Trump's rotten fruit and my own
Luther said we can judge a tree by its fruit. He never said doing so would be easy.
When he heard that David Brody and Scott Lamb were writing a book called The Faith of Donald J. Trump, Eric Metaxas explains in his foreword to the book, “I really was tempted to giggle.” He expected a political gag book that contains “nothing but blank pages. Ha ha ha. Don’t forget to slap your knee.”
Like many Christians, Metaxas endorsed Trump as a candidate and has continued to support him in his presidency, even while critiquing his behavior and rhetoric on moral grounds. In his farcical article “A Few More #TrumpBible Verses,” Metaxas imagines Trump tweeting interpretations of scripture: “A good wife, who can find? I found three. #TrumpBible.” “A prophet is not without honor except in his home town. But I was born in Queens, so who cares? #TrumpBible.”
It’s easy for Metaxas to laugh, and satire can function as a powerful form of social critique. But I’m fairly certain that the asylum-seeking parents whose children are taken from them at the border aren’t laughing about Trump’s foibles. I’m guessing the women he’s groped, forcibly kissed, ogled, or publicly demeaned aren’t laughing either. Nor are the openly transgender members of the military whose future is jeopardized, the traveling Muslim Americans who weren’t allowed back in their country last January, or the black Americans who see white supremacist violence taking on new forms.
