I was going to say “no,” but then something stopped me, and made me write: “Hell no!”
Because if he is the second coming, which a lot of Americans apparently believe, then Satan is laughing his ass off down in Hell.
In August 2019, Bess Levins, a politics correspondent for Vanity Fair, wrote this (here):
“Yesterday, the president unleashed an anti-Semitic rant in the Oval Office in which he declared that Jews who vote for Democrats are either uneducated or disloyal. Unfortunately, with about 70% of Americans Jews being registered Democrats, that’s a lot of disloyalty. So Trump looked elsewhere for answers, and lo, he found an unhinged supporter who says Israelis (the real Jews!) love Trump like the ‘King of Israel’ and ‘the second coming of God.’ Then he cited him on Twitter: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1164138796205654016”
(Note: If you click on that link, you’ll get the following message: “This Tweet is from a suspended account.” That’s because of this. So, if Trump is the Messiah, then God’s messenger to this planet has a suspended Twitter account and will have to save humanity the old-fashioned way: One “Sermon on the Mount” at a time. Of course, I don’t believe that, but I do believe that sucking up to Trump in this fashion is exactly the food his ravenous ego thrives on.
In May 2019, a guy with a Ph.D. wrote in Psychology Today, a respectable magazine, this (here):
“Psychologists have explained quite a lot about Donald Trump’s political invincibility and the unconditional allegiance of his followers. One well-supported explanation is that the president keeps his base loyal by … persistent fear-mongering, with messages like, ‘Illegal immigrants are murderers and rapists,’ and ‘Islam hates us,’ Trump gets to play the role of the great protector.
“But there is another important reason why Trump loyalists do not waver no matter how he behaves or what scandals come to light. For most evangelicals, it is not only fear that keeps them in line, but it is also faith. As a cognitive psychology researcher who has been writing about the science underlying Trump’s support since he began his presidential campaign, I have learned … that a significant portion of his supporters literally believe the president was an answer to their prayers. He is regarded as something of a messiah, sent by God to protect a Christian nation.”
The writer goes on to call this belief “rampant and dangerous.” However, “something of a messiah” doesn’t sound quite as convincing as “second coming,” implying as it does that his followers at least recognize his human imperfections — which, by the way, are hard to miss. This writer noted that Trump “chose to demonize innocent people and to promote false conspiracy theories like #PizzaGate, which put lives in jeopardy,” because he learned “this only served to further strengthen evangelicals’ belief that he was their savior.” Their savior. As in, to hell with everybody else. Or at least, that’s how it comes across, because to everybody else, he was a one-man wrecking ball.
Let me be clear about something here: Evangelicals, and their preacher leaders, discredited themselves for good by falling in lockstep (goose step?) behind a man who (a) has had three wives, (b) cheated on all of them, (c) went bankrupt three times (or was it four?), (d) cheated on his taxes, (e) cheated everyone who did business with him, (f) cozied up to atheist regimes like Russia’s and North Korea’s, (g) took out full-page newspaper ads demanding the execution of five innocent black teenagers, and (h) told over 30,000 lies during his four years in office. (This list is an incomplete catalog of his character failings; it’s what pops into my mind right now.)
Two Giuliani associations, subsequently arrested and prosecuted for their involvement in the Ukraine dealings for which Trump was impeached, reportedly told Trump that “the letters in [his] name add up to 424, which is the same total as the letters in the Hebrew word for messiah,” which is more or less the same thing as telling Trump he’s the messiah (read about that here). Personally, I think those guys are full of crap, and were doing it to get some kind of favor (a pardon? fuggedaboutit, he doesn’t pardon his loyal lackeys. Did he pardon the Capitol insurrectionists? Hell no. He didn’t even pardon himself, although he did pardon Roger Stone, a reptile if there ever was one.)
In January 2021, the “Joseph A. O’Hare, S.J., Postgraduate Media Fellow at America,” the magazine of the Jesuit Society, wrote (here),
“The people who stormed the Capitol are…people. You might hate what they did, as you should—but in another version of this life, they could be any of us with another set of DNA and childhood memories and circumstances.”
