After only three days, it’s clear that the anti-Donald Trump crowd hasn’t all been created equally. Especially those whose opposition to Trump seems to be based on some sort of professed faith about Evil.
As I have written several times, most conversations dealing with Donald Trump are usually about something else, that Something Else in this case being the larger war between Good and Evil.
It’s an article of faith with me that God and Satan are found in virtually all life choices, from the highest government action such as politics, to the choices we teach our children to make at age 3, and that virtually everything we do individually, and collectively has a consequence, defined in Nature as either survival-enhancing or survival-endangering, with only a few things, such as choosing to blow our nose with a linen handkerchief instead of Kleenex, actually having a neutral consequence. (Go through your house and make your own list, it’s fun.)
But rarely are men Evil per se. They are all capable of it, and most have committed acts of evil, some small and some huge, some knowingly, some without understand the full consequences of their acts at the time, but most simply because the act itself is considered legitimate under existing laws or cultural practices. It’s in this last scenario we find America embroiled, where the definitions of Evil and Good are actually being contested in our culture. And Good seems to be losing.
We are engaged in a war, not a contest, not a dispute, as to whether what was actually created here was Good, as a rejection and new path away from the Evil that had dominated the world for thousands of years. We are once again at war to see who even gets to define Good and Evil, just as it was in most of the rest of the world in 1776.
If people wan to speak of Donald Trump using Good and Evil symbolism, it’s in this context that we need to address three questions, the first discussed here, the other two in Part II, soon to follow.:
1) Is Donald Trump doing Evil’s bidding in his presidential campaign?, or
2) Could it be possible that Trump may actually be part of God’s plan to rescue America?, (Wouldn’t that just throw Glenn Beck off a bridge?) or
3) Is Donald Trump just another freak show in what has been a freak of Nature from the very beginning, when America accidentally arose from the primeval ooze and somehow miraculously survived?
Discussed here is Postulate #1, that Donald Trump is serving Evil (Satan’s) purposes in achieving the Republican nomination for president.
Now most anti-Trump writers don’t actually reference this cosmic battle between God and Satan in portraying Trump’s evil, which they should, for without it, their arguments are just a little half-assed.
I wish anti-Trumpsters would be more clear in this, for there are laws (of logic) involved here when we deal with Evil. If Trump’s acts are evil per se, and not just the common ordinary evil all men do…vanity, gluttony, greed, envy, pride, you know, the Big Seven…that distinction needs to be made. For one, any substantive analysis of political Evil and Good requires a depth of study and experience usually denied Wikipedia-weanlings who can’t recite much of any in-depth knowledge earlier than their birth year, and are unwilling partake in more than 142 characters. True evil requires much more, maybe even 3-4 paragraphs.
Then there is a law out there, respected in Science, Medicine, Reason, Logic… that the answer to every question, the solution to every problem, begins with a unified theory. All the pieces have to fit or you are up a dead end. Period. Again, in more than 142 characters.
So what is the “unified theory of evil” behind the anti-Donald Trump conservatives’ arguments against him?
In order to analyze this, we must first separate the anti-Trump Christians into at least two camps, which you can easily discern from the way they behave..
It should have become obvious over the past few years, long before Trump entered the fray, that there are self-described conservatives out there whose philosophical, transcendent, foundations about the relationship between the Constitution and the peoples’ quest for liberty is as shallow as a pool of warm spit. Many of them (but not all) claim to be religious, and even trade on their relationship with God in hawking their conservative bone fides, in the attempt to make that shallow pool look like a deep well.
In politics this is not new, except among conservatives. Into the 1990’s and the Clinton era, all over the leftist landscape from the 1970s on, it was still fashionable to “be Christian”, in a High Church sort of a way, while introducing and approving of government and social acts that were known even then to be deadly carcinogens for a free society. The black family was destroyed in the 1960s, soon to be followed by the American family in general, all in the name of some nebulous Christian Good expounded by the Left. Today, of course, those crimes are now metasticized into their second and third generation (about which few younger conservatives would know anything about) so almost no one of the Left even bothers to lie the liar’s mouth about religious faith, finding almost any public opportunity to give God a rousing “booooo” to assuage one of many of their more modern anti-Christian constituencies.
It’s not for me to determine when Politics trumped God in the souls of my generation, or even if God was ever among them in the first place. But God was the crossroads that caused so many of us quit being “liberal” once they had showed their hand. What we have witnessed since the 60s has been the attempted homicide of an entire (Good) culture, and circumstantial evidence leans heavily toward the fact that it was not accidental. America has been the victim of evil pathologies from assassins, and the American patient now lay on life-support from an assortment of near-mortal wounds. Only, those of us old enough to recognize these wounds suddenly see these same pathologies among an element of conservatism that is almost exactly situated as my generation was in 1964…anything to make a mark, anything to be noticed. To be exalted among peers. To be “in” and not to be confused with any of “them” on the outside….tiny almost insignificant personal evils suddenly magnified because of the greater Evil they have attached themselves to like parasites.
