Donald Trump Is God!

We may be given a gift from the Lord in the presidential race here.
—Joe Biden, January 28, 2016

for a while, I admit it, he had me fooled. I thought he was just a vulgar rich guy with a big mouth and and even bigger ego who wanted to be the CEO of America. But nope. He’s more than that. He’s God.

Come on, I know it sounds crazy, but hear me out. God, in an attempt to save the world, once allegedly hid himself in the body of a Jewish builder in a Galilean village who hung out with hookers, right? Is it so hard to believe that he would hide himself today in the body of a Presbyterian builder from Queens who has owned casinos with strip clubs and been married three times? Huh? Think about it. It would be the perfect disguise these days, especially if your message is that you are the savior with superhuman powers to set the world right—but you require an enormous amount of faith to believe the otherwise unbelievable.

Consider this famous scripture from Hebrews:


That pretty much describes the miraculous power that props up the Trump campaign. His central message is embarrassingly non-specific: “I will do all of these great things, if you will only trust me. Just believe in me and you will see.”

trump bibleOr consider that in The Art of the Deal, Trump said, “Sometimes, part of making a deal is denigrating your competition.” During this campaign he has spent a lot of time doing that, especially the candidates on his own side. But guess who else was good at denigrating his competition, including those ostensibly on his own side? Yep. Jesus didn’t have much good to say about his competition either, calling his fellow Pharisees “whitewashed tombs” who were “full of hypocrisy and wickedness.” Then he topped it off with this: “You snakes! You brood of vipers!” The art of the deal, indeed. All that is missing from that New Testament scene are the American flags behind the podiums on the Republican debate stage.

Or think about that time when God said to his followers in the book of Exodus: “I am making a covenant [deal!] with you. Before all your people I will do wonders never before done in any nation in all the world. The people you live among will see how awesome is the work that I, the Lord, will do for you.” Doesn’t that sound like Donald Trump to you? Come on, admit it.

What about the time when Trump said he didn’t bother with asking forgiveness from God? Of course not! God doesn’t have to forgive himself, does he?

How about when Trump once wrote: “When somebody hurts you, just go after them as viciously and as violently as you can.” Have you ever read the Old Testament? God did that kind of stuff all the time. Just ask the unfortunate Midianites from the book of Numbers. God commanded Moses to slaughter them all, enslaving only the young virgin girls, all for the supposed sin of enticing “the Israelites to be unfaithful to the Lord.” Sounds like a Trumpian response to me. And don’t even get me started on the Book of Revelation, where most of the folks will die horrific deaths and end up in hell in eternal torment. Donald Trump’s denigration and exclusion of Mexicans and Muslims from America fits right in with the biblical idea that most people aren’t welcome in Heaven.

And then there is the idea that I encounter when I talk to hard-core believers in God. I bring up things like the slaughter of the Midianites, and other atrocities committed either by God or with his permission, as recorded in the Bible. Or I’ll bring up God’s creation of hell, with its unquenchable fire and unending torture. The faithful almost always say something like this: “Who are you to question the ways of God? He must have had his reasons for doing those things because he is, well, God.” That response is what I thought of when I heard Donald Trump say the following recently:


A misguided Christian woman thanks Jesus for ‘President’ Trump (Found here; For a related post, click here is incredible—for a normal human being. But apparently not for God. Because no matter what the God of the Bible does, he never seems to lose any voters. He can slaughter thousands of innocents, commit unspeakable atrocities, create an everlasting pit of torment for most of the people who have ever lived, and his poll and pew numbers stay strong. So, is it beyond possibility that he has incarnated himself into a Republican who says horrible things about other people and thinks he could murder someone in the middle of the street and not “lose any voters”?

You tell me.



Dear Iowa Democrats

Please don’t do it!

Don’t make Bernie Sanders a winner! You will only further the fantasy that he can win the general election and start a democratic socialist revolution. Okay? So, please, stop it while there is still time! We expect Bernie to win his neighborhood state of New Hampshire. But Iowa? Say it ain’t so!

Oh, it’s not that I don’t like Bernie. I do. I like him a lot. He’s the real deal. And I would much rather live in a world run by Bernie Sanders than one run by any of the other candidates, including Hillary Clinton. The problem is that it is a fantasy world at this point in our history. It’s just not possible that the things Bernie Sanders wants to do will happen anytime soon, let alone after the next election. Just not possible. America has never worked that way. Things change slowly, often very slowly.

