At last, America decides to stop taking B.S. from Donald Trump

ou can fool some of the people all of the time, or all of the people some of the time. But you can't fool all of the people all of the time.

   It's a hard lesson Donald Trump had to learn the most embarrassing way. He may have been rhetorically right  about him being able to walk out on Fifth Avenue, shooting someone in the head, and still remaining popular to his blindfolded base.  That is hardly inconceivable given that even with over a quarter of a million Americans now dead from COVID-19--victims of  Donald Trump's utter stupidity in his pandemic non-response--he still managed to tally 74 million votes. That number is miniscule only if you compare it  against Joe Biden's 80 million votes (and counting).

   But he was dead wrong in believing his luck will never run out. What goes around comes around, eventually. In Trump's case, it just happened that adjustment unavoidably takes time. The US government is such a complex apparatus, and the American Constitution such a cumbersome manual of principles, that the response to someone like Donald Trump rising to become President  takes place at geologic pace. But even the most exploitable and tolerant of systems has a breaking point, a pivot point for redemption.

   In a real sense, the presidency is mostly a titular office--like being captain of a large ship. The captain's orders are always followed, but are executed by a long chain of command. When he commands the ship to stop, it triggers  a dizzying flurry of activities: engineers cutting forward thrust, others engaging reverse thrust, the helmsman steering the ship to hold course, someone dropping the anchor, and a host of other steps. By the time  the ship is sitting dead calm in still waters, it would still have traveled a considerable length between the giving of the order and its final compliance.  That just happens to be how the system works. The captain does not directly control the ship. He merely controls the crew that runs the ship. 

   Heaven forbid the captain should go mad, begin barking orders that don't make sense, or even put the ship and crew in harm's way. Looking at one another totally aghast at the evident display of amok, the hapless crew are bound by the impulse against mutiny deeply etched into their brains. Many  would suppose that as long as the ship remains seaworthy, is not taking in seawater, not about to run aground or crash into the rocky shores, they would stick by the orders of their skipper--giving him furloughs of benefit of the doubt. It's captain's madness aside, that ship will make it to safe harbor somehow but only because its crew know how to sail home, captain or no captain.

   Donald Trump spent the last four years being Captain Ahab pursuing his whale Moby Dick--the singular focus on keeping his power at all costs. He knows that even if he caught the Dick, it was bigger than his boat and its sinking a foregone conclusion. But he couldn't care less. He will have his Dick, if everybody else has to swim back to land.

   Finally, on November 3, 2020, America's sufferance under a mad President came to an end. American voters can finally reboard the ship of state and assess the damage wrought upon it by Captain Trump.  What awaits their inspection is not a pretty sight.

   Donald Trump has all but destroyed the US two-party system. He was going for an entranced monolithic society where the populace is given no choice but to obey his idiotic ideas or be thrown overboard as chum to a swirling frenzy of feeding sharks. He is totally ignorant about the workings of government and the civil service, treating federal offices as implementing units of the great Trump Ambition. Everybody works for him, not for the government. He  works for himself, certainly not for the American people--not even for his support base. No one has done any counting but given that the Trump school of thought is to just let a pandemic wear itself out, with nobody having to bother to take any precautionary measures, more COVID-19 fatalities probably come from the ranks of his mindless supporters.

   Whenever the vote tally showed him losing a state--like Georgia, for example--all the people in that state suddenly become Democrats and disloyal Republicans actually in bed with Democrats all along. He sees no party lines--it's just him against everybody else he considers "enemy of the people"--with "people" defined as "Donald Trump."

   As an outsider looking in, I've often wondered in the last four years, just how much of this B.S. are the American people really capable of putting up with? Is the American people's tolerance for utter mediocrity really that bottomless?