So, if all anti-Trumpsters are not created equally, we first need to separate the moral wheat from the moral chaff.
Tribe One: #NeverTrump
The chaff mostly identifies with the #NeverTrump hashtag, easily identifiable for its condescending vitriol and mockery, bordering on the vicious, and an unerring inability to recite conservatism in any positive way in over 142 characters. “Tarzan know where Tarzan go.” #NeverForget that #NeverTrump is/was a paid political event, a source of revenue for almost all involved, paid for by millions in PAC money from anonymous donors. True conservatives don’t generally like being called “hired guns”. Along the way, silver clinking in their pockets, their names in marquee neon (in very, very tiny orbits they only recently found out), they almost completely forgot to say anything nice about the reason for conservatism’s season, the People (The common people heard Him gladly…Mark 12:37… Not.). Instead it was largely hate speech about Trump. And the common people heard them not at all. Just an echo from their own empty well.
After months of this vicious cajoling, which in all likelihood gained Trump votes instead of costing him, but which obviously filled other psychological needs for the #NeverTrump troops, think opiate, they woke up only this week to find they had been denied, in a big way. The gig was over. And they have not handled reality very well. So like the kids in Aisle 6 at WalMart who were told for the fifteenth time (how many primaries did Trump win?) they couldn’t have that toy, they threw the awfulest teat fit right there in front of Megatron. We’re seeing that play out now.
But this too will pass.
Since I voted for Ted Cruz, I am not immune from the embarrassment of watching this play out, as I hope Ted is. I still have great hopes for him. I can’t help but feel the way I hope Mexican parents feel about their children shaming them, as in this film of young Mexican children giving the finger and flashing profane placards to voters showing up at a Trump rally (WARNING: not ready for prime-time Penguin)
Is this actually the face of the 80% Hispanics Glenn Beck says hate Donald Trump?
Authorship for the #NeverTrump hashtag movement is said to be claimed by Erick Erickson, former editor of RedState.com, whose holdover staff there have already promised to not just vote for Hillary but work for her, making them complete and utter frauds as conservatives, especially since a couple I know claim this on religious grounds. Erickson, also in seminary, once proclaimed he would refuse to take communion from any minister who supported Trump. My first thought was about the man who swore he would never allow a gay man to serve him in a restaurant, “How would he know?”. I don’t think they have “communion tours” in Georgia” and I know communion is not like a wine-tasting bus tour of Napa Valley.
The good news is the #NeverTrump army is relatively small, found among people who rely on social media, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, which apparently the vast majority of common people use only infrequently, such as showing off pictures of the new kitten or grandchild. A few thousand at most. And in just three days it is disappearing. I’m sure Twitter can graph the decline.
Tribe Two: The Thinking Christians
But there are some genuinely fine Christian voices out there who also maintain that Americans have made a serious mistake in choosing Donald Trump and have also alluded to the evil he represents, and some seem also willing to cast an absentee ballot for Satan, by not voting at all. I wish they would repair to their closet and rethink this, and consider the whole Trump- and-evil thing in light of the greater cosmic battle. About this Rush Limbaugh, much maligned of late, is absolutely right.
That Trump’s rise to power is on the back of stupid people (Glenn Beck) thus illegitimate….is condescending and elitist, very un-conservative, and largely not true if you consider the fine minds who’ve signed on for obviously non-evil reasons. I didn’t just add Ben Carson to my Christmas card list when he ran against Trump, so didn’t drop him when he suddenly endorsed him.
Among these fine Christians are David Limbaugh, brother of Rush, who has yet (that I can find) to throw one shoe of mockery at either Trump or the intelligence of his voters. Even George W Bush chimed in, politely though, calling Trump voters “nativists”, which offended me, in part because he used the term as a pejorative, a slur, when, in context, it most certainly is not. Neither is “populist” if one considers the true, native conservatism of the American people.
Unlike #NeverTrumpsters, who are witless in this area, self-absorbed children, can this wing of the anti-Trump movement offer a unified theory of the Trump ascendancy to define
“…just how Donald is actually doing the Devil’s world here?
Just what are Satan’s interests in seeing Trump elected, or to go down in flames in defeat?
What investment does old Clootie have in America that aren’t already being cashed in by his full-time employees in the Democrat Party and Left, as described above.”
Donald Trump didn’t put the America in that ICU unit, on life support, but many in the Republican Party helped, under the noses of many of those young-gun conservatives who were too busy trying to get invited over to George Will’s house for cocktails to notice.