Vermont SenateIn any case, all this talk about a revolution means there has to be some revolutionaries. And those revolutionaries have to hold power in the government. And they have to hold power not just in the White’s House, but in Congress, too. And until Bernie Sanders, who just recently became a Democrat, explains to me how he will have 218 solid revolutionary votes in the House of Representatives, as well as 60 revolutionary votes in the United States Senate, there will be no revolution—even if he were to get 55% of the popular vote.

I do give Bernie credit. He has talked about the need for voters to give him a new Congress. He’s emphasized that he can’t do it alone. But that’s the problem. The need is there but there’s no plausible strategy to turn the need into reality. The best Democrats can hope for, even if they win the presidency, is to take over the Senate, but it won’t be with a necessary 60-seat majority of revolutionaries, even if all 60 of them have a (D) by their names (do you think Sen. Joe Manchin will support him? Huh?).

We Democrats might even dream more elaborate dreams and see ourselves recapturing the House, but it borders on delusion to think recapturing the House will provide Bernie with 218 unwavering votes for a Medicare-for-all health system or for free college tuition for all, or for any of the other things Bernie supports that many of us believe would make us a better country. Even if he got 248 Democrats, they won’t all be itching for votes on socialism, democratic or otherwise.

And remember that all of the hope behind Bernie is based on a very shaky assumption: that it is actually possible for Sanders to win the general election. Oh, it’s possible that if Republicans are foolish enough to put Donald Trump at the top of their ticket, Bernie has some small chance of winning the election. But even as crazy as President Donald Trump sounds, even as frightening as it is to contemplate that a majority of the country would put a clownish, egomaniacal billionaire in the White’s House, I still don’t think there’s much of a chance that Bernie, an aging democratic socialist, can win.

That’s mostly because before it’s all over, Republicans will turn him into a dangerous Stalinist dictator. He will become a Marxist. A dreaded communist to be feared. The distinction between what he actually believes—his brand of socialism is shared by anyone who uses Medicare or accepts Social Security or Medicaid—and what Republicans will claim he believes will be lost on enough independents and confused Democrats to hand the election to, yes, even Donald J. Trump.

So, what we’re left with is pragmatism. What we’re left with is a relatively centrist candidate like Hillary Clinton. She has flaws, no doubt. But she understands that the unmistakable move toward people-friendly policies in this country has always been fairly incremental. Our present social safety net evolved slowly and was not available to everyone from the start. It has taken time. Change is hard in America because change-is-hard is built into our political system. Not much happens overnight.

Think back about the battle over the stimulus bill at the beginning of Obama’s presidency. Think about how impossible it was to convince the other side that money was needed to help stimulate and rescue the economy, to help rescue it from the devastation of GOP-sponsored economic and regulatory policies. Don’t forget those times. And don’t forget the Affordable Care Act. Don’t forget how hard that was and how hard it still is today to get people to understand that it’s better than the old system, even if it’s not where we ultimately want to end up. It was a baby step. But it was a step. And we need to follow up with another step. And then another. If we nominate someone who will practically guarantee a Republican president, there will be no baby steps. Because there will be no baby.

Make no mistake about it, the surest way to elect a Donald Trump or a Marco Rubio or any other reactionary crusader that Republicans might put up, i#weneedliberty #weneedsmallergovt  #communist #wakeupamerica #socialist s to offer Bernie Sanders to a fact-challenged electorate, many of whom these days get their information from bias-
confirming social media and many of whom will fall for the Bernie-is-a-Marxist line of attack. Remember, even with a collapsing economy in 2008, even when we were sliding into Republican-caused financial chaos, 60 million Americans—46% of the electorate—still voted for a Republican to become president. Remember that.

So, I beg you, my Iowan friends. As much as you feel the Bern, as much as we all wish his ideas would become reality, don’t succumb to the temptation. Don’t give him hope of winning the nomination. Don’t give others hope of him winning the nomination. Don’t hand the presidency back to the Republicans.


Donald’s Diner

It’s all about anxiety.

The rise of Donald Trump. The reaction against him. The fear that he will bring down the Republican Party and poison “true” conservatism. It’s all about a slow, methodical unraveling of white Christian privilege in America and the fear and uncertainty that comes with that dawning reality.

Let me start with Anus Mouth. Donald Trump’s success, so far, has been based on crassly and confidently, if not coherently and consistently, addressing the cultural angst that many white conservative Christians feel. I have written about this angst for many years now. It is palpable. It is real. Even if it is un-Christianly.