   Donald Trump has completely defunctionalized the US Congress, especially the Republican-led Senate.  Meant by the US Constitution to be a co-equal branch of the Executive, instead Donald Trump has relegated the US Senate as his rear guard. Every time the Democrat-led House conducts an investigation tending to expose corruption and wrongdoing by the Trump administration, a parallel Senate investigation tailor-fit to reverse every one of its findings is never far behind. The Senate most famously exonerated Trump without even allowing key witnesses just to spite the House which impeached Donald Trump with full evidence earlier. The Whitehouse threw a monkey wrench at every critical step of the proceeding, overreachingly invoking executive privilege to clamp down on the testimony of people who did not even belong to the executive department.  Every guard rail installed by the Constitution to preclude executive abuse was dismantled by Donald Trump. He stopped any probe into anomalies into his administration by knee-capping the discovery mechanism in the first place, firing Inspector Generals left and right.  When he couldn't ferret out the whistleblower that called out his quid-pro-quo phone call to the Ukrainian president, he branded the entire support personnel of the West Wing as a cabal of leakers--or worse the clandestine appendages of a "deep state" conspiracy out to get him. It wasn't enough that he fired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman for telling on the creative lies Trump cleaners had woven into telephone conversation transcript, the patriot--and his brother--needed to be bodily thrown out of the workplace, escorted out of the Whitehouse  by Secret Service bodyguards.

   The Black Lives Matter upheaval over the streetstyle execution of George Floyd via a cop's knee pressed on the jugular vein of his neck wasn't seen by Trump as a cause for outrage. He saw it as a much needed boost to energizing his racist base, as well as endearing himself some more with his evangelical supporters applauding his holding a bible upside down in a post-protest breakup photo-op.

Do Americans really approve of those actions by their president?

   Evidently they don't but there's little--in fact nothing--they could do in the short daily cycle of these non-stop acts of presidential assault on constitutional and human rights. The reckoning would have to await an appointed time when accountability could speak with one nationally-synchronized voice: the elections.

   In daily buckets of lies and falsehoods, Donald Trump kept the public entranced, fact checkers always a step behind. The linearity of history is on Donald Trump's side. Nobody can call out his error until after he has committed them, by which time he can drown out one error by a more egregious subsequent one.  No one could predict what his next lie or falsehood would be.

    Elections are the internodes between presidential terms. Voters can only know if their choice was wrong by suffering what their wrong choice says and does in the ensuing four years. Then hindsight comes into advantage. The advantage of reckoning a re-electionist is that his ways and thoughts are nio longer a mystery. By the time he sought a second term, Donald Trump could no longer ask the American people to invest in him by faith--other than his frustrated evangelical supporters who have completely lost touch with God--they know him in fact.

    The American people may not be able to predict what Donald Trump's next lies will be. But at re-election time, they can certainly prevent him him from making any more.  Last November 3rd, the American people simply said they've had it, and they're not taking bovine defecatory output anymore from this, the worst US President in history thus far.Ⓒ 2020 Joel R. Dizon

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON

The more dangerous Trump: his reincarnation

he profound damage that Donald Trump did to American democracy cannot be overstated. In a four-year blitzkrieg of certifiable insanity, he managed to rewrite the whole book on American politics and government it's  a wonder the United States isn't a failed state yet.

The specific things that he did to destroy democratic institutions and processes are too numerous to enumerate. But one common thread runs through all of them in that Donald Trump did all those horrendous things by just one modus operandi: ignore the rule of law.

   By his account, Donald Trump accomplished everything he set out to do--and in a sense he is correct. If the definition of an accomplished task is hitting the "bullseye" he hit the centre point each and every time. But the way he did it is not by throwing the dart skillfully enough to stick it in the middle of the board. What he does is throw darts at random and then draw the target board around where each dart hit. He couldn't miss.

   Donald Trump's objectives are not the objectives of everyone else. When he wouldn't disavow racist and white supremacist advocacies, people warned that he was gaslighting the supposedly dying embers of systemic discrimination. A failure by many accounts, but not to him. He was trying to do exactly what everyone else was warning against. He wanted to rekindle intolerance because intolerant demogaphics are a peculiar, if bizarre, support niche he alone cared to cultivate. It was "THE BASE" to him.

   There are ominous storm clouds in the horizon too. The triumph of Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential elections is an imposed self-reflection on America's own self. Trump may have lost but he still garnered over 71 million votes--bested only by Biden's 75 million. It's clear America remains sharply divided and it was a shocking eye-opener for many Americans to witness political nobility beat mediocrity in a down-the-wire photofinish. America now must look at herself in the mirror, see almost half her face covered with warts and then accept the reality that it is what America actually looks like. There is no denying it even if, for the moment, the prospects for better days look bright.

   Smarting from the experience, Americans dread the idea of a Donald Trump comeback run in 2024--and will probably work feverishly the next four years sandbagging against that possibility. 

   That would be a mistake--a failure to recognize what the real danger is simply because you were anticipating its renaissance in familiar form. 

