Politico reports that Sarah Huckabee Sanders thinks President Trump was God’s choice:
“I think God calls all of us to fill different roles at different times, and I think that he wanted Donald Trump to become president,” Sanders said during an interview with Christian Broadcast Network News. “And that’s why he’s there, and I think he has done a tremendous job in supporting a lot of the things that people of faith really care about.”
Which reminds me of some words of support President Bush (43, not 41) received that I happened to see on TV back during his campaign – some voter said she thought that God had picked Bush to be President.
That was well before the wars and economic disaster of the Bush Administration befell us, which I suppose humiliated said voter. Or maybe not, they seem fairly immune to self-abnegation. I later opined that if God had picked Bush, he must surely hate America. And, fact is, most Republicans don’t care to mention President Bush in political conversation. Maybe they did finally pick up on the enormity of their position.
Dana Milbank is on the right track:
This makes sense, because Trump has of late been acting as if he draws his authority from the divine right of kings. He’s asserting his absolute power to act without — and often in contravention of — the Democratic House, the Republican Senate, his own intelligence agencies, law enforcement authorities and diplomats, and the will of the American public.
Presidential defenders say the Sanders claim is simply a repetition of the biblical admonition that all temporal leaders are established by God. And conservative evangelicals have reason to be pleased with Trump’s judicial picks and other policies.
Right up until those judges indulge in incompetence or corruption and are ousted, or, worse, actually turn out to be good judges (such as this one) and rule against the corporatists’ and would-be theocrats’ pet positions. Then they’ll proclaim him to have fallen under the influence of Satan. Poor chap.
But I must say, as an agnostic, Sanders’ remark, her belief that she’s reading the mind of the Divine, or at least interpreting it from the “will” of the voters, is illustrative why such people should simply be laughed out of public discourse. Let me illustrate by building on Sanders’ delusion.
I believe that, given the danger our President has put his own nation in through his actions and inactions with regard to national security, environment, and political corruption, God has decided Americans must learn to appropriate judge their own government, and replace it if need be. Therefore, he willed Trump to be President against the popular vote, and is now waiting for all faithful Americans to surge forth and remove him.
Oh, and fix your damn electoral system while you’re at it. For our God believes in Democracy, and that ain’t Democracy you’re doing.
See? It’s easy. When you’re reading the mind of something that has written so many contradictory and obscure things, and he/she/it is not around to correct you, you can make up any old shit and it sounds good.
And then the zealots come popping out, and before we know it there’s a few dozen people burned at the stake and the lawn is a mess. Do you think I’m joking? Go read some English history. Some representative examples, from which the American Founding Fathers no doubt learned, are embedded in this link.
The point is that Sanders is proceeding down a path bereft of rationality. She has some facts, yeah: President Trump, “conservative judges,” policies she likes. But those don’t add up to a hill of beans until she inserts the approval of a Divine creature for which there is no known objective proof. This is doubly a problem because the human species does not share minds nor consciousness, meaning all we can do is imperfectly communicate. What does that mean?
Sanders may be lying. Or perhaps she’s had a brain malfunction and really thinks she’s talking to God. Or maybe it’s all just deduction on her part. No one can be rationally sure, except perhaps a neurologist with a blood test in hand. But while those first two points are obvious and don’t need discussion, that last one needs a bit of buffing and polishing because Sanders’ idea of the divine is necessarily dissimilar from damn near everyone else’s, and that means her deductions, which necessarily come from her assumptions about God’s mind, may not match my readers’, or her confidants, or her political opponents, or herself a week earlier.
Or mine. She sees the Divine picking Trump as the guy who makes the evangelicals happy by doing their will, regardless of how much he lies, cheats, bellows, boasts, mismanages, and misleads.
And I see Trump as the cautionary lesson, the encouragement to pay more attention to governance and less to, well, pick your favorite time-wasting hobby. Like, say, celebrity adoration. Reality TV shows. Or studying the Bible. God wants us to perform better, not have more judges of a particular bent. That’s my opinion, based on a close study of all the objective information about the Divine. (In case my reader is in doubt, that would be a grand total of none.)
And who’s right? This is the nub, so pay attention. Neither one of us is provably right, yet there are people who don’t deal well with such uncertainty, who’d love to fight the good fight without knowing just which side is the good side.
The Founding Fathers had recent instructive examples in the history of religious folks, and that’s why we’re a secular nation. That’s why the Johnson Amendment exists. I don’t care how much it galls any of the religious folk, Christian, Hindi, or what have you, the history of theocracies is poor and getting worse, and that’s because rationality is not part of the discourse.
And, yes, I’m pissed off that Sanders would display her poor judgment and ridiculous deductions in her role as a government spokesman. It’s an embarrassment. This country excels when it’s rational, and falls apart when it’s in the throes of religious sensibility.
