In our last episode concerning stealing from Venezuela, ExxonMobil’s CEO described the situation as “uninvestible,” a description which made President, excuse me, El Presidente’ Trump deeply unhappy.
But the story doesn’t stop there. Both Professor Richardson and MS NOW reporter Sydney Carruth have reports on the continuing soap opera; this is from the former:
Trump’s threats against Greenland came at a meeting with oil executives. When he attacked Venezuela to capture Maduro, Trump told reporters that United States oil companies would spend billions of dollars to fix the badly broken infrastructure of oil extraction in that country. But apparently the oil companies had not gotten the memo. They have said that they are not currently interested in investing in Venezuela because they have no idea how badly oil infrastructure there has degraded and no sense of who will run the co
2007 nationalization of their companies from the sale of Venezuelan oil Trump has promised to control. ConocoPhillips, for example, claims it is owed about $12 billion. “We’re not going to look at what people lost in the past, because that was their fault,” Trump told them. “That was a different president. You’re going to make a lot of money, but we’re not going to go back.”
In other words, no reparations from the guy who stands to make scads of money. Just make him scads of money and maybe they’ll make some, too.
The key part of predicting someone’s actions is to understand their goal, and that’s been a problem with President Trump. I continue to find Chad Bauman’s hypothesis from 2020 both persuasive and perversely charming:
The president’s admiration for prosperity theology is well-documented. He was raised in Manhattan’s Marble Collegiate Church, which was pastored by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, whose The Power of Positive Thinking, was a key text in the prosperity movement and took the nation by storm. Similarly, the president’s spiritual advisor, Paula White-Cain, is a prominent contemporary figure in the movement, having survived a 2007 investigation opened by Republican Senator Charles Grassley into her finances (and those of several other prosperity preachers).
As election returns showed the president’s early lead evaporating into the ether last Wednesday, White-Cain broadcasted a prayer service in which she spoke in tongues, called on God to discharge angels from Africa to aid the president’s reelection, and rap-prophesied that she could hear “victory, victory, victory, victory in the quarters of heaven.”
It’s like a particularly ghastly version of confirmation bias. I have lots of money, here’s a religion celebrating wealth, therefore it must be right and I’d better accumulate more to earn God’s approval and admiration.
That makes even this old agnostic a bit gaggy, as it’s such a perversion of the old message of the Christ. It relieves Trump of moral duties and lets him pursue a single goal without regard to the moral collateral damage, as it elevates wealth above all.
And it means that Trump isn’t trying to improve the world – only his bank account. Thus $TRUMP, all the kitsch he sells, all of his antics.
And here’s the thing: a significant portion of the poverty-stricken look at him and sees someone who’s not starving, who has a future of being somebody, and for those whose faith is weak because it didn’t result in at least food on the table, it’s quite the lure. Just as democracy is not magical, neither is Christianity. If each doesn’t come through and help ensure survival of a society, then it’ll be discarded, exchanged for something else that seems a better choice.
For those who try to forecast Trump’s actions, his religious background may turn out to be the key neglected component for explaining his fascination with wealth.