   Such as he is, Donald trump is not a unique pariah.  He is a type--a reusable template for anyone to repackage and repurpose for their own present and future bid to go even farther than Donald Trump did. 

   There's a reason why everything a US president says and does matters. It matters because it sets the limit of what a US president can say and do.  Whether he sets the bar high or low, he justifies his successor going as high and as low at minimum--with the opportunity to push the envelop as farther out until public pushback stops him cold.

   But there's an added element of danger: a second incarnation of Donald Trump could come in a prettier package. Imagine everything reprehensible about Trump being woven into the spellbinding charisma of an articulate orator, for example. The problem with Trump is that when he was told by statisticians he was polling poorly among suburban women, the next day he goes out to the podium, spreads his arms wide open and cries, "Suburban women, please like me!" A more gifted charlatan could deliver the message with more finesse and quaintly-faked empathy he would win the vote not only of the suburban woman but her entire family's as well. . 

   And then there's a second layer to this element of danger. This means you don't have to act like Donald Trump to be Donald Trump. You just have to think like him, and go with your own well-liked and well-received public persona. You don't have to say, after a Ku Klux Klan or a neo-Nazi rally is broken up by police, that in the widening national dialogue about racism "there are fine people on both sides."  You might say, instead, that the "national effort to eradicate intolerance follows a universal objective that appeals to all."  Same message but kinder-sounding. After all, when you say that tribalism is universal, you make tribalism the virtue in and of itself. That does not advance the cause of healing and uniting a deeply fractured society.

   One sector that Trumpism really damaged deeply is the evangelical church community, already hobbled by a whole range of sub-doctrinal differences as it is. The debate on whether or not to support Donald Trump channeled the Reformation Era schism  between believers who subscribed to the doctrine of salvation by irresistible grace alone, and those who embraced salvation through the cooperation of divine grace and human obedience. 

   The church clearly got it wrong, in endorsing the blatantly un-Christian Trump--even if you pile up all the "good works" he has supposedly done for the church (not even for God). If love and adulation to a political leader were the measure of heaven's approval, North Korea's Kim Jong Il ought to be beatified. And if sexual perversion such as Trump is legendary for is only the precursor of a life destined to be ultimately repurposed for God's glory, then let's go easy on all those pedophiles in frocks up and down the Vatican hierarchy. Shall we say these priests sodomized little altar boys so that in their public repentance, people would praise the God they betrayed?  With Christians believing that, who needs atheists? Incidentally, Joe Biden is Roman Catholic and he seems to be standing up for God more than many reformist congregation members worming their way through the thickness of Trump's "Make America Great Again" rallies.

   Donald Trump once pointed out to a black man in one of his rallies, referring to him as "my African-American"--he forgot to add "slave."  It was a masterful stroke of public relations to have Kanye West call on Trump at the Whitehouse and declare to the 'hood that Trump was his superhero.  They even tried to put Kanye West on the ballot to try to draw votes away from Biden who wouldn't otherwise vote for Trump anyway. Of course state election officials nixed the idea all across the continent, you'd think Kanye West would at least land a "Plan B" role as campaign curtain-raiser and crowd drawer. He would have been the focus of the rally, something  Trump cannot endure.

   But what if a second Donald Trump were to emerge who could actually shoot a basketball? Or deliver a few lines of rap?  Compared to the unsubtle tricks and antics of Donald Classic, this guy would be a hit.  That's because Donald Trump rewrote the rule on character: you don't have to stand firmly for one thing, you just need to know how to stand loosely for everything.

   Politics is addition. This used to mean that those who aspire for public office must face a nation, bare his soul, declare his life principles and obtain public approval by the number of people who join him. Donald Trump rewrote it so that a politician must plunge headlong into any group, declare that he stands by whatever they stand for, and would they add their number to his base?

    The way he did it grossed out many people. So now the new holy grail of obtaining the skill behind the "Art of the Deal" is who can be Donald Trump the most while seeming like him the least. That heralds the coming of the Second Donald Trump. Here's hoping even the church gets it right next time. Ⓒ 2020 Joel R. Dizon

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON

The slam dunk win that Trump squandered

onald Trump could be the 46th president of the United States right now if he had not  squandered a golden opportunity to score a "slam dunk" victory in the 2020 presidential elections.

