(Dobbs) Surrendering Their Money, Buying His Prophecies
One can only wonder whether the Kool-Aid isn’t all gone.
I once did an interview with a woman who spoke in tongues. Her name was Elizabeth Clare Prophet. She fashioned herself as the head of The Church Universal and Triumphant. We were in a school bus, one of two at a complex in Montana, just north of Yellowstone National Park. Both were buried underground. They were part of her preparation for Armageddon.
She was nutty. But she wasn’t the only one. A flock of her followers were preparing with her. They called her Guru Ma. They believed every prophecy she muttered. They left their families to join her. They sold their worldly possessions and gave her the money. They got guns. She got rich.
There has been a long line of greedy hustlers and hucksters in the eclectic history of America. And a long line of gullible disciples who believe the charlatans. 79 of them died thirty years ago in Waco, Texas, for Branch Davidian “prophet” David Koresh. 909 perished fifteen years before that in Jonestown, Guyana, when cult leader Jim Jones was exposed as a grifter and he told them to drink cyanide-laced Kool-Aid and lie down and die.
Which brings us to Donald Trump. He is emptying his acolytes’ wallets just as sure as Jones and Koresh and Guru Ma emptied the wallets of theirs. From golden sneakers to mugshot t-shirts to branded whiskey to perfume.
His latest? Selling the Bible. Surely you remember his relationship with the Bible. In the mercifully final year of his presidency, when he was upset by the George Floyd demonstrations outside the White House, he ordered protestors removed from the area and marched across the street to Lafayette Square for a photo op, Bible firmly in hand. We’d already heard more about Mein Kamph on his bed stand than a Bible, and when a reporter asked, “Is that your Bible,” his only reply was, “It’s a Bible.”
So now, although there is no sign that on Easter he actually darkened the door of any church, he inaugurated Easter week by imploring everyone to have a Bible in their hands, which will put dollars in his pockets. He introduced a new product for the minions he manipulates: the “God Bless The USA Bible,” predictably promoted as "the only Bible endorsed by President Trump!” As Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock put it— he’s the former pastor at Martin Luther King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church and he does regularly go to church—“The Bible does not need Donald Trump’s endorsement.”
At risk of a bad pun, Trump’s has been a fascinating conversion, considering the fact that “Christianity Today” reported a few years ago, “Trump was not a regular churchgoer before he was elected president.” His forays into churches have been confined pretty much to campaigns.
Now? He compares himself to Jesus.
On the first day of his fraud trial in New York, posing as the victim of persecution, he posted someone’s sketch of him in the dock, with Jesus by his side. He has called himself “the chosen one.” He has shown a three-and-a-half minute video on his website that casts him as a messiah, with the narrator saying over a shot of Trump coming down his Trump Tower escalator in 2015 to announce his candidacy, “So God gave us Trump.”
Just the day before Easter, he shared an article on his website with the title, “The Crucifixion of Donald Trump.”
The disciples of Jesus must be turning in their graves.
The disciples of Trump can’t get enough of it.
During the Iowa caucuses in January, a local pastor told The Washington Post that Trump was “ordained by God.” In February at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, The New York Times interviewed a woman who said of Trump, “He’s definitely been chosen by God. He’s still surviving even though all these people are coming after him, and I don’t know how else to explain that other than divine intervention.” A man there told The Times, “They’ve crucified him worse than Jesus.” A supporter tweeted a week ago, “Thank you again for taking the arrows intended for us.” Last week Trump posted that a supporter had told him that “Christ walked through his greatest persecution the very week they are trying to steal your property from you.”
One can only wonder whether the Kool-Aid isn’t all gone. After all, here’s what happened to Jesus Christ.
Here’s all that happened to Donald Trump.
It is one thing for millions of Christians to support Trump for the religious-right shift he brought to the Supreme Court, or for the policies he enacted or promises to enact on issues that are core to their beliefs like abortion, homosexuality, and prayer in public schools. I’m not in their camp but that’s what it looks like on the other side of the aisle. It is quite another thing to support him for the Christian nationalism he preaches, the idea that this is a white Christian nation and there should be no separation of church and state. That is the core of what he now tells his faithful. At the National Religious Broadcasters International Christian Media Convention in Nashville in February, he pledged to the audience, “No one will be touching the cross of Christ under the Trump administration, I swear to you.” He plays the crowd for all it’s worth. His former national security advisor John Bolton told CNN yesterday, “He sees himself as the ultimate victim, then he convinces his followers that they are victims like him.”
They lap it up. According to a YouGov poll a few months ago, Republican Christians say that they face discrimination more than blacks do, more than Muslims do. Really? And even if it were true, Donald Trump— a congenital liar, an admitted adulterer, a convicted sexual abuser— is their savior?
At the top of a story yesterday titled “The Church of Trump,” the Times ran a photo that answered that question.
It is a measure of the man’s religious reverence that on his website, his Easter message began with four nice words, “Happy Easter to all,” then descended into a 162 word all-caps rant filled with vitriol and vengeance from the toxic territory of Trump’s mind before coming back to the holiday at the very end with three more niceties, “Happy Easter everyone.”
That’s a difference his evangelical admirers need to see: according to biblical accounts, Jesus Christ preached forgiveness. He implored his followers, “Love your enemies.” Trump implores his to hate their adversaries and seek revenge for their grievances.
Maybe they should pay heed instead to one of our nation’s founding fathers and its fourth president, James Madison. “Is there no virtue among us?” he asked the delegates to Virginia’s convention to ratify the United States Constitution. “If there be not, we are in a wretched situation.”
I fear we are heading back, driven by people who don’t leave their families or live as survivalists, but they do surrender money to their messiah and believe every prophecy he mutters. In their minds, it will be a cultural armageddon if Trump doesn’t get back to the White House.
Heaven help us.
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Where is PT Barnum? A lot of minutes have passed since he utterd those very 5rue words, thus one could observe a lot of suckered have been born
When wisdom, truth, decency and honor are gone, where does that leave us?