Your Own Personal (MAGA) Jesus

Trump versus the Bishop

Every picture tells a story, and the images of the Trump crime family and the Vances listening to Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde tell a bleak story of America’s descent into the Hellmouth. Their assembled faces might have appeared in some Renaissance portrait, let’s call it I Bastardi. There is Trump’s lynx-like scowl, the downturned mouth and the imperious raised eyebrows, the dim incredulity that some lowly cleric would have the temerity to call him out in a public forum.

Next to him his equally sinister wife - a grim nod to Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People, tight-mouthed and resentful, oozing the same sociopathic malevolence as her husband, or perhaps she is merely thinking of her grifting cryptocurrency. And then the furrowed brow of JP Vance - a faint smile, half-way between disdainful irony and how dare she?

This hillbilly Faust probably attended enough sermons in his Kentucky youth to know that he has sold his soul to the devil for the rock bottom price of a vice presidency and Peter Thiel’s cash, but is he bothered? Is he hell.

Around them the infamous Trump brood: a grotesque medley of highlights, pampered stony-faced privilege, suspicion and predation. There is Tiffany half-pouting, as you do in church, and Eric grasping to understand what is actually happening around him, as a female (female!!) bishop dares to hold up a mirror to his family’s cruelty and venality, with these powerful and stirring words:

In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and Independent families, some who fear for their lives. The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals. They…may not be citizens or have the proper documentation. But the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, gurudwaras and temples. I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away. And that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land.

These words were a direct response to the Executive Order which Trump had issued the previous day, declaring:

America’s sovereignty is under attack. Our southern border is overrun by cartels, criminal gangs, known terrorists, human traffickers, smugglers, unvetted military-age males from foreign adversaries, and illicit narcotics that harm Americans, including America.

This invasion has caused widespread chaos and suffering in our country over the last 4 years. It has led to the horrific and inexcusable murders of many innocent American citizens, including women and children, at the hands of illegal aliens. Foreign criminal gangs and cartels have begun seizing control of parts of cities, attacking our most vulnerable citizens, and terrorizing Americans beyond the control of local law enforcement. Cartels control vast territories just south of our southern border, effectively controlling who can and cannot travel to the United States from Mexico. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have tragically died from drug overdoses because of the illicit narcotics that have flowed across the southern border.

To deal with this ‘invasion’, Trump is preparing to send the army to the border, rescind refugee applications, withdraw citizenship from the children of ‘aliens’ who were born in the US, and unleash what may well prove to be the largest deportation operation in American history. Bishop Budde’s description of American immigrants who ‘may not be citizens or have the proper documentation’ as neighbours, members of different faiths, taxpayers and workers, was a powerful rebuttal of the dehumanizing caricatures that have made this onslaught possible.

Very few politicians, either in the United States or Europe, have ever made such a forthright defence of immigrants and immigration in the face of far-right populism. Most politicians are too frightened of accusations that they are ‘soft’ on immigration to speak out like this. And the fact that Bishop Budde’s appeal for mercy was couched in Christian terms had very particular implications for a president and a movement that believes that God and Jesus are on their side.

This month, Congress was treated to the gross spectacle of the Defence Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth - the AI incarnation of the generic white supremacist sexual predator/alleged rapist - bleating piously about his ‘lord and saviour, Jesus’, when presented with documented allegations of sexual assault.

MAGA Republicans love Jesus, and they think that Jesus loves Trump. But the Jesus they believe in is not the Jesus that I was taught to believe in as a child. That Jesus preached compassion, empathy and solidarity with the poor and the sick, the marginalized and the excluded. The MAGA Jesus is more likely to be a white alpha male Chuck Norris, toting an automatic rifle and a handgun, ready to blow away migrants crossing the Rio Grande.

Just Google the words ‘Gun Jesus’ and you can see these memes, AI-generated images and artwork in all their tawdry eye-popping madness. Some MAGA supporters think that Trump is Jesus. Last year, Marjorie Taylor Greene compared the presidential candidate to the man who was ‘murdered on a Roman cross’ in her response to the Stormy Daniels trial guilty verdict.

If Jesus had cheated on his wife and paid a porn star hush money to keep quiet about it and then falsified his business records to conceal that transaction, there might be some merit in this comparison. As the trial should have made clear, Trump is not the messiah, he’s just a very naughty boy. Yet many of Trump’s God-fearing supporters still believe, as TV evangelist Hank Kunneman put it last year, that in a battle between good and evil, ‘There is something on Trump that the enemy fears: it's called the anointing.’

As a non-believer who received a Catholic education, I can only gape in slack-jawed horror and amazement at such a gross perversion of Christianity, and I suspect that the priests and nuns who taught me would have felt the same disgust.

Trump has clearly begun to believe this gibberish himself, or has at least recognized its usefulness. During his campaign, he also suggested that he was ‘chosen’ and ‘anointed’ by God to save America, and that divine intervention saved him from an assassin’s bullet. In his inaugural address, he told his audience ‘I felt then, and I believe even more so now, that my life was saved by God to make America great again.’

At the same ceremony, with Biden and Harris looking on helplessly, the Reverend Franklin Graham praised God for Trump’s comeback. ‘When Donald Trump’s enemies thought he was down and out,’ the man of the cloth proclaimed, ‘you and you alone saved his life and raised him up with strength and power.’

This ought to be pass the sick bag time, but all this ol’ time religion has clearly gone to Mangolini’s head, so much so that he too could be heard babbling about the ‘power of God’s love’ at a National Prayer Breakfast this month as if he actually believed it.

A more crazed and dishonest perversion of the Christian faith has not been seen since Flannery O’Connor’s con artist Hoover Shoats fleeced punters to fork out a dollar to join the ‘Holy Church of Christ Without Christ’ in Wiseblood.

You don’t have to be a Christian to find these depraved God-spouting, Trump-worshipping charlatans repugnant and shameful. But shame is beyond this movement and its leader, who did not like the version of themselves that Bishop Budde presented to the world. And so Trump denounced Budde as a ‘nasty’ bishop and a ‘Radical Left hard line Trump hater’ and called on her to apologize.

Trump’s vapid minions immediately went on the attack with him. Lorenzo Sewell - the preacher who delivered the benediction at Trump’s inauguration and compared Trump to Martin Luther King - called Budde a ‘heretic’ and accused her of delivering a ‘demonic message.’

The Episcopal Diocese’s social media account was overwhelmed with posts calling on Budde to resign. One Fox News host called her ‘Satan.’ Sean Hannity condemned a ‘disgraceful prayer full of fearmongering and division’. Hannity’s accusation could be levelled more credibly at Trump’s Executive Order. But what do these people care? Like Trump himself, they lie as they breathe, and they do it so naturally and so consistently that you wonder if even Jesus could save them.

One Republican congressman called for Budde to be ‘added to the deportation list’ - the default solution to every far-right problem. The Daily Wire claimed that ‘hell exists for people like Mariann’, because pleading with a president for mercy is what gets you into Hell nowadays. Naturally, the Daily Mail joined in with attacks on the ‘woke bishop’ and her ‘wild lecture.’

To her credit, Budde has not backed down, and has refused Trump’s call to apologize. And now the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has condemned Trump’s decision to allow immigration officials to enter schools and places of worship as ‘contrary to the common good’, arguing:

Turning places of care, healing, and solace into places of fear and uncertainty for those in need, while endangering the trust between pastors, providers, educators and the people they serve, will not make our communities safer.

This statement has aroused the wrath of the ‘heartbroken’ Catholic, J.D. Vance, who has accused the bishops of faking humanitarianism in order to access funds that help to ‘resettle illegal immigrants.’ If there’s anyone who knows about fakery and grifting, it’s Vance. And you don’t have to be a Christian to recognize the disingenuous and sordid hypocrisy of these pious MAGA con men, who use religion to give themselves a lustre that they don’t deserve, and then turn on their own religious leaders when their fascistic cruelty is called out.

Bishop Budde knew what the response to her appeal for mercy would be, but she did what she believed her religion expected her to do: she defended those who will be at the receiving end of MAGA extremism. Once again, you don’t have to be a Christian to do this, but in order to understand the calamity that is unfolding in America, you do need to be able to distinguish between those who use religion as an alibi and a shield, and those who represent the universal principles that are common to all religions and which also transcend them - justice, fairness, solidarity with the weak, the marginalised and the defenceless.

That is what the ‘woke bishop’ called on the president to do, and her moral courage should act as a rallying cry to all those who oppose this dire authoritarian movement and its army of charlatans.

And as for those who are attacking her, they are exactly how Jesus once described the Pharisees, ‘like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness.’