   He performed creditably well, despite running with an engine that wasn't firing on all pistons. From the outset, this was his election to lose. He is the incumbent with a solid base of supporters uniformly afflicted with tunnel vision that he could literally pied piper them off any cliff any day--and twice on Sundays.  Every  time he snaps the order to "Jump!" they all chorus back "HOW HIGH?!"  His rallies served no purpose of consolidating their support for him. Those rallies were only meant to help him sustain an egomaniac 'high' because, without it and with his campaign's donation tank on warning-light empty, he was literally chugging the last miles of the homestretch on fumes.

   For his target audience, he had the right idea of projecting himself  "working his ass off."  The average rural and suburban (and not a few cosmopolitan) American loves that Sly Stallone "Rocky" warrior complex, driven by the hypermantra to  floor  the gas, put the pedal to the metal, leave nothing to chance, take no prisoners, live or die like there's no tomorrow. What else would explain his penchant for COVID19-oblivious  mass gatherings where one person inhales what the person next to him exhales? 

   His speeches are such an interesting study, I should make it my students' midterm thesis assignment in political science. They are  Germanic Hitler in structure, using the so-called "call-and-response" format. He says "Your Governor should open up your state, her quarantine restrictions are killing you!" and his audience cry in unison,"Lock her up! Lock her up!"  repeatedly in rising crescendo. He says, "Dr. Anthony Fauci, he's been around 500 years, but he's wrong a lot" and the bleachers resonate with "Fah-yer Fauci!  Fah-yer Fauci!"  

   This is not an original Hitler concept, by the way, he copied it from an observation he made while attending mass at a church in Berlin where the priest and the congregation engaged in a similar "call-and-response" public reading of scripture referred to as "responsorial psalms." Hitler noticed that a core stimulating message could be used to elicit a programmed response that erased any distinction between the engaged and the inattentive. The whole audience to the last man, always answered in one voice unthinkingly and without resistance. Hitler corrupted the concept that Trump (or, I suspect, some obscure scholarly adviser) learned from on how to serve up his shallow message and draw an almost Pavlovian response. "Here, I'll ring the dinner bell and you all salivate at the same time, okay? All together now..."

   With that simple delivery method, Donald Trump could make his audience swallow the lumpiest messages. I'm the greatest. I alone can solve the problem. I will drain the swamp. Protesters are looters. I know more than the generals. It's a long litany of self-actualized grandstanding platitudes--each one a distinct "call" to which the "responsorial psalm" reply was, "Four more years! Four more years!"

   There's only one problem with this kind of scorched-earth fighting message: he was preaching to the choir--no offense to the thoroughly-confused WASP (white Angle-Saxon Protestant) churches that also kept in step with Trump's Apocalypse Now marshall drumbeat. But to win reelection,  what he needed to reach was the complementary demographic who represent the opposites to his 42% approval rating.  

   There's a reason why Donald Trump couldn't bring himself to denounce white supremacists, neo-Nazi's, QAnon conspiracy theory spinners and gun-toting NRA members. They are loyal to him. Loyalty eats its own children.  If he acted with genuine statesmanship and put down these wayward advocates of violence, he risked losing their support in exchange for the uncertain gamble of maybe  endearing himself to decent society. It's a plus-potential minus-certainty formula he couldn't live with. Literally speaking, he was trapped with no means of escape. He couldn't extract himself from their midst because he was their vortex.

   Suddenly, out of China from whence all good things come, fate gifted Donald Trump with a golden ticket to re-election: the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.  His initial response suggested that he didn't "get it." He did not realize that a pandemic is a protracted disaster that will grip America's undivided attention, and continually beg of dashing images of heroes--and not even unsung ones but screaming their tonsils out. 

   What makes little boys dream of becoming policemen, firemen or soldiers is not the fancy uniforms. It's the drama of  firemen hanging from the back of a wailing red truck passing through in a flash to dive into a giant fire somewhere. It's the moving image of soldiers bristling with guns and grenades shooting at enemies they can't even see. Doctors in neat white lab gowns holding stethoscopes are unimpressive. It's the ones in the green pajamas wielding scalpels hunkered over an operating table that fires the imagination.  The COVID-19 pandemic was a chance served on a silver platter (or petri dish) for Donald Trump to be engaged in heroic action that he didn't even have to fake.

