On the tarmac yesterday in Ohio, the fake president warned the nation that Joe Biden, if elected, would unleash an atheist apocalypse: “No religion, no anything. Hurt the Bible, hurt God. He’s against God, he’s against guns, he’s against energy, our kind of energy…religion, Bible, God.”
Before you gnash your teeth (as well you should), here’s some historical perspective. Idiotic attacks like that are nothing new. They date all the way back to the election of 1800.
Presidential candidate Thomas Jefferson was a Christian who refused to wear his religion on his sleeve; his enemies, working for incumbent John Adams, falsely claimed he was an infidel. One pro-Adams newspaper said the election was a choice between “GOD-AND A RELIGIOUS PRESIDENT” and “JEFFERSON-AND NO GOD!!!” If Jefferson were elected, one pro-Adams tract warned, he would close the churches. Indeed, “those morals which protect our lives…and shield our religion from contempt and profanation, will be trampled upon and exploded.”
But we can cut John Adams a break. He himself was a good man and he never personally hurled those charges at Jefferson; in that distant era of primitive media, he was largely unaware that such toxic tracts were being circulated on his behalf in faraway states.
Trump has no excuses. Granted, he’s desperate to save his hide, terrified at the prospect of losing and thus spending the rest of his life fighting to stay out of jail. But you have to wonder, in this benighted year of death and unemployment, whether America’s average voters (aside from his Kool-Aid drinkers) are going to swallow a God sermon from a guy who cheated on all three wives; paid off a porn star with whom he canoodled while wife three was home with a newborn; tear-gassed peaceful protesters in order to hoist a Bible upside down in front of a church he doesn’t attend; failed in an interview to cite a single Bible verse when asked to name one; brags of grabbing women “by the pussy”; locks kids in cages; describes 157,000 pandemic deaths as “it is what it is”; stole money from his own charitable foundation and spent it on himself; and, of course, so much more.
Perhaps Trump should consult the King James Bible, Galatians 5:22, which condemns “adultery…lasciviousness…hatred…wrath, strife, seditions” and says “that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.” Only those who practice “love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance” shall gain admittance.
I’ll go out on a limb and take a wild guess that Joe Biden – a practicing Catholic who wears his late son Beau’s rosary beads on his left wrist – will inhabit the kingdom long before Trump. (Heck, one of Trump’s alleged rape victims is still hot on his trail.) But the big question for Biden, in the wake of yesterday’s attack, was whether to ignore Trump or hit back.
Jefferson faced that dilemma. During the 1800 campaign, he told James Monroe in letter that his instinct was to simply “disregard” the anti-God accusations. He wrote, “It has been so impossible to contradict all the lies that I have determined to contradict none; for while I should be engaged with one, they would publish twenty new ones.”
But Biden has decided to take the opposite tack. He writes:
Like so many people, my faith has been the bedrock foundation of my life: it’s provided me comfort in moments of loss and tragedy, it’s kept me grounded and humbled in times of triumph and joy…My faith teaches me to love my neighbor as I would myself, while President Trump only seeks to divide us. My faith teaches me to care for the least among us, while President Trump seems to only be concerned about his gilded friends. My faith teaches me to welcome the stranger, while President Trump tears families apart. My faith teaches me to walk humbly, while President Trump teargassed peaceful protestors so he could walk over to a church for a photo op. As I’ve said so many times before, we’re in the battle for the soul of our nation, and President Trump’s decision today to profane God and to smear my faith in a political attack is a stark reminder of what the stakes of this fight truly are.
Or, as the 19th-century British essayist William Hazlitt once remarked, “:The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy.”
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Meanwhile, we should note for the record that Trump has suffered another political humiliation, this time in red Missouri. On Tuesday night, 52 percent of the voters decided to enshrine Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion in their state’s constitution. Voters in red Oklahoma did the same thing on June 30.
In other words, at a time when Trump is still trying to kill Obamacare in the U.S. Supreme Court (in the midst of a pandemic, no less), voters in Trump-friendly states are using Obamacare to expand health coverage to low-income citizens who badly need it. More than 200,000 Missourians may now get it.
It’s amazing how right-wing ideology crumbles when it collides with urgent reality. Missouri is now the sixth Republican-run state to endorse Obamacare expansion at the ballot box. No word yet on whether Trump thinks those voters have “hurt the Bible.”