Interlinking History
The Trump Monarch — Reprehensible King or Fated Caesar?
Treacherous American Presidential Politics
2 Nov 2020:
As the Presidential Election on 3 November 2020 treads upon us in the U.S., it is easy to be swept up in the polls, hyped up about the Electoral College, fear violence and more clashes between opposing politically-charged citizens, and all the while during real concerns about our national fate in the COVID-19 pandemic and the unabated protests of social injustice. Looking back to our poignant summer, it’s hard not to also recount in review, the irreligious event that set off a storm of critics and questions about President Trump’s hidden intentions about his place in our history and take another perspective on his likeness to baneful historical figures, no matter who wins the right to sit in the White House in 2021.
7 June 2020:
Instinctually, opposing interpretations erupted from President Trump’s photo-op last Monday evening (June 1) in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., as the President held awkwardly, and at first hesitantly in rumination of which position to pose, a Revised Standard Version Holy Bible hoisted above his right shoulder like a dictatorial savior. Indeed, the forcible removal of peaceful protestors by tear gas beforehand in order for him to make this contrived appearance, secularly highlights his imperial self-worth and his true compassion for disregard of any obstacles to his political agenda and self-praised media reputation, but, on the other hand, many evangelical supporters recognized his display as the testament of his mandate of God. Still others, politically and/or religiously affiliated, found obvious offense to the overt insinuations of mere political pandering to hard line evangelicals in an act of dominance over lawlessness (from the rioting and looting considered as evil by the most fervent evangelicals) and the sacrilegious borrowing of a religious establishment and text (even though a controversial version of the Bible for evangelicals) for personal political gain. Yet, a delightfully superficial irony to all this is the coincidental reference, indirectly or not, to King Henry VIII — also known to have been an obese hypochondriac — as well as the irrelevant attempts to entangle religion and government in contradiction to Thomas Jefferson’s famous letter paraphrased as ‘separation of Church and State’ while the real constitutional and legal arguments rage on in the true backdrop of racial inequality and abuse of police use of force for which the peaceful protestors are demonstrating.
The Episcopal origin is linked to the Anglican Church of the King of England of 1534 when King Henry VIII broke his ties to the Roman Catholic Church for the Pope’s denial of his annulment of his marriage to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. The repugnant likeness of character between King Henry VIII and President Trump gets even better. Famously known for the English Reformation, King Henry VIII declared himself the Head of the Church as a result of his singular dynastic focus on producing a legitimate male heir between multiple women and affairs. Philippa Gregory’s 2003 The Other Boleyn Girl was the salacious story (also turned into the 2008 movie) highlighting just one of many historical accounts of the king’s jealous sensitivities in love, his subsequent rash marriages, divorces, and ordered beheadings of his wives. It is also rather entertaining to note King Henry VIII’s legacy was notably abominable, known as the worst monarch of all time by some British historians, in addition to his marital woes, and including but not limited to his vanity, his deficient commanding of unproductive wars, squandering of his entire formidable bequeathed fortune from his father Henry VII, his poor health later in life, and his characteristic fear of disease. President Trump’s own records are dubious regarding his self-proclamation of billionaire status prior to office — his wealth largely inherited and artificially augmented through tax schemes and familial loans to avoid personal bankruptcy; his recorded sexist comments and rhetoric and scandals of extramarital affairs, along with his most recent questionable glowing health checkup report which reconfirms he is the oldest American president to ever be in office, but also extrapolates his serious corpulence and glosses over his fear of contracting COVID-19 by his compulsive intake of hydroxychloroquine as a false and dangerously reckless preventive measure.
What makes the presidential photo stunt further humorous is Jesus wasn’t white, in the European White sense. Moreover, the greatest flourish of Christianity is attributed to Constantine whose complete reversal of two centuries prior of persecutions of Christians to declaring the religion as the official one of the Roman Empire in 380 CE has been debated by historians as a conversion of political convenience and used as justifications for and victories of wars; a form of realpolitik — a German coined term utilized in 19th century German nationalism and ‘as means to strengthen states and tighten social order’ (Wikipedia.org) and implication of Machiavelli politics (playing as amorally, criminally, and deceptively as a crafty game induces). That is to say, President Trump is not the first, nor presumably the last, to use any form of religion (Christianity being the majority American White man’s) as absolution or anointment for his impending war(s) whether on non-White looters, the U.S. Constitution, or to legitimize his superior inalienable authority.
Yes, we know that American history was built from the Whites: the Pilgrims of the Mayflower were Calvinists (a major sect of European Protestantism of which Episcopalians are a part) and the Founding Fathers were white — but, they were not Christian. They were Deists — practicing the belief in an overall Creator of all but absent in the world and thus the requirement of reason and logic that must guide us.
It was based on that human Deist logic that Thomas Jefferson’s allusion to Church and State as divided by a separating wall, that we have our liberties of practicing any religion (in the First Amendment) and the non-prerequisite of a particular religion for holding an elected office (Article VI, Section III of the U.S. Constitution).
