I’m sure I’m going to get along with him, and if I don’t, he’s going to pay a big price.
That’s Donald Trump, the likely Republican nominee, explaining his plan to get along with Paul Ryan, the Republican Speaker of the House.
Like many people, probably, I held-out a faint hope yesterday that the grown-ups would step-forward and dismiss Trump once for all. No. The grown-ups have all gone home, and there is nobody left but the loonies.
Piper: “If you don’t want God more than you want anything else, you are not a Christian.” https://t.co/7sOBKZ4cLu
— Desiring God (@desiringGod) March 2, 2016
A 2-year long grand jury investigation has concluded that hundreds of children were abused in a Pennsylvania diocese, and that church officials engaged in an extensive cover-up.
After an exhaustive, two-year investigation, a statewide grand jury has determined that hundreds of children were sexually abused by priests and other religious leaders serving the Roman Catholic Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown in western Pennsylvania over at least 40 years.
The grand jury issued a 147-page report, made public today, that details widespread alleged abuse involving at least 50 priests and religious leaders, and the findings include accounts of how Diocese superiors took action to conceal the accusations in order to protect the Church’s image.
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.
I naively thought the next generation was better than this.
Students at two Midwest high schools recently hurled Trump-themed insults at Latino students, using the presidential candidate’s anti-immigration rhetoric as inspiration for repulsive basketball game chants.
Fans at Andrean High School in Merrillville, Ind. Friday held a cutout showing Trump’s face and chanted “Build a wall! Build a wall!” during a basketball game against Bishop Noll Institute, which has many Latino students — highlighting Trump’s pledge to erect a barrier along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Four days earlier, students at the predominantly-white Dallas Center-Grimes High School in Iowa chanted “Trump! Trump!” during a basketball game against Perry High School, which has a more diverse student population.
There has always been a dark streak in American life. There is the Klan; the unapologetic public beatings of foreigners during World War I, and Jehovahs Witnesses because they consider reciting the Pledge of Allegiance a form of idolatry; the whisper that Roosevelt was really a corruption of the name Rosenfeld and World War II was just a setup for surrender to the Global Jewish Conspiracy; and … on and on.
Now, we have a presidential candidate who has deliberately stimulated and tapped that malice and, according to the polls, he’s going to have a good day.
