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God's Sale
Force
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| Donald Trump can be
understood as an organized crime figure, but he is also a pseudo
religious figure, and that is why so many Americans worship him
and gather in droves to idolize him. |
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| By
Debby Long |
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 “I
want you to hear from God. God already spoke to me what I'm
going to write out. You're going to write your checks to Paula
White Ministries. If God tells you to give $12.99, do it.
Whatever the Holy Spirit speaks to you. If you need to give by
credit card, do so”. – Paula White, Donald Trump’s spiritual
advisor while in office.
Donald Trump can be understood as an organized crime figure, but
he is also a pseudo religious figure, and that is why so many
Americans worship him and gather in droves to idolize him. His
doctrines are immoral; some are patently evil; and most are
contrary to U.S. interests and represent the thinking of fringe
advisors who lack sufficient credentials to be in positions of
power. Trump metes out punishments with the righteous fury of a
displeased god. He demands blind allegiance with his claims of
being some sort of revivalist divinity, and he consigns heretics
to his own style of obloquy – to ruination and ostracization.
Donald Trump is a sinister figure in American politics, but
strangely, his lack of moral constraint and his wanton brutality
have failed to bring him down.
It is tempting to view the Trumpism Movement as an anomaly in
American government – something that we can simply vote out of
power once we sober up enough to feel the consequences of the
carnage his policies have, in fact, delivered to the American
people. Milestones have been reached: Over 900,000 Americans
have died from his Covid Denialism; Corporations have relocated
to Canada, China, and India due to his Anti-Immigration Policy
and his H-1B visa cap. African Americans are murdered by
hyper-militarized police departments throughout the country in
furtherance of his and his party’s war against Civil Rights; and
Women’s Rights have been violated and are about to be crushed
under the heel of a highly partisan Supreme Court that is led by
the religious zealots who dominate it and who were appointed by
Trump.
But the Trumpism Movement is not an anomaly in world history.
The phrase “a cult of personality” is blithely tossed around as
a pejorative depiction of Donald Trump, but the tactics he has
employed are precisely the same tactics used by Vladimir Putin
of Russia, with his bare-chested displays of virility, and Kim
Jong-Un of North Korea, with his direct claims of divinity
handed down from his family’s dynasty. Benito Mussolini, the
fascist leader of Italy during WWII, was reported to have left
the light on in his office to convey that he was so devoted to
his work that he rarely slept. And Mussolini’s cult of
personality included stories of his mythical, death-defying acts
of survival and his claim that he was chosen by God to utilize
his superhuman powers. And, of course, there was Adolph Hitler:
“Death, destroyer of worlds” and executioner of tens of millions
of souls all of whom served as scapegoats in his pursuit of his
deadly dream of world conquest.
Donald Trump uses all of these memes and tactics: His unflagging
virility is on constant display due to his history of sexual
conquests and likely acts of sexual abuse - and validated by his
wifely prisoner, Melania. His apparent immunity to the wages of
the deadly Covid virus were on every television set in America,
as he returned from Walter Reed to greet Americans in a
victorious gesture of unyielding and miraculous survivorship;
and his claims of divinity are amplified by his declaration that
“I alone can fix it”. His divinity is validated by deeply
religious Evangelical Christians, such as the entrepreneurial
megachurch pastor, Paula White, and other spiritual advisors who
famously laid hands on him to solidify their support as he sat
at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office in 2017. Trump was
particularly impressed by Creflo Dollar, another Evangelical
supporter that day, who was trying to raise $60 million from his
Atlanta-based followers in order to buy a Gulfstream G650 for
himself. According to Mckay Coppins of The Atlantic, Trump
remarked to Michael Cohen following the event, “They’re all
hustlers.”
We must start a conversation about religion in America, and most
urgently, we must talk about religion in government and on the
Supreme Court of the United States. Americans are taught to
treat religion like the first rule of Fight Club: You do not
talk about Fight Club. But now we must talk sensibly about
religion because it pervades our government and acts as a test
for membership in state and federal legislatures and as a
qualification for appointment to the Supreme Court. Religion has
literally knocked down Thomas Jefferson’s Wall of Separation,
and it has taken root within all aspects of American government.
And this army that has torn down Jefferson’s wall is comprised
of Evangelical Christian Soldiers and one half of America’s
Roman Catholics, forming the most powerful voting bloc in
American politics.
