Trump's Rant About How Joe Biden Will Kill God Was Insane But Clarifying [View all]

[TomCADem]

I think it is easier to believe that Trump is the Anti-Christ then that Biden, a regular church-goer, would hurt god. At the end of the day, by validating the racism, sexism and hate of his supporters, Trump can oppress them by giving voice to their sense of grievance and entitlement.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/trumps-rant-about-how-joe-biden-will-kill-god-was-insane-but-clarifying/ar-BB17Hl0t?li=BBnbfcL

Just as Vice President Mike Pence provided a clarifying look this week at how conservatives see the Supreme Court, his boss has been a clarifying force when it comes to American political religion. In short, the kind of Political Christianity that now dominates on the American right has very little to do with the teachings of Jesus Christ, or even the Old Testament. That's how Donald J. Trump became the standard-bearer for Evangelicals despite personifying all of the Seven Deadly Sins at once, and despite his palpable disdain for believers even when addressing them directly. "Two Corinthians 3:17, that's the whole ballgame," he said at Liberty University way back in 2016. "Is that the one you like?"

It didn't matter that the president was essentially saying, I'm pandering to you because I think you're an easy mark, or that he clearly has no familiarity with even basic tenets of the Bible, or that he rarely, if ever, goes to church, or that he's cheated relentlessly on all three of his wives, paying hush money to multiple mistresses. It won't matter that he's demonstrated callous indifference to the deaths of 158,000 Americans, or that, as more than 1,000 of his constituents die each day and the current economic suffering is set to explode with the lapse in boosted unemployment benefits, he really packed his schedule Friday as he heads to one of his golf courses.

On Thursday, the last day that he and Congress saw fit to work this week, he gave a speech in Ohio in which he once again demonstrated that his strategy for courting Evangelical votes is just throwing things at the wall.

The idea that a presidential candidate could "hurt God," a Supreme Being who exists beyond space and time, is not really the kind of talk you'd expect from someone who believes in or understands the concept. But this is a fairly revelatory look at the state of the conservative movement. As Trump has proven, this sort of Godliness and religiosity is less tied to any principles to live by than they are one facet—along with gun ownership and, apparently, burning fossil fuels—of a conservative identity around which the movement's base is organized. He doesn't mention opposition to nonwhite immigration here, or the larger concept that this is a country built for and by white people and everyone else should just be happy to be here, but those are the really animating features that drew movement conservatives to his candidacy in the first place.