   Donald Trump only had to act the role of COVID-19 fighter and he could have held the entire nation in bated breath, hanging on to every word that spews from his mealy mouth. He didn't even need to understand everything he says. He just needed to moan painfully for the nation. The government is a well-oiled apparatus that actually runs on autopilot the whole time. The system will clean up after him and take care of the nitty gritty details of a system-wide pandemic response.  

   After a while, when he said he considered himself a "wartime president" I was sure he finally got it. I doubt that he came up with that phrase. It was coined by some Whitehouse advisers who forgot the most important thing: they needed to define "wartime president" to him, and not let him inject his own meaning into it. 

   Donald Trump understands only one meaning of war: it's every conflict he can imagine that pits  him against the rest of the world. War to him is any competition where anybody tries to outshine him. He could not fight a military war because he couldn't stand the idea of having to follow strategy mapped out by generals. That makes the generals smarter than him. A strict no-no. That's  why he completely shunned the COVID-19 war because Dr. Anthony Fauci was making him look like a spectator.  

   What a difference a little adjustment could have made. All he needed to do was to reverse his tack. Instead of projecting strength, dominance, total grasp, full control and almost narcotic optimism, he would have gained better traction channeling besiegement and reprising endless "calls" for public support. He needed to look like he is leading the fight for the people, and he needed to look losing not winning the fight. He needed to look painfully overmatched by the microscopic enemy, but he needed to show his head bloodied yet unbowed.  

   "Superman" heads of state who project needlessness do not rekindle patriotism. It is the unrelenting champions of the people who are taking a beating while holding the line as hard as they can, for as long as they can, while issuing rallying calls for civic activation--those are the WInston Churchhills, Harry Trumans, Richard the lionhearted and the Joan of Arcs of mythical lore that people respond to.

   He got a second chance when he tested positive for COVID-19. But apart from the perfunctory "Been there, done that, I feel your pain" message that he only used once or twice, Donald Trump demonstrated that he still didn't get it. His machismo got the better of him, telling both the virus and America, "In your face! I beat this virus by myself. I didn't need anybody's help!"  His self-promoting instinct told him to pander to widespread fear and anxiety and offer himself as the savior come in the flesh, but he just could not bend a knee to lower himself where he could have rallied the people to boost him up.  He was messianic, but no, he wasn't Mister Nice Guy--a most succinct oxymoron, if there ever was one.  He wanted to play messiah but only knew how to act pariah.

   Well, not only did he lose to coronavirus, he lost the presidency. But now at least he can say he has stumbled upon the vaccine against winning. Ⓒ 2020 Joel R. Dizon  

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON

How did the church get this one wrong?

n the eve of the US presidential elections, I found myself wading through a flood of emails, forwarded video clips, letters, and other internet flotsam in my inbox. These came from friends, relatives, former schoolmates, or just total strangers  from different places around the world but mostly from North America--the United States and Canada. They are reacting to several articles I wrote in this blog which they suggested were "leaning towards endorsing Joe Biden."

   First of all, I am not even an American citizen. I will not vote this November 3rd. In fact, I am not even in the United States. I don't belong to the Democratic Party and I don't know Joe Biden personally. He certainly doesn't know me. In short, I have no stake in the outcome of this elections. I am just one political observer taking advantage of technology that makes it possible now to participate in a global dialogue on everything from global warming to the hundred ways you can recycle a soda can.

   Secondly, US politics are not an exclusively American domestic subject. US foreign policy impacts the rest of the world, including the region where I live. The direction of policy is determined by who's in the Whitehouse. Policy is the result of building consensus among opposing interests looking to that policy for advantage or exception. On a practical level, policy depends in large part on who sits behind the huge desk in the Oval Office. And that, in turn,   is the collective result of the American electoral behavior. So it cannot be avoided that in myriad ways fair and foul, the rest of the global community will look to influence the behavior of the American electorate by helping shape the landscape of universal opinion that they know the American voter is sensitive to. On second thought, I along with the rest of the world, am just as invested in the US presidency and in contributing to the vetting factors that lead to that choice.

   Thirdly, it's my failing to have created only the impression that I was leaning towards Joe Biden. I should have just come clean and said it plain and simple that  I am for Joe Biden for reasons that are not entirely American. 

