The New York Times publishes yet another tedious meditation on Donald Trump’s appeal to evangelicals.
AMONG the most inexplicable developments in this bizarre political year is that Donald Trump is the candidate of choice of many evangelical Christians.
[ … ]
Mr. Trump’s evangelical supporters don’t care about his agenda; they are utterly captivated by his persona. They view him as the strongest, most dominant, most assertive political figure they have ever seen. In an odd bow to Nietzschean ethics, they respect and applaud his Will to Power. And so the man who openly admires tyrants like Vladimir V. Putin and praised the Chinese crackdown in Tiananmen Square because it showed “strength” has become the repository of their hopes.
Set aside the fact that Mr. Trump is a compulsive and unrepentant liar. Set aside, too, that he has demonstrated no ability for statecraft or the actual administration of government and has demonstrated much incompetence at business to boot.
There is a very great deal more to Nietzsche’s ethics than suggested in that passage, but at least this writer is looking in the right direction. Certainly, ol’ Friedrich had Trump’s number and knew who evangelicals are.
Really, it is no more complicated than this: Evangelicals are an inexhaustible store of resentments and malice whose aim in life is to drag their betters down to their own miserable level, and Trump’s scattershot, incoherent malice is their scattershot, incoherent malice. Trump is their Walter Mitty daydreams, fulfilled.