Opinion Writer
NY Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/02/opinion/trump-bible-speech-st-johns-church.html
Elizabeth Bruenig writes in The NY Times:
Late Monday afternoon, President Trump emerged from the White House and strode in the cool spring daylight to St. John’s Church in Lafayette Square. It was supposed to be an act of defiance: Mr. Trump has bristled at the observation that during the protests roiling the capital he has burrowed into a fortified bunker rather than addressing the nation.
Like most performances arranged by Mr. Trump and associates, it made only a disjointed sort of sense. Yes, the president’s decision to march through the heart of the city’s unrest caused police and National Guard units to blast a peaceful crowd with tear gas and rubber bullets, carving a punishing path to the steps of St. John’s. But the show of force seemed to emphasize only that his legitimacy has shrunk to the point that he feels moved to dominate his own people with military power.
As he took up his post before the church, which was partially boarded up after a minor fire that broke out during a recent protest, Mr. Trump set his face in a stony scowl and held up a black Bible, tightly closed. “Is it your Bible?” a reporter shouted. “It’s a Bible,” Mr. Trump said neutrally. The entire routine was vulgar, blunt: There Mr. Trump was, holding aloft this mute book — neither opened, cited, nor read from — in the shadow of a vandalized church, claiming the mantle of righteousness.
After all, that was what he had come to do. A ruler maintaining order strictly by brute force has a problem. Such regimes are volatile and fragile, subject to eruptive dissolution. Mr. Trump may lack the experience or interest to even pantomime genuine Christian practice, but he has acute instincts when it comes to the symbolism of leadership. He seemed to know, as he positioned himself as the defender of the Christian faith, that he needed to imbue his presidency with some renewed moral purpose; Christianity was simply a convenient vein to tap.
“I think that’s a standard trope in American political frames of reference,” Luke Bretherton told me on a Monday night phone call. Mr. Bretherton, who is a professor of moral and political theology at Duke University’s Divinity School, cited Cold War efforts to demonize socialism as viciously atheistic and amoral. It was work undertaken with anxious eagerness precisely because socialist criticisms of American life were substantial and compelling.
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Read the rest of Liz’s op-ed at the link.
Christ’s humanity, forgiveness, and empathy for the outcasts of the world is completely lost on the totally immoral and willfully ignorant Trump. The Bible is just another prop. If Jesus came back to earth today, he certainly would be found with the protestors seeking social justice rather than the current inhabitant of the White House and his equally corrupt and immoral cronies like Billy Barr.
PWS
06-03-20
UPDATE:
Check out Tom Toles’s cartoon “Sermon From the Pit” (“Vengeance is Mine Sayeth the Lowered”) from today’s WashPost here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/02/trump-does-photo-op-show-just-how-low-he-can-go/
Just when you think Trump has hit the rock bottom, he takes it to an even lower level!
PWS
06-03-20