   I am also an evangelical Christian--a born-again believer in Jesus Christ. Like all doctrinaire believers, I am not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ for the bible declares it is the power of God unto salvation for all men. I don't claim any prophetic anointing or oracle powers of any kind. I only believe in the relevance of the scriptures and in the duty of every Christian to speak out on matters that touch on biblical principles to declare the glory of God in the secular arena of post-modern politics--even at the risk of being wrong. 

   I disagree with the position of some Christian ministries in the US--mostly those in the so-called "bible belt" of the American midwest and deep south--who vigorously support Donald Trump as the "Anointed One" of God. To be fair, it is not the Christian church that made such declaration. It was Trump himself but without any significant objection from the church. It is also not the first superlative claim that he has made for himself. He unabashedly calls himself the greatest US president ever, the one who has done the most for the African-American community with the only "possible exception" of Abraham Lincoln.  He seriously believes he deserves to the the fifth head on the granite cliffsides of Mount Rushmore. He brags about building--or at least aspiring to build--a border wall that is longer than the Tower of Babel is tall. 

   He is a man full of flaws, errors and contradictions--and that is putting it kindly. But the enthusiastic Christian supporter of Donald Trump is quick to point out that Christianity is not about being good.  It is about acknowledging that no one is good and that the fallen nature of man renders him predisposed to doing evil. Man cannot, by his own puny efforts, divorce himself from his reprobate nature. It requires the gracious intervention of a compassionate and forgiving God to cleanse unholy man. Then with the sanctifying work of His Holy Spirit, God can repurpose the life of a redeemed sinner to become, among other possibilities, a vessel of godly agenda for civil government. Therefore, when a man like Donald Trump is "raised by God" the people of God must be quick to recognize and set aside the seeming incongruence between the anointing and the man's character. Not only can God utilize even an evil man, in fact evil men are all the material God has to work with in this fallen world. So the church must demonstrate its faith in God by accepting His will--even if it comes in the unpalatable form of Donald Trump. Failing to do that is flying in the face of God's sovereignty  and a rebellious declination to submit to His all-encompassing lordship.

   All that explanation is needed just to clarify the statement that "Christianity if not about being good."

   But if you state the opposite--"Christianity is about being evil"--the self-contradiction is all at once self-evident that any explanation is totally unnecessary. The statement simply won't fly. You should not try to justify it, because you can't.  This time it flies in the face of the nature of God Himself.

   For centuries theologians have debated the answer to the question, "Can God create a rock so large that He cannot lift it?" If the premise is that nothing is impossible with God, then you must grant that He can indeed create a rock of any size. But based on the same premise, you have to grant that He can lift it--which means He didn't do a good job creating the rock in the first place. His nature in the second act contradicts His nature in the first act. 

   In truth, that question cannot be answered because it cannot even be asked. It's not a question of impossibility but of validity of premise. It is not true that nothing is impossible to God. Yes, there are any number of things God cannot do. God cannot do anything that would deny His nature. God cannot lie, God cannot die, God cannot reproduce Himself, God cannot cease being God. This is why God, being the sum total of all universal good, can never be evil. God cannot stand for both good and evil. He cannot stand for evil, period.

   But it has been lovingly pointed out to me by brothers and sisters in the faith that Donald Trump may be all rough and tumble outside, but is godly soft and chewy inside. Never mind that he held a bible upside down for a photo-op, relegating the object representation of God's Word to the status of a talisman, an amulet of superstition. He couldn't quote a verse of scripture if his life depended on it. The Word of God is not on his lips because it is not in his heart. But then, again, the argument comes forth that God will often use the "humble things of this world to shame the wise."  Jesus said whatsoever you do to the least of your brothers, that you do unto him. In other words, don't jump to conclusions when you see the outward appearance of an unworthy person. If you reject someone because you think he is unworthy you could be rejecting the embodiment of Christ without even knowing it.  For all you know, the unworthy-appearing person is actually God-sent. God just packaged him that way--later God will guide His people through revelation to recognize the servant he sends forth among them.

   You see, again, all that explanation is needed just to explain the idea that God might use an unlikely candidate as His vessel.

   The God I serve didn't give me the power to judge another man, that he may either enter heaven or be cast into hell. God gave me--and all Christians--wisdom not to be used to judge the eternal destiny of men. That wisdom is to be used to help me navigate the labyrinths of temporal life--because, in the meantime, that is the life He has given me to function with in this fallen world. 

   If God chooses to raise a leader of men, He will not--in denial of His nature--use any kind of deceptive or misleading packaging. The revelation that Christian orthodoxy talks about as the mechanics by which God influences human decision making is revelation that is reserved for the purpose of understanding God himself. To direct the temporal affairs of God's people in the Old Testament, God was not vague. He was not mysterious, he was not suggestive. He was blatant.

   He did not give three million Israelites wandering the vastness of the Sinai desert navigational revelation. He simply told them follow the pillar of fire by night, and the pillar of smoke by day.

   I've listened to Donald Trump all throughout the campaign, I have never heard him say one biblical thing. Saying "Jesus is popular in America" is not a spiritual achievement. It is just dumbing down the obvious. What I have heard from him plenty is how he promises to make America wealthy again--and he leaves no room for misinterpretation that by "wealthy" he means material fortunes, in the framework of jobs, tax rebates, trade advantage, the stock market, arms sales, snatching the commercial success of TikTok and other tell-tale signs of material prosperity.

   It is no wonder many of the ministries that support Donald Trump are some of the same controversial churches--of contentious stature within the Body of Christ itself--that espouse the so-called Prosperity Gospel.  This is the unvarnished preaching of the idea that God meant for Christians to never experience poverty, and doing so to regard it as a sign of disfavor from which deliverance must be sought.

   Many Christians have pointed out to me that Donald Trump has appointed conservative justices to the US Supreme Court. Enough of them already, in fact, that the reversal of Roe vs. Wade is a foregone conclusion. Soon enough, but not too long from now, abortion would be illegal again across all fifty states.

   Abortion is murder. From the very first time the crime was committed by Cain, God had always disapproved of it, God never lifted the  mark of Cain from the collective brow of the entire human race. The reversal of Roe vs. Wade will not set things right for the unborn child in the womb of its mother on her way to an abortion clinic. That child died in the heart of its mother from the time she became aware of her pregnancy. The abortion clinic is only where she goes to bury the fetus. If the Christian church will look to policing hospitals and clinics to stop the unbridled killing of innocent unborns, the battle is already lost.  If it puts its trust on legislation and criminal penalties to coerce society into respecting the sanctity of human life, it abdicates its whole duty to respond to God's call for His law to be written on tablets of human hearts--and not in volumes of congressional bills.

   If the church cannot imbue the pro-life value of God's kingdom in the hearts of men and women, even nine pro-life justices in the US Supreme Court--the entire bench--cannot stop abortion. It is not a legal issue. It is an issue of the heart. The agencies of government cannot compensate for the failure of family and religious institutions in propagating the Christian value and ethical systems.

   On the other hand, I hear only Joe Biden trying his best to refocus America to the womb of its inception--the godly founding of America as the world's beacon of faith, hope and restoration. He cries that this election is about a battle for the soul of the nation. 

   The Christian evangelical church rejects that call by rejecting the man through whom God channels the blatant message. They prefer the biblical contortionism needed to rationalize their support for Donald Trump--who is blatant about his total lack of understanding of the will of God. 

   Between Donald Trump who panders to the church by giving in to all their political and material demands, and Joe Biden who appeals to godly conscience and calls on America to rededicate itself to the original ideals of the Christian Founding Fathers, the evangelical church in America threw their support behind the man-pleasing Trump.  The human leaders of the church are simply wrong on this one, there is simply no more polite way to say it.

   I considered delaying writing this piece--what if Donald Trump wins? But if I delayed this, if I refused to go out on a limb and call out the error of the evangelical church in America, then I'm just waiting for the last touchdown in Sunday's football game so I could describe it accurately on Monday morning.  

   I believe that if Donald Trump loses, the people of God who did not bear witness to him being anointed will be vindicated. But if he wins, it will not change the fact that Donald Trump still does not mirror much of God's righteous standard. And this is the crux of the matter:  God expects His people to submit to the civil government he will head anyway. This is the counter-intuitive wisdom that evangelical America pre-empted. It's not that God will test if people will support a man He did  not anoint. It is more likely that God wants to see who would continue to submit to the civil government institution that He anointed, even if its reigns were usurped by the most generic sinner.  The obedience is not demonstrated before the elections--or even in intervention of it--when its possible result is in the hands of man. It comes after the elections when results can no longer be changed--and the destiny of the nation is in the hands of God--Donald Trump or no Donald Trump.Ⓒ 2020 Joel R. Dizon 

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON