Donald Trump’s match made in Hell
The Palmer Report takes no official position on Christianity just as it takes no official position on fly fishing. To be sure, we may have personal opinions on either topic, but Palmer Report ex officio concerns Donald Trump and his train wreck of a “presidency” first and foremost. Neither would anyone (in their right mind anyway) think of Donald Trump as the Christianity go-to guy any more than one might think of, say, the Dalai Lama as the go to guy for the best steakhouse in New York City. So how exactly did such strange bedfellows as Trump and Christianity come to pass?
You’ll get no clues from interrogating Christianity’s holy book any more than you could from Trump’s bellicose and quasi-literate quotidian tweets. Those familiar with the former, particularly the latter half of the former, can only shake their bemused heads. If you can find your way to Donald Trump via admonitions to love your neighbors and feed the poor, then you’re an odder man than I. Turn the other cheek? There’s most emphatically no Trump in that. And if you could assemble Trump’s midnight Twitter rants into something vaguely resembling a book of its own, you’d find yourself the possessor of a tome suspiciously like one written by the Antichrist, the very man Christians spent two millennia warning us against, before electing him President of the United States.
No one seemed more surprised by all of this than Donald Trump himself. Tuesday night in the midst of yet another tedious Nuremberg-variety rally, this time in Tampa, Florida, by way of introduction of mega church pastor Paula White, Trump said, “I hear we’re more popular than ever with the evangelicals.” The moment seemed unguarded as there was a genuine hint of puzzlement in Trump’s voice. Paula White herself had nothing to give away on the subject.
There seems to be no answer we can discern, apart from the bottomless corruptibility of the human species that the Bible, in perhaps its most profound service to irony, so steadfastly and conscientiously warns us against the likes of Donald Trump.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.