There is no God but God… except for you-know-who

by David Benjamin

“To say no to President Trump would be saying no to God, and I won’t do that.” — Rev. Paula White

MADISON, Wis. — Ever since Donald Trump landed ego-first on the Resolute desk like a 250-pound sack of Yukon Gold potatoes, I’ve been mystified — not by his supporters, fans, cronies or toadies — but by his starry-eyed believers. Folks like Sarah Sanders, daughter of a prominent televangelist, who, from her perch in the White House press room, said. “I think God… wanted Donald Trump to become president.”

Really, Sarah?

Yeah, really. I have at least one friend who’s certain Trump was sent by God. Last year, a Rush Limbaugh ditto-head called Trump, “an emissary of the Messiah.” Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, agrees, as do evangelical leaders James Dobson and Franklin Graham. As do 21 percent (one fifth!) of American white Christians, according to a survey by the Religion News Service. There’s a theory among Trumpists that he’s the second coming of Cyrus, a Persian king who freed the Jews from Babylon 2,700 years ago. Noted theologian Lev Parnas told Trump that his names translates as “Messiah, Son of David.”

Since Trump’s fateful escalator ride, I’ve been trying to puzzle out this weird devotion — among the nation’s most devoted religionists — to the least Christlike president in history. To quote St. Vincent of Green Bay, “What the hell’s going on out there?”

My latest analysis — more of a wild guess, really — is that Trump’s true believers blend three disparate but oddly sympathetic strains of popular culture. 

The Trump trinity unites a) the white nationalist movement with b) forces of anti-government nihilism and c) the farthest, fatalist fringe of the religious right.

Trump’s white nationalist following embraces bigots of every stripe, from neo-Confederates and Klansmen to Nazis, Jew-baiters, Islamophobes, xenophobes, homophobes, misogynists, skinheads, etc. You know the list.

Group B — anti-government nihilists — are bourgeois anarchists who hate taxes viscerally and regard all social programs, including Social Security and the VA — as criminal giveaways to the riffraff. They’re a smorgasbord of survivalists, sovereign citizens, monarchists, recluses, the “cold, dead hands” gang and all the cynics who’ve forsaken the American idea in favor of survival of the fittest.

The evangelical wing of Trump’s trinity composes those zealots whose turbulent gospel circles the maelstrom of Revelation. These bleak soldiers of a vengeful Lord see America as a wilderness into which they’ve been cast, and from which they can only be saved by a global holocaust that deports all Jews back to Israel, triggering the End of Days and a Judgment that skyrockets the faithful to Paradise and plunges the rest of us infidels, billions of souls, into endless torture in the flaming bowels of Hell.

Despite the vast ideological gaps among these three strands of mania, each foresees an unseemly status quo ending in violent, holy catharsis. The Christian right has its Apocalypse (see above). The alt-right looks forward to a race war that will kill millions, torch cities, initiate jungle law and force each Caucasian to choose between his or her own death and the extermination of the “mud people.”

The libertarian nihilist version of America’s End of Days is not so much war or judgment as a matter of homicide. In the words of Grover Norquist, head of the blandly named anarchist asylum, Americans for Tax Reform: “I’m not in favor of abolishing the government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” Glug glug.

These three all-American breeds of extremism have always been with us. But they were, throughout history, scattered, disorganized and discrete. The Bill of Rights allowed them to speak and recruit, but they languished under the radar. Despite the presence of a permanent constituency hungry for their hokum, they were deemed too kooky to get much coverage from respectable media. 

Indeed, since the Founding, there has existed a restless mass of restive citizens who wonder what’s wrong. They tend to be law-abiding, hard-working Christians who, despite their best efforts, can’t get ahead and can’t figure out why they’re stuck. Is it their fault or is something — someone — holding them back, queering their hopes, flushing their dreams, stealing their place in line? We all have neighbors, relatives, friends who are aggrieved, angry, shadow-boxing with the “system” and desperate for a vessel into which they can pour their rage. 

In Network, screenwriter Paddy Chayevsky personified this populist fury in news anchor Howard Beal. He gave Beal a cri de coeur that galvanized millions of pissed-off Americans: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore!”

Take what?

Never mind.

Chayevsky understood that American politics has always had a religious undercurrent. He saw that a continent opened to white colonists by Puritans, missionaries and witch-burners could never truly separate church and state. Presciently, he fashioned Howard Beal — a charismatic but deranged creature of television — into a latter-day savior. 

In the movie, Beal’s evangelism joins America’s bigots, nihilists and evangelicals with the great mass of frustrated, confused regular folks and gives them a daily live-at-five CRT Messiah. In the end, of course, Network is logical. Television, which is part of the “system,” inevitably wearies of Howard Beal’s lunatic gospel, washes its hands and crucifies him.

Today, social media are the glue that unites our menagerie of extremists and pumps their various faiths to irritated masses who crave the balm of collective rage. We still have TV, now liberated from a defunct Fairness Doctrine. We have talk-radio, full of incendiary rhetoric and conspiracy theorists. But the arrival of internet forums where trolls and phantoms openly spin lies and foment hatred has degraded the American conversation and split citizens into factions more rigid and bitter than ever before in modern memory. We are now deafened — and defined — by deviant beliefs that were, before the social media explosion, barely a whisper.

In this digital era, as our neo-extremisms blended into a toxic faith lamely termed “populism” by old-school journalists “objectively” echoing every voice, the faithful came to need their Howard Beal. They craved a prophet deluded, brazen and empty enough to be the vessel for their unholy trinity of creeds.

They needed a gasbag possessed of sufficient force to rise up before a national convention and shout, “Only I can fix it!” (followed by a standing ovation).

They wanted a hero with the chutzpah (and absence of Biblical knowledge) to announce, “I am the Chosen One!” (followed by hosannahs on Fox News).

Someone, finally, with the arrogance to announce his impunity from all the laws of mortal men and Founding Fathers: “I can do anything I want.” And from social norms that shield the vulnerable from the rich and powerful: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

Someone who, with death all around and fear abroad in the land, can brush it off as Jesus once disdained the Pharisees, and write his own rules, preaching a gospel never heard before — someone who could invent and occupy his own church: “The president of the United States calls the shots. They can’t do anything without the approval of the president of the United States… When somebody’s the president of the United States, the authority is total… total!”

Doninus vobiscum.