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O R W H Y I D I D N T V O T E F O R T R U M P
A few early mornings ago, I received a call from someone I know quite well
who said they had run into an essay on the Internet that I had written about
Trumpism and was surprised as it appeared from the title of the essay that I
had not voted for Trump. 1
My response was that as a long time Republican and a conservative (at least
a solid fiscal conservative), of course I did not vote for Trump. I could not,
based on the humanistic values that underlie both Republicanism and con-
servatism.2
The caller seemed confused. So, I deepened this simple explanation with a
discussion that as he was neither representative of Republican or conserva-
tive values, so why would I want to vote for him? At least in this last election,
my perspective was that the Democratic choice for president, Hillary Clinton,
was much more representative of Republican and conservative values than
Trump. The caller responded with, But how can that be so? What follows is
my thinking on this matter:
T H E I L L E G I T I M A T E P R E S I D E N T
The insight of Jacob Taubes in his The Political Theology of Paul resonates
with one answer to these questions that today is being challenged more and
more by those who claim their Christianity for Jesus life and teachings say
that: Love means that I am not centered in myself. But, rather: I have a
need. The other person is needed. I cant do without the other.5
3 Neverland - a small imaginary island where Peter Pan lives his never-ending childhood with the Lost Boys. Never-
land was first imagined by the Scottish novelist and playwright J. M. Barrie (18601937) in the 1902 adult novel, The
Little White Bird.
4 Antigone, risking death herself by burying her brother against the edict of Creon, exemplified the political risks in
defying the ban against public grief during times of increased sovereign power and hegemonic national unity (Refer-
ring to Sophocles Antigone, 46). But without naming the violence that permeates our national identity, our commu-
nities, and our bodies, we not only enable this violence to determine the basis for community, we become complic-
it in it (19). All the victims of this violence must be mourned. Otherwise we loose our humanity; our very relationality
to each other and to God that defines us as persons for violence is, always, an exploitation of that primary tie, that
primary way in which we are, as bodies, outside ourselves and for one another (27). Page numbers refer to the es-
say by Judith Butler, Violence, Mourning, Politics in Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and
Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004), 1949.
5 Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann, eds., Dana Hollander, trans.
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 55-6.
6The 13th Amendment to the Constitutionn declared that "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a
punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any
place subject to their jurisdiction." Formally abolishing slavery in the United States, the 13th Amendment was passed
by the Congress on January 31, 1865, and ratified by the states on December 6, 1865.
Fiscal conservatism has little to do with lower taxes. Lower taxes is not a
metric that determines the government is being well-run. During WWII taxes
were high to pay for the military build-up required to win the war. This was
money well spent. After the War, taxes were high to pay down the debt from
the War. This was sound and prudent fiscal management.
Fiscal conservatism also has little to do with the preference for free markets
over government-run enterprises. It is not correct to assume that govern-
7
The notion of self-referentiality is especially important regarding those who claim they are Christian (or Republicans
or Democrats or Independents), yet live into a chauvinism, that at least in part, appears to be based on the deeply
antidemocratic and dehumanizing hypocrisies of white supremacy (Cornel West, Democracy Matters: Winning the
Fight Against Imperialism [New York: The Penguin Press, 2004], 14). Early Christians (and their Jewish forbearers)
understood that their persons, their selves, were not defined via interiority, but by relationally; through their relational-
ity with God, with neighbor, and with their environment. There was no existent self independent of these relation-
ships. Thus ethically, the only thing that constituted Reality was how one behaved relationally. It was never enough to
personally ascribe ones membership to the community of Christians. If one was Christian, it was because one actu-
ally acted Christian. The notion that the majority of Christians support torture (or racism, or disaster capitalism, or
white nationalism, any ism) would not have made any sense. That is because, by definition, anyone supporting tor-
ture (or capital punishment, or capitalism, or nationalism, any ism) would not, could not, be Christian.
8(Source:Ezra Klein, "Doing the Math on Obama's Deficits,"The Wall Street Journal,January 31, 2014. What is
often assumed in this conversation is that all deficit spending is equal and all of it is bad. Thats not the case. Deficit
spending when the economy is growing is dierent from deficit spending when the economy is in crisis. Nor is all
deficit reduction alike. Sometimes, cutting the deficit will expand the economy. Sometimes, cutting the deficit will
shrink the economy.
9 SeeAmericaReport" at https://www.scribd.com/doc/9717658/AmericaReport.
ment activities are less ecient or more expensive than private enterprise.
This is a myth that has been solidly disproven in case after case. The truth is
that, depending on the activity and the time frame one is measuring, some-
times private enterprise is more ecient, sometimes government-run activi-
ties are more ecient.10 Anyone who claims otherwise is either blinded by
ideology, lying, or is just ignorant of the facts.
