What Would Jesus Do With Donald Trump?

For the four years of Donald Trump’s presidency, for at least two during the run up, and now for the two years after defeat, liberals have been obsessed by Donald Trump.

He was branded as evil from the start.  He was not simply an extravagantly outrageous politician, a man of the mean streets, of Las Vegas runways, and the show and glamour of Hollywood; a man who upended politics as usual and treated America to a one-man vaudevillian routine of bombast and braggadocio, but a dangerous, anti-democratic demon.  He terrified the Left who had never before even imagined such a thing. They became so afraid of him that they banned his speech as if words alone could disrupt and destroy.

After the election he became an even more insidious and  dangerous character.  Without the trappings of office, a coterie of loyalists, and a complaisant Congress, one would have thought him neutered and left out in the cold. But having discarded these presumptuous harnesses, he was renascent and ever more influential.

It was the demonizing of Donald Trump by the Left that energized him, gave him renewed political relevance, and a chance to regain ultimate political power.

Of course Trump is no demon, no Satanic interloper, no Rasputin seated in the Presidential chair.  He  is a burlesque comedian, a political cross-dresser in oversized falsies and a fright wig, a lion tamer, a bear baiter, and the Master of Ceremonies in a three ring circus.

There is nothing to fear from this comic strip caricature who speaks in balloons.  It matters not that a fractious, rebellious, loony hive-off has gotten all the press, generating fears of a MAGA deep state take over, another January 6th.  Few Trump supporters let alone serious conservatives pay it any mind, only another serialized chapter in The Demon Trump: The Sequel.

Despite the anguished, apocalyptic howls of the Left and the wild West shoot-‘em up bravado of the radical Right, business is as usual – a dogfight, mud wrestling, smarmy, tendentious claims and counterclaims.  The Left thinks it has a winning ticket in Donald Trump, and by running candidates bound and determined to save the democracy that Trump tried to subvert, it hopes to prevail.

Of course the Left has missed the point entirely.  Trump is now just a has-been with populism in his sails but with only a light following breeze.  He may be a savior to the crazies in northern Idaho but only a horse who will gallop until it tuckers itself out.

Once a Catholic, always a Catholic’ is an old and familiar adage.  There was nothing pliant about the Irish American church in the Fifties, nothing that even suggested the individual spirituality professed by the counterculture.  There was only one path to salvation, and that was through the Holy Mother Church; and most lapsed Catholics could never shake this commandment.  As much as one might try to rid oneself of Jesus and the good Fathers, one could not; and many lapsed Catholics turned to ‘spiritual secularism’ as an anodyne for doubts, and were offered another parallel path to salvation.

‘Spiritual secularism’ was a term that came out of Liberation Theology,  Latin American priests who took Jesus’ words about the poor seriously and literally, and became  activists for the economically and politically oppressed.  They were the self-appointed ‘deacons of poverty’ and were more often than not in the slums and not in church.  “The slums are our church”, they said, following what they saw as Jesus’ example of working with, ministering to, and loving the poor.

Spiritual secularism appealed because it had no ties to the Church or organized religion but was Christian in spirit.  The new activism concerning civil rights was exactly the right match of higher intent and ground-level ministry.  It was no accident that Martin Luther King was an ordained minister.

The lines between political commitment and religious belief are easily crossed.  The environmental movement is an example of a divinely ordained principle.  Environmentalists believe in the sanctity of Mother Earth, the center of many ancient pagan religions and now renascent as the heart of Environmentalism.

Mother Earth is Gaya, a sensate organism with a life of its own.  She reacts to pain, to rape and mutilation and sheds the tears of Jesus Christ who asked in disbelief at the evil of Mankind,  “My God, my God.  Why have You forsaken me?”.  Environmentalism is not just a secular movement, dealing only with atmospheric computer models, the delicate measurement of ultra-violet light penetrating the ever-thinning ozone layer, the build-up of toxic and nuclear waste, fracking, and clear-cutting.  It is a religious movement with a profoundly spiritual core.  It is no more fractured by the various issues confronting it or by its multiple enemies than religious fundamentalism.  Whether one joins the fight for clean water, clean air, toxic waste clean-up, alternative energy, or forest preservation, the fight is for Mother Earth, the preservation of her sanctity.

So it is natural that progressives who began their spiritual odyssey with Christianity but became disillusioned with the predatory aggression of the Church in the Crusades, the political collusion between the Holy See and the courts of Europe, buggery, and the complaisance of Pope Pius XII in matters of Jewry and Hitler, have sought secular religion.  All men have a need for belief regardless of its sentiment or promises; and the American Left has been at the forefront of True Belief.  European socialists and communists while working to change the world order, never were motivated by such retro-spiritual aspirations.  A new, compassionate, sharing, and just secular world was enough.  For American liberals, it was most definitely not enough.  There had to be something inherently good, absolute, and unchangeable in their vision; and so it was that American progressivism became the world’s secular religion.

Religious secularists are chary of Jesus, a man they honor and respect as a teacher and latter day prophet, but no God, and certainly no player in political dynamics.  Yet religion is hard to shed; and most older liberals, the heart and soul of the progressive movements, can never dismiss Christ as irrelevant or at best supernumerary.  They grew up believing that he was the Son of God, and at least some residual belief remains.

So they ask without irony, “What would Jesus do?”, as if He really cared about the supposed warming of one of his planets, a dot in His Universe; or the glorification of the black man, one infinitesimal, insignificant speck among uncountable numbers of species; or the infernal logic of reverse sexuality in a universe so evolved that only mind and spirit occurred.

But he must care, these aging Sixties progressives insist.  Even though he may not be God, he is still watching; and if we follow His rules within a secular context – obedience and respect for received wisdom (Ten Commandments), honor, justice, compassion, tolerance, peace, and love – then if there is a heaven, we will be in it; and if there is not, we will be in some alternate Elysian fields.

As for Donald Trump, he bears the mark of Cain, the 666 sign of the Devil, the black spirit of despair, the unredeemable soul of hideously barbaric enterprise.  What would Jesus do? Damn him, cast him out into the eternal fires of Hell.

Trump, of course, pays all of this fol-de-rol no mind.  He carries on squiring young beauty queens, bathing in the spotlight, jousting with the credentialed thugs sent his way by Congress, living the good life, untouched, and very, very happy.

Despite what progressives may think, Jesus could care less about Donald Trump, a flash in the universe’s pan, a niggling thorn in the foot of the unrepentant, but a cipher in the scope of things.