I turn 50 this week. Friends and family ask me what I want, and I don't really need anything...I have a great life, a wonderful family, and all that I really could ever want.
And so what do I really want you to do for my birthday? I'll keep this wish simple for any of you who read this: PLEASE DO NOT VOTE FOR DONALD TRUMP. There, that's it. I understand that many of you will do so, regardless of what I say. I'll try not to think less of you for doing such a thing, though it's hard...how can you justify voting for such a terrible person who has been such a terrible president? I say this as a former Republican who has no desire to become a Democrat, and who is not at all excited about the possible Democratic landslide in November. But that doesn't worry me nearly as much as four more years of Trump. Better a democratic socialist than a national socialist, I say.
I have been intentional in recent years in not talking about politics (much) on Facebook. I don't preach politics (not directly, though all proclamation of the Kingdom of God is inherently political). I bite my tongue more often than not when I see such blatantly wrong things being said in support of Trumpism. As a steward of the gospel of Christ, I know that it's so much important to keep relationships peaceful for the sake of the faith than it is to argue about something so stupid.
But as we come closer to the 2020 election, now only 61 days away, I feel compelled to speak out against President Trump. This will be the last time before the election I will speak directly on this, and so I need to be concise with my words: one could spend hours, even days, cataloguing the horrible things he has done as president. But I think his failures can be narrowed down to three broad topics:
1)Corruption, both financial and electoral. Remember when Trump was going to release his tax returns, like every other presidential candidate does so that we can ensure there are not any direct financial conflicts? Whoops. But it's not just about tax returns (which can be just as corrupted and hidden as anything else). It's about the millions that he gets the government to pay to his properties so that he can golf more than he governs (even as he brags about returning his $400K salary back). It's about the shady agreements he has made with foreign entities ("I love the Saudis"...they are some of his biggest renters). It's about how much money his kids and his cronies are making off the family brand name, even as they are quasi-members of the administration. It's awfully hard to drain the swamp when he depends on that swamp to prop him up. Then there's the way Trump has welcomed the undermining of our democracy by foreign entities, the way he is seeking to suppress voter turnout, and even the fact that he simply cares nothing for those who do not vote for him. This is why he puts cities against rural areas, why he puts the elderly against the youth, why he puts red states versus blue states. He knows that if he can just win the electoral college by the tiniest of margins, that's all he really needs to keep his grip on power. It's unseemly and simply wrong...but that's not the end of the problem.
2)Competence, or the lack thereof. Donald Trump is simply bad at his job. Trumpites will point to the stock market, but like everything else the market is easy to manipulate by the massive deficit spending he has continued to support since he came into office. Because of many of his economic policies, the long-term economic future of this country is bleak. He's not the only one at fault, of course...but the same person who wants to take credit for anything good also has to take blame for the bad as well. And there's a lot of bad things in our country: racial unrest that he continues to stoke, the militarization of law enforcement that has led to many the ongoing protests, massive unemployment and wage disparity, and broken relationship with the closest of our allies while at the same time honoring dictators in Saudi Arabia, Russia, and North Korea. And that doesn't even get us far into 2020, in which his one of his greatest failures is on display, the COVID-19 pandemic. Is it Trump's fault that the virus got into the country? No. But how he has handled the federal government's response to this is beyond criminal. Look at how we have responded compared to most other western democracies, where the pandemic is now mostly a nuisance rather than a clear and present danger. Again, it's not all Trump's fault: hopefully we will have learned the lesson that shutdowns don't stop the pandemic; but his unwillingness to take it seriously for months and devote the resources of government to curbing it (his neo-federalism of telling the states to fend for themselves was based mostly on a.his laziness to attend to detail and b.his desire to stick it to the blue states) has been reprehensible. For several years I thought that perhaps we would survive with somebody as incompetent as Trump in office, that the bureaucracy (or, as he and his supporters call it, the 'Deep State') developed by leaders from both parties over the years would be sufficient. But I was wrong...it's amazing how quickly one awful leader can destroy an institution. I get it...being a president is hard work. Not many people can do it, I surely can't. I have no idea whether or not Joe Biden will do well, and wish we had a better option. But Donald Trump proven that he is not up to the task. Yet I genuinely believe that his bad job as president is rooted in the deepest problem.
3)A complete lack of moral character. For years many of my conservative Christian friends would bemoan the lack of moral character in our presidents...wasn't this the entire case against Bill Clinton? "We need a godly man in the White House!" And now, we are left with "God can do great things through a flawed individual." I've even heard Trump compared to Cyrus, the anointed king from Isaiah 44:28-45:1. Well, I am glad to see that people see him as a pagan, but in fact they've got the wrong comparison. A better one might be Belshazzar (Daniel 5), who partied while the empire was crumbling. Others go so far as to compare Trump to King David, who after all was a murderer and an adulterer. But the question remains: who does God use in a surprising way? Continually we find people whose hearts are open to being changed by God, who are penitent of their sins, and who honor God in a genuine way. None of these describes Trump, who only uses God as a prop and thinks himself above sin. Trump is his own god. As a parent there is nothing about Donald Trump's character that I can commend to my children. Fathers, would you trust him with your daughers? Would you trust him to manage your money? Would you trust him to speak at your church for five minutes without blasphemy being uttered? Like it or not, political leaders are role models...and if the president continually lies, is unfaithful to their spouse, and is more interested in ratings than he is in righteousness, then I don't feel that he's fit to be president.
If you have made it this far, thank you, and I promise that I won't do this again before the election. But it truly breaks my heart to see what Donald Trump has done to this country. If you have supported Trump in the past, please re-consider as your birthday gift to me. Trump continually uses the unrest in our country now to say, 'See, this is what a Biden presidency looks like.' But the neverending unrest and divisiveness is what 3 1/2 years of a Trump presidency have been in reality, and it will only get worse if he is re-elected. Please, vote this man out. Thank you.
