The biggest mystery to me about the following of Donald Trump is all of these people who for years now have made excuses for his numerous crimes and defended him against all the wrongs against our country that have been proven against him. The number one question that keeps coming up in my mind is, how in the world can an intelligent person who thinks of themselves as a Christian continue to support this wretched human being? I do believe that none of us are without sin and how dare I cast the stone. It’s a simple common sense observation by anyone who has an ounce of faith in what we believe to be “the right thing to do.”
Here in the Deep South, most of us were raised in church and learned from the time we could comprehend what church was about, that there are Ten Commandments that God has set down for us to obey. It doesn’t matter what church we attend, they are all the same Ten Commandments.
The Second Commandment tells us “Thou shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself no graven image.” Donald Trump has spent his entire life erecting altars to himself. His name, emblazoned on every building he builds, reminds all who see it what Donald Trump thinks of himself. He sees himself as the greatest jobs president that God ever created, “the most militaristic person ever,” the best negotiator, the best wall builder, and having “the best words.” Trump worships himself and demands that others put him on a pedestal and treat him with reverence due to gods and kings, neither of which he is. He once referred to himself as “The Chosen One” and sadly many so-called Christians did not find this as blasphemy.
The Third Commandment “You shall not take the name of the Lord our God in vain.” If you have ever attended a Trump rally or watched his YouTube video, you will hear him use God’s name in some of his speeches. In the book of Micah 6:8, it says rhetorically, “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” Donald Trump does not love justice, who does not love kindness, and does not walk humbly with our God, or humbly at all. He has regularly brought disrepute upon God’s character and, as such, irreverently misuses God’s name.
The Fourth Commandment “Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.” We all see differences of opinion on religion, however, does this mean that we take a day off and fly down to Florida and play golf or does it teach us about sanctifying a day so that we may learn how to bring sanctity to every day? In an early interview, Trump said “I don’t pray because I don’t sin.”
The Fifth Commandment tells us “Honor thy Father and thy Mother.” Donald Trump’s mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, was born in Scotland in 1912. On February 17, 1930, she was issued an immigration visa. On May 2, 1930, MacLeod departed Glasgow on board the RMS Transylvania arriving in New York City on May 11, 1930. Like many immigrants, she dreamed of becoming a U.S. citizen. She began working as a domestic servant and was naturalized twelve years later on March 10, 1942. Donald Trump’s immigration ban and border security measures fly in the face of the freedom that his own mother celebrated by immigrating to the United States. He dishonors her memory when he attempts to shut down immigration, belittle and bully those who clean and cook for his hotels, and withhold wages from those who perform vital work for his projects.
The Sixth Commandment is clear “Thou shall not kill.” You say “Oh but Trump never killed anyone.” Wrong. On January 6, 2021, he incited a riot in our Capital that resulted in the death of Capital Police Officer, Brian Sicknick. He encouraged violence and praised the crowd for their attacks on the police officers and the destruction of our Capital. If you will recall, Charles Manson never physically committed murder but he incited and encouraged his followers to act on his behalf.
How many innocent children have been fatally killed in our schools because of gun violence? One of the first things Trump did was sign an Executive Order allowing anyone with mental health issues to have access to firearms. Since this law was removed from our land, there has been an uprise in gun deaths.
A year into the COVID-19 crisis, more than 386,000 Americans died from the virus. We can’t say with precision how the crisis would have unfolded differently if Trump had been more truthful. But it’s reasonable to venture that his dishonesty led to a significant number of deaths.
The Seventh Commandment “Thou shall not commit adultery.” In 1990, Trump had an extramarital affair with Marla Maples while married to his first wife, Ivana Trump. Ms. Maples became pregnant with Trump’s child. He divorced Ivana Trump and married Marla Maples. He divorced her to marry the 3rd Mrs Trump who he also cheated on with porn actress Stormy Daniels. He has been accused by 19 different women of sexual assault and even bragged about it in an interview with Billy Bush. He has regularly objectified women rating them on a scale from 1 to 10. He has no respect for women and is not a role model for his own son. Trump has also expressed his lust for his own daughter, Ivanka.
The Eighth Commandment “Thou shall not steal.” According to the Washington Post, Trump stole over $250,000 from his charitable foundation where people had donated their own money and used these funds to settle lawsuits. Trump University was another avenue to swindle people out of their money. He has spent his entire adult life running a con on people as his business. Let’s not forget the classified documents that he took from the White House when he left. This is not even a fraction of the things that could be listed here.
The Ninth Commandment “Thou shall not bear false witness against our neighbor” is most likely the easiest one of all. It would be impossible to list the number of lies that Donald Trump has told in just one week. Just before election day in 2016, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said that over 5,000 students across the country were defrauded out of about $40 million by Donald Trump and Trump University. Students argued that they had been “lured by false promises into paying up to $35,000 to learn Trump’s real estate investing secrets from his hand-picked instructors.” This is not even the beginning of the lies that he has told. During his term as President of the United States, Donald Trump made tens of thousands of false or misleading claims. The Washington Post‘s fact-checkers documented 30,573 false or misleading claims during his presidential term, an average of about 21 per day.[ The Toronto Star tallied 5,276 false claims from January 2017 to June 2019, an average of 6.1 per day. Commentators and fact-checkers have described the scale of Trump’s mendacity as “unprecedented” in American politics and the consistency of falsehoods a distinctive part of his business and political identities.
As part of their attempts to overturn the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Trump and his allies repeatedly falsely claimed there had been massive election fraud and that Trump had won the election. Their effort was characterized by some as an implementation of the big lie propaganda technique. On June 8, 2023, a grand jury indicted Trump on one count of making “false statements and representations”, specifically by hiding subpoenaed classified documents from his own attorney who was trying to find and return them to the government. On August 21, 2023, of Trump’s falsehoods about the 2020 election were listed in his Washington, D.C. indictment while 27 were listed in Georgia
The most dangerous lie of his presidency was that Covid 19 was a virus equivalent to the flu and “totally under control”. The lie that the virus was “disappearing” and suggested to Americans that they didn’t have to change much about their usual behavior. We found out later that he knew all along that this was a dangerous virus and he intentionally deceived the American people.
The Tenth Commandment “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house, nor his wife, his man-servant, his maid-servant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is your neighbor’s.” Trump covets attention, love, glory, power, and victory. His childish claim that he had the largest crowd “ever” at his presidential inauguration was a sad joke. His jealousy of President Obama refused to accept that the Obama inauguration was the largest in history. He consistently reminded us of his 306 Electoral win while ignoring the over 3 million popular votes that he lost to Hillary Clinton.
When you think about all of this in the sense that preachers are standing in the pulpits praising this man and encouraging their church to re-elect him is mind-blowing. No credibility compares the reasoning.