One example, is healthcare: for every dollar spent for Medicare insurance,
approximately ninety-seven cents is returned to health care providers to pay
for their services. For every dollar spent on private sector insurance, approx-
imately seventy cents is returned to health care providers to pay for their
services. In other words, Medicare insurance is many times more ecient
(less costly) than health insurance from the private sector. So, if one wants to
reduce the GDP costs of health care on the nation, the choice, IF one was
truly a fiscal conservative, is to expand Medicare to more of the population,
NOT to try to dismantle or reduce its eectiveness. The issue with healthcare
is the percentage of the GDP it makes up, not what accounting bucket
healthcare costs appear in private of public sector.11
Scientists have proven with ever more detail and preciseness that Anthro-
pogenic Climate Disruption (ACD; previously known as global warming and
climate change) is occurring today. Few members of the public would decide
to challenge physicists concerning the details of quantum physics. Claiming
that the theory of quantum physics was a hoax would be hard to swallow.
Unfortunately, this questioning of basic physical reality (Anthropogenic Cli-
mate Change and its eects can be demonstrated as clearly as the eects of
a nuclear explosion) has been used to forestall policy development. The
longer policy decisions are delayed and appropriate mitigation does not oc-
cur, the more expensive the consequential eects. Today, if 350 PPM CO2 is
the tipping point (latest MIT studies), the cost of mitigation may exceed
$20,000 billion. However, the global consequences of doing nothing may re-
sult in the morbidity of as many as a few billion humans, large numbers of
species lost and a worst case economic impact of $200,000 billion. Donald
Trump fails the existential climate challenge test completely. 14
HIV does not cause AIDS. The world was created in 4004 BCE. Smok-
ing does not cause cancer. If climate change is happening, it is nothing to
do with man-made CO2 emissions. Peak Oil is just a figment of doomsay-
ers imaginations run wild.
For example, Thabo Mbeki's denial that that HIV caused AIDS prevented
thousands of HIV positive mothers in South Africa receiving anti-retrovirals
so that they, unnecessarily, transmitted the disease to their children. His
health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, famously rejected evidence of
the ecacy of these drugs, instead advocating treatment with garlic, beet-
root and African potato.15
15 Pascal Diethelm and Martin McKee, Denialism: what is it and how should scientists respond? in The European
Journal of Public Health 2009 19(1):2-4; doi:10.1093/eurpub/ckn139 quoted in Mark Hoofnagle, Denialism in the
Literature at http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/2009/05/denialism_in_the_literature.php (accessed 8/28/09).
16 In Heather Cox Richardsons, To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party (2017) book she reiterates that
at crucial junctures in American history, Republicans have taken the stand that economic opportunity is central to
the American ideal and that it is governments responsibility to make it possible for everyone to rise. Republicanism
is responsible for the first strong national government and income taxes during the civil war, strong regulations for
business corporations during Republican Theodore Roosevelts administration and the policy that to avoid war, all
nations must benefit from Americas strengths during Dwight Eisenhowers Republican administration.
17For example, despite the fact that Hitler had plainly explained in Mein Kampf and countless speeches before
1933 what he wanted to do once in power: to abolish the democratic "system" of Weimar Germany, to "eradicate"
Marxism (by which he meant both social democracy and communism) and to "remove" the Jews from Germany. As
for foreign policy, he made no secret of the fact that he wanted to revise the Versailles Treaty and that his long-term
goal was the conquering of "Lebensraum in the East. See Zeit Online, Wait Calmly at http://www.zeit.de/wissen/
geschichte/2017-02/adolf-hitler-chancellor-appointment-anniversary.
18 Waiting and seeing was essentially the German peoples strategy during the 1930s as Hitler suspended the
German Constitution in order to deal with the Jewish threat to the homeland. Today, maybe the only real dierence
in our wait and see strategy is that we are concerned with the Muslim threat that may be embedded in refugees
fleeing for their lives from predominantly Muslim countries. Do we actually have any hard data that this is a real
threat? Hitler certainly had no real data that the Jewish threat in the 1930s was anything other than a political con-
venience for an autocrat to suspend the German Constitution to declare himself dictator.
For Paul in his Epistles, the kingdom of heaven was a standard religious
code phrase meaning an in-breaking of the divine realm into the realm of
Caesar, Herod Antipas, Pilate, etc. the olam-ha-bah (the world to come).
This vision relies on the view that the world we live in can be repaired (tikkun
olam); that a better world is possible through communal action.
As Amy-Jill Levine writes in her The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the
Scandal of the Jewish Jesus the kingdom of heaven is not, for the Jewish
Jesus of Nazareth, a piece of real estate that can be bought by the coinage
of Rome for the single saved soul; it is a communal vision of what could be
and what should be. It is a vision of a time when all debts are forgiven, when
we stop judging others, when we not only wear our traditions on our sleeve,
but also hold them in our hearts and minds and enact them with all our
strength. It is the good news that the Torah can be discussed and debated,
when the Sabbath is truly honored and kept holy, when love of enemies re-
places the tendency toward striking back. Jesus did not die because he
taught that the poor would have an easier time getting into heaven than the
rich; he did not die because he rejected Torah; he did not die because he
preached love of God and love of neighbor. He died because... in Roman-
occupied Jerusalem [he was making a political statement that the estab-
lished order did not appreciate].... He died under the criminal charge of sedi-
tion: Jesus of Nazareth, king of the Jews - as a political dissenter. 20
No. I do not consider doing business like Bernie Mado subscribing to the
business values of a legitimate capitalism.21 Of course, Trump could release
his tax returns at any time to dispel such concerns.