America’s Evangelical Movement, according to Tara Isabella
Burton of Vox, “… has come to represent the worst of the
conflation of American-style capitalism, religion, and
Republican party politics”. And the Prosperity Gospel that is
preached in the megachurches of pastors such as Paula White and
Joel Osteen resounds with the same sort of clarity that Trump’s
early pastor, Norman Vincent Peale, preached to him as a child
at Marble Collegiate Church, New York. Peale was Trump’s pastor
and mentor throughout his life. Peale was also a friend to
Richard Nixon and his family, and was awarded the Presidential
Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan in 1984. Peale was an early
member in the group called “Spiritual Mobilization”, an
organization of leading Protestant ministers and some of the
most powerful industrialists of the era in the 1940s. It
included oil producers and automakers who opposed the New Deal
of President Franklin Roosevelt.
Spiritual Mobilization, with Peale on its advisory board, also
became associated with the "America First" movement that opposed
the U.S. entry into World War II.
And Peal’s book entitled “The Power of Positive Thinking” was a
foundational influence in the life of Donald Trump. Peale was
broadly considered a conman and a fraud, and was called a
“confidence man” by the press in the 1950s. Peale wrote that:
“Any fact facing us is not as important as our attitude toward
it, for that determines our success or failure. The way you
think about a fact may defeat you before you ever do anything
about it. You are overcome by the fact because you think you
are.”
Failure is anathema to Donald Trump, while winning is a
fundamental pillar of his worldview thanks to Norman Vincent
Peale, his 6 bankruptcies notwithstanding. It follows that
Trump’s loss in the 2020 election and his concoction of “The Big
Lie” – a galvanizing belief among his flock of supporters -
comes directly from the worldview preached to him by Peale.
But like his pastor, Norman Vincent Peale, Trump is a religious
conman. His waving of the Bible (albeit upside down) in front of
St. John’s Episcopal Church, following the rioting over George
Floyd’s murder by police, was an unambiguous declaration of
religious victory directed to his Evangelical Christian
followers. And Trump’s show of force that included: Attorney
General, William Barr; Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
General Mark A. Milley (dressed in fatigues); Defense Secretary
Mark Esper; and other members of his administration, validated
his claim of near infallibility. This was a pointed message to
American Evangelical Christians that his cause was just; that
they were supporting the right man, and that his crusade was
supported by: the American military, the American judiciary, and
the American Secretary of State who is responsible for foreign
policy. It was a marketing coup that was intentionally directed
at a crucial constituency that Trump relied upon for his
upcoming reelection in 2020 and his likely campaign of 2024:
“Onward, Christian Soldiers”.
While we all are aware of Trump’s strongman tactics and how
closely they resemble various dictators of the past and present,
it is not apparent that we all recognize the power of the
pseudo-religious tactics used by Trump and Republican
politicians throughout America to maintain their power.
America is a Christian nation. In fact, America is the largest
Christian nation in the world with ~230 million followers - a
full 70.6% of Americans - according to Pew Research. But not all
Christians consider themselves Evangelical.
So, what explains the fact that Christian Evangelicals would
follow such a clearly immoral miscreant leader like Donald Trump
in such high numbers, and why would they reliably vote for his
sneering party of Republican legislators, many of whom use their
Christianity as a shield to protect themselves from prosecution
for sexual, financial, and political misdeeds – legislators such
as Matt Gaetz of Florida and Jim Jordan of Ohio? Republicans
have separated Evangelical Christians from their traditional
views concerning humanity and compassion for others in order to
create a polity of single-issue voters – a bottomless well of
wedge issues such as abortion, gun rights, and individual
freedoms. They have picked ideological daises throughout the
country that collectively reside under a Republican umbrella of
anti-liberalism. Evangelical Christianity sells blind faith in
an ideology that, in order to survive, must extinguish the very
critical thinking skills a child needs to navigate our modern
world. Blind faith enables figures like Trump to emerge using
the age-old tactic of extinguishing opposition by extinguishing
reason and stifling of critical thinking.
Book burning like that depicted in Ray Bradbury’s 1953,
“Fahrenheit 451” describes this tactic in a dystopian America
controlled by totalitarianism and anti-intellectual policies.
And now, book burning and banning has returned to America with a
vengeance.
It is not an accident that Trump, proficient in marketing, would
ascend to the top of America’s Republican power structure. It
was a public relations coup that grew in an inverse relationship
with the decline of the American mind.
“I love the poorly educated”, Trump said glibly, as he won the
Nevada primary in 2016.
We have failed to take populist religion seriously. Perhaps it
is time for the 70% of Americans who are Christian to cull this
cultish movement from its own flock, or risk losing the very
government that ensures their own right to exist.
“To say no to President Trump would be saying no to God”. -
Paula White, Donald Trump’s spiritual advisor. |
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