So, a rather un-Christianly Donald Trump comes along—Mr. “Two Corinthians”—and figures out a way to feed the beast of collective white conservative Christian anger and resentment that has now become the dominant force in Republican politics. It matters not that he feeds the hungry beast a smorgasbord of megalomania and mistruths or that he offers the beast a feast of bewildering bigotry and baptized balderdash or that he serves all-you-can eat dishes of toxic demagoguery and dissonance to this famished and unfortunate creature.

What matters is that the beast has been starving for attention, hungering for a conservative cuisine that satisfies its most basic, and basest, instinct: fear of the Other. Fear that the Other is winning. Whites are getting dirtied by malicious brown people from Mexico and the Middle East. Christianity is under attack from within—Obama is a Muslim! The War on Christmas!—and from without—ISIS is just steps away from pulverizing American churches just like they did that 1400-year old Christian monastery in Iraq!

Donald can fix it all. Make America White Again.

Now, there are those on the “true” right starting to figure out that Donald’s Diner, affectionately known as the Buffoon’s Buffet, perhaps needs some health inspectors to come in and shut the place down before too many conservatives are poisoned and the movement dies. The most recent conservative health experts joined forces in a lengthy critique of Trump’s conservatism that was published by National Review, a magazine founded by William F. Buckley and that was, once upon a time, a place where thoughtful and interesting conservatives could make intellectual war on liberalism. These days National Review is publishing pieces by trolls like Glenn Beck and Erick Erickson. Talk about cultural decline.

In any case, reading some of these critiques oddly reveals just why there is a beast hungry for the kind of junk food that Trump cynically serves. Sure, one writer criticized Trump’s “nativism and his promise of one-man rule” and his “racial and religious scapegoating.”  Another isn’t sure if he is a “boor” or a “creep” or a “louse,” but is sure that he is a “con man” and “has demonstrated an emotional immaturity bordering on personality disorder, and it ought to disqualify him from being a mayor, to say nothing of a commander-in-chief.”

But when you dig a little deeper into these latest critiques of Trump, you find that at the heart of many of them is a validation of the anxiety and fears that Trump is exploiting. One writer said that Trump is embracing “Barack Obama’s authoritarianism.” Another wrote of Obama’s “withering assault” on “religious freedom.” You see? The subtext is validation: The Scary Negro is a tyrant tearing down the scaffolding that supports white Christian privilege. He’s letting into the country brown immigrants from Mexico. He’s welcoming Muslim refugees from Syria.20160120_151250

Another writer, again published by the once-reputable National Review, did manage to call Trump a “know-nothing demagogue.” But in the same paragraph he called Bernie Sanders a “Marxist,” Hillary Clinton a “leftist crook,” and said, “all are competing to see who can be even more like Mussolini than is Obama.” Mussolini? Really? And you wonder why there is an appetite for the kind of ignorance and hate that Donald Trump piles on his buffet table and sells the Republican electorate?

An old Reaganite, Ed Meese, criticized Trump for his vigorous and vitriolic attacks against fellow Republicans in the race. Then he ended by calling President Obama “one of the most divisive and incompetent presidents in history.” Again, we see the validation of one of Trump’s central messages: our leaders are incompetent and ruining the country and The Donald is so much smarter and much more cunning—he loves that word—that he will make great deals and build great walls and win great wars. Thus it is that even when the conservative health inspectors are trying to claim the food Trump is serving is bad for conservatives, they are authenticating the recipe.

But it’s not only such authentication that serves to undermine the conservative case against Donald Trump, a case prosecuted not only by the writers at National Review, but writers and pundits and politicians elsewhere in the right-wing world. Perhaps what really undermines the seriousness of their arguments against him is best illustrated by what Eric Erickson wrote to begin his anti-Trump essay:

I would vote for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.

That sentence pretty much explains why it is that so many people, empty buffet plates in hand, stand in long lines and fill large arenas to hear a hateful demagogue repeat stupid and hurtful things on the campaign trail and why those same people don’t pay much attention to National Review writers or others trying buffetto take down Trump. In the end, right-wing criticism of Donald Trump is hollow, unless it is followed by, “Donald Trump is dangerous and I will not vote for him—and neither should you.”

Until we hear more of that kind of talk from conservative Republicans, there is every reason to believe that fearful and anxious white Christians will continue to flock to the Buffoon’s Buffet and feed on the poisonous pottage that Chef Anus Mouth serves them.

%d bloggers like this: