Immaculate deception

It didn’t take much proselytizing to convert America’s white evangelical Christians to Trumpism. Like an ecclesiastical Svengali, Donald Trump exerted an evil influence over the majority of evangelicals and led them down a godless rabbit hole to accomplish his personal political crusade. 

He sermonizes the exact opposite of what Jesus taught in the New Testament gospels while many Christian pastors hypocritically condone Trump’s heresy by staying quiet like monks who took a vow of silence.

Trump has corrupted a mass of Christians by leading them astray.

Through the years Trump’s desecration of Christianity was supported by modern day pharisaical false prophets like Pat Robertson, the founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network, who prophesied the world would end in 1982 and 2007, and said in October 2020, that God told him that “according to what I believe the Lord told me, the president is going to be reelected.”

The only prophet Robertson knew was financial profit by cozening vulnerable believers that donated to his estimated net worth of $100 million.

Yoked with Trump, Robertson and other Christian leaders preached Trump’s dogma, co-signed his blasphemy and vomited his self-righteousness in the face of America’s evangelical Christians like possessed Reagan McNeil did to Father Damien Karras in the “The Exorcist.”

In 2015, Trump was asked by political consultant Frank Luntz if he ever asked God for forgiveness. Trump responded, “I don’t think so.” Unknowingly, Trump also confessed to never reciting “The Lord’s Prayer” wherein the faithful specifically ask God to “forgive us our trespasses.”

Further, Trump told Luntz that he participates in Holy Communion.

For Christians, Holy Communion is a sacred time in fellowship with God when they reflect on Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. But for Trump, he described Holy Communion as “When I drink my little wine ... and have my little cracker.”

In 2017, while performing for the flock during a Christian commencement ceremony at Liberty University, Trump hailed, “In America we don’t worship government, we worship God.” Paradoxically, Trump savored  the worship from the brood of Trump disciples applauding and chanting “U.S.A., U.S.A.”

And although no one ever accused Trump of being a theologian, he preached to the tractable graduates like a fearmongering subway riding mystic proclaiming, “Christianity, it’s under siege,” and incorrectly cited Second Corinthians 3:17 as “Two Corinthians,” then concluded “That’s the whole ballgame,” cursorily summing up 2,000 years of Christian theology.

In 2019, Paula White, Trump’s bilingual spiritual adviser who speaks both in English and in tongues, declared “To say no to President Trump would be saying no to God.”

On June 1, 2020, Trump came out of his bunker in the White House after hiding from Americansprotesting the police murder of George Floyd. He awkwardly held a Bible in his hand in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church. Trump remained stoic, like a statue of an entitled white supremacist from the antebellum South defiantly waiting to be removed from the public square by order of the court.

A reporter asked Trump, “Is that your Bible”? Appearing uncomfortable with the question and maybe debating whether to assert his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination during his impersonation of  a pious Christian, Trump then answered, “It’s a Bible.”

According to the Washington Examiner, the Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C., was “outraged” by Trump’s use of St. John’s as a “prop.” Budde posted on Twitter, “Tonight President just used a Bible and a church of my diocese as a backdrop for a message antithetical to the teachings of Jesus and everything that our church stands for.”

Easter Sunday is the most revered day in Christianity and the essence of the Christian gospel as it commemorates the resurrection of Jesus Christ after his crucifixion. And what does Trump do?

He figuratively passed around a collection basket by selling Bibles with his cunning marketing slogan “Make America Pray Again.”

This type of avarice is why Jesus overturned the tables in the temple.

Is bottled Trump holy water that cures leprosy next or will Trump start selling indulgences guaranteed to reduce the punishment for one’s sins like the corrupt Medici Popes of Florence during the Renaissance?

Even as a convicted felon, Trump still has the praise of the vast majority of white evangelical Christians compared to former Vice President Mike Pence, notwithstanding that many say Pence is ostensibly the embodiment of Christian conformity. 

Instead Trump, the proverbial serpent in the garden who represents deceit and temptation and has been a false idol to many Christians for a decade, is for the third time the person the majority of white evangelicals want as president.

Trump’s repetitive lies and suggestive stimuli induce his converts to obey and respond to his every wish. Sometimes at the end of Trump’s rallies. ominous cult type music is played as Trump soliloquizes softly lullabying his congregation into a trance.

David Cay Johnston wrote that Trump repeatedly and publicly denounced “Christians as fools, idiots and schmucks” and according to former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, after pastors “laid hands” on Trump, he stated, “can you believe that people believe this bullshit.”

Trump insists he is being persecuted and glorifies himself declaring, “I am being indicted for you,” implying a similarity to Jesus who was crucified for the sins of the world.

In a March opinion piece for the Washington Times, “The Crucifixion of Donald Trump,” Tim Constantine compared Trump to Jesus Christ in that both drew crowds and instilled fear in others. However, Constantine ignored that the sinless Jesus sacrificed himself to save the world and the wicked Trump would sacrifice the world to save himself.

I suspect Constantine’s commentary further enabled and encouraged Trump’s narcissistic messiah complex. Will Trump now claim the appearance of stigmata?

In diametric contradiction to the foundational tenets of Christianity, somehow many evangelicals idolize Trump like the “golden calf” while Republican zealots call him “orange Jesus.” 

“And the people bowed and prayed/to the neon god they made.”

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