Talk of domination comes easy to the weak
When I was a teenager in the ‘70s, one of my secret vices was the steady consumption of books by Hal Lindsey, author of one of that decade’s top sellers, “The Late, Great Planet Earth.”
Lindsey’s books were designed to be primers on the End Times and how to recognize the coming of the Antichrist — a charismatic, ostensibly secular political leader who was in reality a devil-worshipping authoritarian who, with the help of his lieutenant, the False Prophet, often disguised himself as a God-loving populist to the religiously gullible.
Lindsey’s interpretation of Scripture hinged upon a uniquely American take on eschatology that was less than 100 years old at the time. His teachings, like that of most American popularizers of the apocalypse, ignored centuries of interpretations of how the weird, visionary literature of Revelation was understood on a symbolic level.
Consequently, readers who took Lindsey’s pop theology seriously had no problem imaging either post-Camp David Jimmy Carter or jet-setting Henry Kissinger as the Antichrist. The idea of the Antichrist was still flexible enough to encompass America’s entire political spectrum, though there was some resistance to imagining him as a North American and not a slick European or South American.
What I remember vividly about that absurd and gaudy era was the theology of suspicion that implicated everyone who called attention to themselves in politics, especially in vulgar ways that would’ve involved using a church as a prop for a photo op.
In those days, the Religious Right was one very angry and easily spooked constituency that saw “the Abomination of Desolation” aka “the Man of Perdition” aka the Antichrist in every deviation from American constitutional norms.
Fast forward many decades to today’s post-COVID-19 fever dream of racial resentment. Former President Barack Obama, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and billionaire philanthropist George Soros are the Religious Right’s strongest candidates for Antichrist — despite the presence of a character in the White House who would’ve inspired an armed Christian resistance movement in the ‘70s, given his track record for literal and symbolic blasphemy.
Standing in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church after pepper balls and flash-bang grenades had been used to clear peaceful protesters from Lafayette Park to make the photo op possible, President Donald Trump awkwardly inspected a Bible handed to him by his daughter for the occasion.
After examining it but never referencing a favorite passage, he held the Bible aloft like a winning lottery ticket. Meanwhile, civil, religious and constitutional norms were crushed in securing a photo op that was widely mocked around the world.
The American military had been used in an aggressive way against civilians as the self-styled “president of law and order” prattled on about “strength” and the need to “dominate” the protesters like they were a species of vermin to be executed.
It was obvious to those who watched the commercial that Mr. Trump’s re-election committee quickly shot of the visit to St. John’s that the president was compensating for the stories that leaked about hiding out in an underground bunker with his family when protesters breached a perimeter on the White House grounds Friday night.
Because of the roar of the public’s laughter, something cracked in Donald Trump this week — something fundamental to who he is.
It is no secret Mr. Trump spends an inordinate amount of time massaging his own ego and fretting about how he’s perceived, but there was a stridency to his latest stunt that was simply breathtaking and resulted in more than the ordinary allotment of lies.
He’s come a long way since the days followers on Twitter proclaimed him “the Chosen One” and “the King of Israel.” He no longer has the aura of invincibility that encompassed him when, during his first official foreign trip as president, he posed with his wife and a Saudi potentate, clutching a glowing orb in the single most sinister photograph of a U.S. president ever.
While doubling down on the rhetoric of toughness this week as the protests for George Floyd and for racial justice got bigger and encircled the White House, Mr. Trump conjured a story about not retreating to a bunker at all last week, but merely “inspecting it” at the request of those protecting his family.
Meanwhile, former U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis excoriated his former boss in a public statement as “the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us.”
Even the current defense secretary, Mark Esper, tried to distance himself from the shameful photo op at St. John’s on Monday by rejecting Mr. Trump’s call to “dominate” the “battlespace” of American cities. He made it clear he would not go along with deploying the American military against the American people. Thank God for small things, eh? The thinking is that Mr. Esper probably won’t have his current job this time next week.
Televangelist Pat Robertson, who has been around since Hal
Lindsey’s days, uncharacteristically blasted Mr. Trump for using inflammatory rhetoric when cool, pragmatic leadership is called for.
“It seems like now is the time to say, ‘I understand your pain, I want to comfort you, I think it’s time we love each other.’ But the president took a different course,” Mr. Robertson said. “He said, ‘I am the ‘president of law and order,’ and he issued a heads-up.
“He said, ‘I’m ready to send in military troops if the nation’s governors don’t act to quell the violence that has rocked American cities.’ A matter of fact, he spoke of them [governors] as being jerks. You just don’t do that, Mr. President. It isn’t cool!”
Mr. Robertson then made an impassioned plea to the millions of evangelical viewers of “The 700 Club” to reject racism and to embrace God. “We’ve got to love each other,” he said. “We just got to do that. We are all one race, and we need to love each other.”
While Mr. Trump displays all of the superficial markers of Hal Lindsey’s mythical Abomination of Desolation, this week has also been one of revelation for me.
For a man determined to show how tough he is whether confined to a bunker or not, Mr. Trump couldn’t help finally revealing himself to be the most extraordinarily weak Antichrist imaginable.