Also, portentously, non-Hispanic Whites will not be the future majority in America. According to Dudley L. Poston, Jr., professor of sociology at Texas A&M University, his research based on the Census puts Whites (nearly 60% in 2020) to below 50% projected in 2045 (and at the turn of the 20th century, Whites were 87%). Hispanics and Latinos will commensurately increase to 21% followed by Blacks and Asians. Moreover, his studies show that White children under the age of 11 are already in the minority today.
Perhaps President Trump’s performance last Monday evening was an illusory deflection from some ulterior undercurrent intent?
What is not laughable and more incisively construed from President Trump’s photo stunt is his incidental preoccupation with sovereignty that exudes from his speech of and flirts with militarism — even an inferred militaristic Caesarean rite to dictatorship through domestic military might; his continual encouragement in multiple media speeches of the use of military control of domestic matters, including the one made at the White House Rose Garden just prior to his photo-op as well as advocating strongly of all governors to deploy the National Guards to ‘dominate’ over the rioters in every state.
The apparent Attorney General Barr’s order for Park Police and (military) National Guardsmen to clear D.C.’s Lafayette Square for President Trump’s appearance just after the end of curfew Monday evening was merely a parlour diversion to the subsequent internal instigation of debates and garnered backing that have now ensued in favor of domestic warmongering, from senators (notably Tom Cotton of Arkansas whose own op-ed in support of deploying military domestically was later debated for publication retraction from The New York Times), to military officials, sometimes dangerously vacillating, as Army General Mark Milley and Defense Secretary Mark Esper were criticized for appearance of acquiesce but appeared as though they were entrapped in doing so in accompanying President Trump in photos after the use of military force on protestors in Lafayette Square, and Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy whose stance is not all that clear other than obeying orders from Defense Secretary Mark Esper who finally agreed to call off the then already stationed active duty troops outside D.C.
Domestic military force debates, criticisms, and fears have now been awakened to the fore. Within days, former Defense Secretary of the Trump administration and a retired United States Marine Corps general with an impressive military career and a devout Catholic, James Mattis, came forward with an openly critical statement against the President’s divisive leadership, character, and his abuse of power for calling on domestic military action. Other highly respected military figures, retired General John Kelly who was also President Trump’s former White House Chief of Staff, retired General John Allen, and the current Trump administration’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, have all now come out openly, after the fact, denouncing Trump’s wanton calls for military action domestically; followed by another statement by former U.S. ambassadors and high-ranking military officers who firmly caution against the breach of U.S. Constitutional use of military for domestic and presidential means.
If it were not for these highly experienced decorated and prognosticating former or retired U.S. military generals and high-ranking officers from speaking out, our Rome may have already begun to become overrun with military forces in prelude to ordain the king.
Meanwhile, contradictory media accounts came of Attorney General Barr’s ordering of the clearing of peaceful protestors which he denies and his subsequent official remarks 72 hours after the presidential photo-op assuaging conjectures of formal White House sentiments of pursuing federal and independent legal justice against the Minneapolis police involved in George Floyd’s murder.
So in the midst of confusion and uproar, the commotion aims to push the battle for racial equality in America into the background while the exposed battle emerges with presidential supremacy. President Trump’s continuous remarks, on Twitter, demanding blind respect for regal objects, i.e. the U.S. flag, that for him symbolizes irreproachable preeminence and an eternal blanket for all national flaws or for any obligations for reforms, is not an admonish for ‘no kneeling’ but rather the circuitous treacherous call for allegiance to himself, his doctrine and authority on ‘law and order’ in his absolute terms.
While the facts remain regarding the economic inequitable realities between Blacks and Whites in wealth, income, unemployment, poverty, healthcare, and COVID-19 deaths, President Trump’s nearly silent church photo-op last Monday (as he shushed media) was clear propaganda with no obvious acknowledgement to the religious Nicene Creed (core to Episcopalians), but, rather, hijacking the real message of Jesus as his own: ‘…the gospel regards the incarnation [of Christ] as challenging the existing order…Christ’s birth is not a silent night — it’s the beginning of a revolution that threatened to undermine the whole basis of Roman power.’ (Frasier, Giles. Empires prefer a baby and the cross to the adult Jesus. 23 Dec 2004. theguardian.com).
As President Trump irreverently contends that the deceased George Floyd, who was murdered by police brutality, would be gazing from heaven in approval of his performance of the ‘improved’ jobs report on Friday and his demagoguery continues to feign as our U.S. president for his own maddening narcissism and his imaginary fictitious television series, it cannot be understated that while some protestors allegedly did set ablaze the nursery of St. John’s Episcopal church the Sunday evening prior to the President’s photo-op the following Monday evening, and the fire damage was gratefully not considered significant, the more indelible warning implicated by some protestor’s vandalizing mark on the church wall that read ‘The Devil is across [the] street’ is far more foreboding of the equivalent cautionary guidance from the very same Revised Standard Version Holy Bible (clasped contemptuously by President Trump during that photo-op) of a wolf in sheep’s clothing (Matthew 7:15 RSV).
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