What Would Jesus Do With Donald Trump? Nothing - A Clown In A Devil Suit Is Still A Clown

The American Left is nonplussed, cornered by the possibility that Donald Trump will return. For four years they have vilified and immolated the former President to no effect.  He is more popular now than ever despite the witch trials, hysteria, and righteous indignation.  For every fevered sermon, every beartrap and wolf snare; for every word written about his lies, distortions, and manipulative errors; his insurrectionism, bald-faced capitalist greed, misogyny and homophobia, and his downright evil, his supporters cheer all the louder.  

'He's our man!', they shout.  A man for all seasons, a man of the times, a man to roll back the tide of queer woke socialism and make America great again. 

'String him up', shouted the most outraged at this imposter, this poseur, this interloper.  'Burn him at the stake'.  

Of course ordinary progressives had no patience for such unhinged, cabalistic ideas within their ranks.  While they encouraged the most far flung charges of treasonous malfeasance, Russian collusion, and downright anarchy; and while they used the terms ‘demonic’ and ‘Satanic’ to describe the devil in the Oval Office, they had always been used metaphorically.  The suggestion of anything more...might one even suggest possession? ...was beyond the pale even for this...this Beelzebub. Trump’s maniacal, fascist insurrectionist role in the January 6th assault on the Capitol was far more than a putsch.  It was Miltonian.  

'Trump - What Would Jesus Do?' can be seen on lawns of a leafy progressive neighborhood of Washington, ironic given the secularism of the movement; but meant to call out the evil of the former President in no uncertain terms.  Invoking the good man of history and juxtaposing his name on plea for decency and civility might have crossed some church-and-state borders, but it made the point.  The country was not just dealing with an insurrectionist madman, but an evil one - a man not only without principle, compassion, and concern but out to destroy goodness, to corrupt as surely as Satan. 

Trump 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 which had never before even imagined such a thing.  The fight against him was a holy one, a crusade, a march to Jerusalem, the heroic struggle of Charlemagne at Roncesvalles to save Christian Europe from the Saracens. 

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?

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.  There is nothing remotely evil about the marvelously mischievous mind of a huckster, con man, Ponzi scheme artiste, and circus clown. He is simply one of the kind, not one iota 'presidential', cut from a very different, very American Hollywood and Las Vegas cloth, one studded with stars, woven of plastic and tinsel, worn like a movie hero's cape.  A braggart, blowhard, braggadocio tummler, a Borscht Belt comedian, an insurrectionist only of cant. 

America, despite its Bible Belt fundamentalism, is a secular country.  Jesus doesn't matter that much.  'We get him. He gets us' is the new Christian meme.  Jesus the actor in a B-buddy movie, nice guy, grandfather, harmless, friendly, but insignificant. 

Progressives of course are the ironic heirs of Jesus.  Christ has had his day, a mythical white man, a thorn in the side of Romans and Jews but full of empty promises.  We, say secularists, have taken the ideas of polity, democracy, civility, and compassionate co-existence from the history of oppression, colonialism, and racism.  We don't need an old turncoat Jew for inspiration. 

But there they are, claiming absolute right, permanent and universal and all but God-given, and playing the role of St. Paul, the front man for Christ, his marketing genius, his aggressive, ambitious soldier. 

‘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. 

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.

It is amusing that the Left claims that Trump is evil.  Who says? If there is no Satan and no God to throw him out of heaven, then the world is without sin.  Evil is a fabrication, a febrile, changeable, relative notion of no substance; so ours is just as good as the next guy's. There may be no Hell awaiting Donald Trump, but the stocks, exile, tar and feathers, and the stake await him in our secular Gehenna. 

Jesus would do nothing with Donald Trump - the same Jesus who let Hitler kill six million Jews will certainly not bother with a trifle like The Donald.  The subject of evil has been bandied about for centuries and theologians like Augustine wondered how evil could exist in a world created by an all-good God?  There is no such thing as evil, said Augustine, just the absence of good, thus kicking the can down the road for the likes of Kant, Sartre, Kierkegaard and Hannah Arendt to kick it further. 

Progressives want it both ways.  Trump is evil, but since in a secular, relativistic world there is no such thing what to make of his Satanic devices?  Let's call him evil and see what happens.  And so the Grand Guignol continues, a fiery crusade to destroy him, to incinerate him, to forget that he ever happened. 

Good luck with that.  Trump is likely to win the election, and then what? The rats are already scurrying from a sinking ship.