Satan’s been doing swimmingly without Trump and the best we can say about the GOP is that they were only driving the Devil’s getaway car. Sort of like Nixon in Watergate.
Having been around side-by side with this spawn since the 1960s, and having gotten to know some of the Soviet bloc playbook designers, I have a pretty good idea of what it is that Satan wants to destroy in the United States, and probably no one can articulate this better than Rush Limbaugh. Or that, since the rise of Clinton’s, (sorry GW, but you did very little combat with this internal evil in your eight years, focusing instead of the foreign evil) Satan has done quite well…his task force inside the Democrat Party, academia, the popular culture, having reached what I would call the third stage (of four) in undoing everything that God caused to happen here.
Without belaboring the point, if Christian conservatives see Trump as representing Evil in his presidential quest, kindly reduce it to a unified theory and tell us just what this JayVee Republican, Donald Trump can do that Satan’s varsity isn’t already doing? Connect all the dots. Close the circle. If all Donald Trump does is give you a sour belly, take a Rolaids. Then thank God you don’t have a serious pathology as I’ve insinuated among the #NeverTrumpsters, And check yourself for all the normal vices, Vanity high among them, as to why Donald Trump personally offends you. On a conservative scale these reasons should not be outcome-determinative, but personally they may be if you are a closet self-righteous prig.
Most of the dislike I hear about Trump is more ordinary; he’s rich and either got there with an unfair advantage, or by hook or by crook. If you’re under 60, just know that both propositions were conditioned into you by (you guessed it) the Left, Satan’s minions, slowly over the past 1oo years. Donald Trump is not a multi-national corporation. He is just a very, very, very, very rich small businessman. So go back to your closet and check out your Envy gripe as well. American used to celebrate such people. Never criminally charged even in a capitalist-hostile state as New York, we still are willing to believe Trump broke every law in the book in order to build his wealth. Moreover, Trump is not of the political establishment and its rules. He knows nothing about it, which when Herman Cain ran in 2012 was considered a virtue. Still, clearly he isn’t stupid, only too many of you want to say he is because he knows nothing of political stuff, like the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905 that ended the Russo-Japanese War. Donald Trump has never heard of it. But he should, the “gotcha” in you argues.. I simply know Trump is a quick study (that’s how business magnates succeed) and when it’s important for him to know about Teddy Roosevelt and his Nobel Peace Prize for screwing over Japan in that Treaty of Portsmouth after they had defeated Russia to become the first non-white nation to defeat a white nation in a war…some say insuring their hostility toward to America leading them into a Pacific war with us 30 years late…then and only them will Donald Trump know it. Trump has always known how to do this. And having been inside board rooms with CEO’s I know that Donald Trump, in both staff meetings and negotiations, is not a bully, nor a clown. Guys like that rarely make it past their first million…unless they are on someone’s payroll.
And there are those who simply don’t trust Donald Trump to do what he says he will do. He promises good things but won’t believe he means it, so0000….I may stay home, and cast that absentee ballot for Satan. Or even vote Hillary. So go your closet and have a serious gut-check. There are no sure things. Ask Ike when he thought he was putting a conservative Earl Warren on the bench. Or David Souter (Bush I) , Or John Roberts even (Bush II)? Insteda, here’s a thought. For circumstantial weight, ask the people who actually know Trump and also endorse him…there are dozens among them you admire, or used to. Then avoid the inspired clairvoyance of people like Beck. (Way too many flies I that fellow’s buttermilk.)
Trump has a way of managing things that scares people (just as people felt about Reagan, even as he ended the Cold War with his way of a managing them). Then considering the knuckleheads the GOP has asked us to vote on to make these decisions lately, while discarding new thinkers such as Herman Cain. I’d like to see more private sector, non-politicians in the presidential field. If Donald Trump does well, that will be his legacy, in fact, opening the door to a steady stream of new and innovative private-sector thinking into the political process. Nothing will ever the same.
Against an objective standard of “fine”, Donald Trump should do just fine. Against a subjective of God’s plan for America, Donald Trump will not move us one step further away from it than we have already managed on our own. In a contest between the Presidency & the People versus all the rest, I actually like our chances better with Trump than with Ted Cruz, although I’d love to see Ted understudy for a few years. As I keep telling you, the next four years under either Donald or Ted, will not be ideological. It will be virtual warfare with the Left, and much of the GOP, including the Quislings of #NeverTrump, whoever they can get to sign their paychecks.
(Part II, Is Donald Trump a part of God’s plan for America? is a really way-out consideration, but once you have dealt with Trump’s consorting with Evil, vis a vis your own vanities, it’s a natural after thought. As is the general notion, is Donald just a freak, a fly in Nature’s buttermilk, just as the Left already perceives America to be? Clue, perception is everything.)
And no I still haven’t been paid to write these things. )