Let me interrupt here. No. They are not like us. Not in another life, not on another planet. They’re … different. From. Normal. People. (That’s all I’ll say right now.)
“We all believe things. We all hold our own convictions. We are urged forward by a faith that leads us to act in the world, to live, to vote, to protest.”
Yeah. But not all convictions, or protests, are equal. Shooting up a pizza parlor because you (wrongly) believe that Hillary Clinton is running a child trafficking ring in the basement of a building that doesn’t have a basement, no matter how strong your faith in that belief is, isn’t the same thing as protesting the murder of George Floyd. It just isn’t.
“What are we to do with the fact that the insurrectionists and presumably many more of Mr. Trump’s supporters really treat this man like a messiah? I rack and rack my brain for solutions.”
Not me. This one’s easy as pie: Prosecute them for the crimes they committed, and if they’re convicted in courts of law, throw their asses in federal prisons. Like any other criminals who committed the same crimes, which included assaulting police officers, damaging government property, disrupting official business, and let’s throw in flag desecration while we’re at it.
But all of this still leaves unanswered the question,
Is Donald Trump the New Christian Messiah?
Somebody calling herself “Dr Lasha Darkmoon (b.1978)” (here), whose C.V. is “an anglo-American ex-academic with higher degrees in Classics whose political articles have been translated into several languages,” including, apparently, English, wrote (here):
“The enthusiastic, uncritical embrace of President Trump by white evangelicals is among the most mind-blowing developments of the Trump era. How can a group that for decades—and especially during the Bill Clinton presidency—insisted that character counts and that personal integrity is an essential component of presidential leadership not only turn a blind eye to the ethical and moral transgressions of Donald Trump, but also constantly defend him?”
She has her theories, and I have mine (higher intelligence not among them), but one of her correspondent/observers bottom-lined the situation as follows:
“Trump’s supporters believe God’s hand is on Trump—that Donald Trump is God’s man, in effect.”
I’ll just say that believing something doesn’t make it true, and let it go at that. No, wait, I can’t let it go at that, because that belief system is a grave threat to our country, freedom, and way of life. As a CNN article (here) points out,
“With its cultish devotion to Donald Trump, … the Republican Party is choosing a wannabe-autocrat over the political system that made the United States the world’s most powerful nation and its dominant democracy. … [Trump] doesn’t have to be in the Oval Office to damage faith in US elections and to trash truth, as his movement based on lies and personal homage takes an increasingly firm grip of the Republican Party. The widespread mistrust he continues to foster in the fairness of the US political system among millions of voters poses grave risks to democracy itself.”
That’s nearly all Republicans they’re talking about; and evangelical preachers are leading the charge. Right Wing Watch, a blog run by People for the American Way, a progressive advocacy group, reported (here) in December 2016 that,
“Televangelist Jim Bakker hosted several fellow End Times preachers on his television program today to discuss the prophetic implications of the presidential election. One of Bakker’s guests … spent an entire segment of the program explaining that “rabbis” have revealed that Trump may be the messiah …. ‘They’re looking at Donald Trump’ as the messiah, … saying that Trump’s name ‘actually means ‘messiah.’ Among the clues that Trump may be the messiah, he said, is that the president-elect is a kingly and warrior-like leader committed to protecting Israel and … rebuilding the Temple of Jerusalem.”
I thought it was a border wall he was after, for which he diverted money intended to build housing and schools for military families, but whatever.
I could go on and on, and cite more examples, but it isn’t necessary. People make mistakes, but few people are as mistaken as those who believe this man was sent by God to save our country. God doesn’t send demons, and Trump didn’t save our country; he made a godawful mess of it (e.g., half a million dead from a pandemic he first shrugged off as a hoax, then used as a racist talking point). If Donald Trump is a messiah, he’s Satan’s messiah. Follow him at your own risk.
Photo: An artist’s representation of Trump being crucified by his political opponents. Seriously. Really. (This cannot fail to give art a bad rap.)