A couple of weeks ago, at a political rally in Iowa, Donald Trump took a moment to talk about his Democratic foes in ways Americans rarely hear from a president. Referring to opposition to Republican Party’s far-right megabill, Trump said: “They wouldn’t vote only because they hate Trump, but I hate them, too, you know? I really do. I hate them.”

This week, at a White House Faith Office luncheon, the president went even further — condemning Democrats as “evil.”

“They’re evil people in many ways,” the Republican told attendees, adding, in reference to his American political opponents: “We’re against an evil group of people.”

Trump occasionally used the same word during his first term — after Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, the president said the jurist’s critics were “evil” — but his reliance on the word appears to have become even more frequent lately.

Last week, for example, at an event in Texas regarding deadly flooding, a reporter asked about his message to local families who said flood warnings didn’t reach the public quickly enough. “Only an evil person would ask a question like that,” Trump responded.

In late June, the president said journalists at The New York Times and CNN have “evil intentions.” Around the same time, he said a reporter at Forbes magazine also had “evil intentions.” In April, he said former Democratic mayors in Chicago and New York City were responsible for “evil.”

As the New York Times noted in an analysis published this week, “evil” is a word “getting a lot of airtime in the second Trump term.”

It is not enough anymore to dislike a journalistic inquiry or disagree with an opposing philosophy. Anyone viewed as critical of the president or insufficiently deferential is wicked. The Trump administration’s efforts to achieve its policy goals are not just an exercise in governance but a holy mission against forces of darkness.

It’s an important detail. Intense partisan fights are not new to the American tradition, but it’s not normal for a White House to explicitly go to the public with a message rooted in the idea that its political opponents represent forces of unholy malevolence.

As for why the public should care, the Times’ analysis added: “The characterization seeds the ground to justify all sorts of actions that would normally be considered extreme or out of bounds. If Mr. Trump’s adversaries are not just rivals but villains, then he can rationalize going further than any president has in modern times.”

Different political scientists define the nuances of authoritarianism in different ways, but I think most would agree that a hallmark of any despotic regime is the delegitimization of political opposition.

It’s against this backdrop that the incumbent president, using language foreign to American ears, wants the public to believe that journalists and his partisan opponents are not only worthy of “hatred,” but should also be seen as “evil.”

Such rhetoric is dangerous, and it fuels the kind of radicalism that has become the new normal at the White House.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.