is for you. The loyal friend, the devoted sibling, the person who has spent years explaining away behavior that, in your gut, knew was more than a quirk. The political moment we are living through has ripped the comfortable ambiguity away. What was once easy to excuse now has a voting record. A presence on social media. A public face.
You’re not imagining it. Something is wrong. And you deserve the clarity to name it.
What Malevolent Traits Look Like
The word malevolent can sound over-the-top until you understand what it means. Malevolence is a persistent pattern of behavior defined by a lack of empathy and to dehumanize others. It’s the need to dominate or humiliate people who are not part of one’s chosen “in-group.” It’s the person who smiles warmly at neighbors but sneers at anyone they deem unworthy. The relative who paints cruelty as “just being honest.” The public figure whose entire persona thrives on grievance and chaos.
The key word is pattern. A single harsh remark isn’t malevolent. But when someone consistently justifies harm, takes pleasure in the suffering of others, and never shows genuine remorse, that’s a serious problem. It reveals an allegiance to the belief that power and contempt matter more than truth or decency. Once that pattern becomes visible, it’s hard to unsee it. It shows up in what they excuse, the selective outrage they perform, how quickly they turn on anyone who stops serving their ego.
This dynamic explains why Trumpism has felt like a magnet for malevolent traits. The movement doesn’t just tolerate cruelty; it rewards it. It transforms aggression and humiliation into signs of “strength.” It recasts empathy as a weakness, and treats moral boundaries as something to be mocked or broken. Trumpism didn’t invent these traits, it gave them permission to flourish in public.
The Symptom and the Root
Trump doesn’t represent a political movement. He’s permission to be the worst person you can be. The people in your life who embraced him were waiting for that permission long before he showed up.
Trump didn’t create the people around you, he revealed them. Or more precisely, he made it harder for them to hide what was always there.
The contempt. The dehumanization of people unlike them. The selective outrage where they’re furious about some things, yet unbothered by others. Their actions follow a very consistent pattern if you’re willing to look. These traits didn’t magically appear in 2016 or 2020 or 2024. They were present at the holiday table years ago. They showed up in offhand comments you brushed aside. They were there in how they talked about certain neighbors, certain coworkers, certain strangers on the news.
This is the part that stings. Because if the traits predate the politics, then the politics only made the problem impossible to ignore.
And… if you’re waiting for the political climate to calm down so your relationships can go back to normal, you’re waiting for something that was never really there.
Some will push back here. “Not everyone who voted differently is a bad person,” they’ll say. “This is exactly the kind of thinking that divides us.” And they would have a good point.
Having an opinion about politics doesn’t always reflect malevolent behavior. Reasonable people differ on policy. This is true and important. There is a difference between believing in a policy and dehumanizing the people those policies affect, knowing full well you’re one of them. Calling it the former, is denial. Denial has a cost that you have already been paying.
The Mirror This Era Has Held Up
Think about what this era has given you, underneath the exhaustion and the grief. Information.
You can see who they vote for, can see what they share online, what offends them and what doesn’t bother them. You can see whether they push back when someone in their circle says something cruel, or whether they laugh along. The ambiguity that once made it easy to give the benefit of the doubt has been removed.
The mirror is right there. What you’re seeing is not a distortion. It’s a clearer picture than you have had before. The question is whether you’re ready to trust what you see.
“You can love someone and still see them clearly. These are not in conflict.”
The Empathy Trap
Empathy isn’t a universal trait that some people express more than others. For some people, it is simply absent. Some people hope that if a person suffers enough, they’ll get it.
If the tariffs hurt their farm, the policies cost them their healthcare… if the economy squeezes them the way it has squeezed everyone else, then they will understand. Surely empathy will follow.
It doesn’t work that way. This is what your therapist is probably trying to tell you. Someone realizing that a policy hurts them is not the same as developing empathy for others that are hurting. These are completely different things. One is self-interest. The other is integrity. And if the basic decency wasn’t there before, pain alone won’t produce it.
Malevolent traits won’t dissolve under pressure. They’ll find new targets. They create new explanations for why the suffering is someone else’s fault.
If you’re an empath, and the fact that you are reading this suggests you might be, this is the trap you’re most vulnerable to. You feel things deeply, so you assume others do too. You have been through hard things and came out more compassionate, so you assume the same applies to others. For you, it does. That is not a universal law. Recognizing this is clarity and it’s what you need right now.
Love Is Real. So Is the Pattern.
You love them. Or you did. Or you love who you thought they were, which is its own complicated grief that we will get to.
That love is real. It doesn’t need to be argued away or dismissed. You don’t have to stop loving someone in order to make a clear-eyed decision about the kind of access they have to your life.
But here is what love can’t do: make contempt acceptable. It won’t transform daily dehumanization of people like you into a “difference of opinion”. If someone who calls themselves your friend regularly insults people of color, despite knowing that’s how you identify yourself, that is personal. You’re allowed to receive it as such.
Maintaining relationships with people who consistently dehumanize others is not an act of love or open-mindedness. It is a slow, quiet agreement that you and the people they dehumanize are worth less than their comfort.
What “No” Actually Sounds Like
Saying no isn’t being cruel or causing drama. It’s not cancel culture or tribalism or whatever dismissive label someone will try to put on it. It is a description of a life that has integrity in it.
Here is what it can look like:
- No, we can’t hang out. Not because I hate you, but because I cannot keep pretending this is fine.
- No, you can’t be around my children. I am teaching them to stand up for what they believe in, to not accept mistreatment from anyone and that lesson has to start at home.
- No, we can’t be close friends anymore while you degrade people like me on a daily basis. It is contempt for who I am.
- No, I will not let you disrespect me. Not anymore. Not even in the name of keeping the peace.
If you have children, they are watching this. Every single part of it.
They are watching what you tolerate. And they are learning what self-respect looks like. Not from what you tell them, but from what you do. Every boundary you hold is a lesson. You’re showing them that integrity has its costs. Standing by your values isn’t always comfortable but it is worth it anyway.
You don’t owe anyone a lengthy explanation or a debate. A clear, calm statement is enough. And the discomfort you feel saying these things: the guilt, the voice that says maybe you’re being too harsh, it’s not evidence that you are wrong. For an empath, it is almost proof that you are doing the right thing.
Grief Is Part of This. Let It Be.
What you are losing is real. Even if the relationship was hurting you.
You may be grieving who you thought they were. The version of them you held onto for years. The possibility that they might come around. The idea that people who love each other can hold vastly different values and still make it work. That grief deserves space. Do not rush it. Do not let anyone tell you that you should feel nothing because the relationship was toxic.
If you grew up with a narcissistic or malevolent parent, this is a pattern you know from childhood. Please be gentle with yourself here. You were trained, likely from a very young age, to keep trying. To find the right words that would finally make them understand. That conditioning runs deep. Recognizing it in yourself is not a weakness. It is the beginning of choosing differently.
Grief is not a reason to go back. It is evidence that you loved genuinely. And that you are now choosing yourself with the same sincerity.
You Have Enough Information Now
This political moment has given you something painful and valuable at the same time. Clarity. More of it than you have ever had about the people closest to you.
You aren’t imagining the pattern or being too sensitive. You’re not overreacting either. You’ve been paying attention for years, longer than you probably realized, and you are finally allowing yourself to believe what you see.
Acting as if malevolent traits don’t exist is denial. And denial has a cost in the form of your energy, your peace, your sense of self.
We are not obligated to shrink ourselves to fit relationships that cannot hold all of who we are. We never were. We just needed permission to believe it.
This is hard. It is supposed to be hard. And you are not doing it wrong just because it hurts.
