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It Won’t Do You Any Good to Apologize for Trump
Very often conservative support for President Donald Trump starts with an apology. It goes something like the following.
I know he writes mean tweets and makes nasty insults, calls people names like a jr. higher. He is badly flawed, foul, immoral, a lawbreaker, braggadocios, self-centered, divisive, petty, a liar, a con man, a flip flopper, a criminal, authoritarian, and banal. But, I still voted for him because, you know, I look at performance.
People who start with an apology, I believe, think they’re warding off the expected angry reaction. Or, they won’t be associated with the worst character traits of Trump, readying themselves to hear them. I’m writing to say that it won’t do you any good to apologize for Trump. Embrace him. Accept his 2016 victory and his presidency.
None of the other 16 candidates would have defeated Hillary Clinton. Trump did almost everything he said he would do. He stuck his thumb in the eye of the corrupt media. He battled and fought for conservatives against the greatest political opposition in my lifetime and maybe all of American history.
In 1836, Sir Henry Taylor wrote the classic book, The Statesman, the first modern book devoted to that subject. He wrote:
[A] statesman has already, in the commonwealth of his own nature, given to the nobler functions the higher place; and as a minister; therefore, he is one whom his country may be satisfied to trust, and its best men be glad to serve. He, on the other hand, who sees in the party he forms only the pedestal of his own statue, or the plinth of a column to be erected to his honour, may, by inferior means and lower service, accomplish his purposes, such as they are; but he must be content with vulgar admiration, and lay out of account the respect of those who will reserve that tribute from what is merely powerful, and render it only to what is great. “He that seeketh to be eminent amongst able men,” says Lord Bacon, “hath a great task; but that is ever good for the public. But he that plots to be the only figure amongst ciphers is the decay of a whole age.”
Professor at Notre Dame, Michael Zuckert, wrote in 2020, Lincoln and Democratic Statesmanship:
Our ideas of statesmanship are fraught with seeming contradictions: The democratic statesman is true to the peoples (sic) wishes and views—but also capable of standing against popular opinion when necessary. The statesman rises above conflicts and seeks compromise between parties—but also stands firmly for what is right.
And I quote all that material about statesmen and statesmanship to get to my subject of President Donald Trump. I’m not going to say whether I think he is one or not. As you scan through the annals of the history of government, who was a statesman and did it matter? Was Julius Caesar one? What about William the Conqueror? Was King George III? What kind of statesmen presided over the Roman Coliseum?
If you go to scripture, you can look at all the various leaders of nations in order to surmise the statesman. Old Testament Israel looks like a recent Marine Corps slogan, “A Few Good Men.” Very few. A statue of General George Patton sits outside the library at West Point some say because he didn’t spend much time in there. Even Patton wouldn’t survive the present environment of the United States.
Today some propose settling for nothing short of Burkean conservativism in the trajectory of Russell Kirk. They yearn for William F. Buckley at the National Review. Jonah Goldberg just today, as I write this post, attacked Trump again. These conservatives, including many professing Christians, now take on the chief identification of Anti-Trump. In his piece, Goldberg insulted Trump voters, showing again, as he and others have again and again, got Trump wrong. This is seen all over his post in the LA Times, which doesn’t publish true conservatives, where he wrote:
One of the paradoxes of charismatic leadership is that the leader’s illegitimacy — in legal, rational or traditional terms — can have the effect of strengthening their hold on their followers. This dynamic has been at the heart of Trump’s distortion of the right. If the man cannot measure up to the traditional, moral, rational or legal yardsticks that conservatives once ascribed to leadership, then it is the yardstick’s fault for not measuring up to the man.
That’s right. Through his charisma, Trump has a cult-like, worshipful loyalty on his voters, who are called followers. All of these 74 million voters, which was more than any presidential candidate had ever received in any presidential election, could not see the fraud that Trump was like the enlightened Goldbergian human being. Goldberg said concerning the Founder of Turning Point USA, “Charlie Kirk, a pliant priest in Trump’s personality cult.” On the other hand, the public intellectuals (if that is possible), who voted for and defend Trump, call Goldberg the subject of Trump derangement syndrome. Douglas Wilson wrote last week:
Whatever I might think, the brains behind the progressive left have decided to take a header into the maelstrom of “doing whatever they can to advance the narrative and person and prospects of Donald J. Trump.” This is what a derangement syndrome can do to you. It turns the quivering brains of high-powered political operatives into a soupy kind of jelly, with green mold on the surface.
I see the jelly with the green mold coming out of Goldberg’s ears.
To speak of Trump without apology, consider why you voted for him, support him, and would vote for him again as president, even though you’re a Christian. You don’t have to use the Russia hoax, even the Dobbs decision to overturn Roe v. Wade with all the conservative justices Trump appointed. Trump believes that something in the United States is of higher value than other nations worth protecting by securing the borders. Borders conserve something on the inside that is better than what is on the outside. That simple, basic conservative idea separated Trump from his competitors like the wall he aspired to build.
A long time ago the United States left the possibility of a Russell Kirk conservative. We are in much more desperate times. We have to look to principles much more basic than those outlined by Edmund Burke and Benjamin Disraeli. The Brexit vote in England recognized this too. What I’m describing, Jonah Goldberg calls “instrumentalism.” He wrote in another essay:
The least objectionable of them justified their decision in the name of instrumentalism—“Trump’s flawed, but we can use him.”
This isn’t using Trump until we can get somebody better. That’s still an argument for 2024. No, Trump is where we’re at. Maybe we will get somebody better, but that’s also the reasoning behind what led to Joe Biden in 2020.
Trump isn’t an instrument. He espouses necessary, rudimentary principles. His don’t go far enough. They don’t do as much as I would do. But they go further than what we would get from anyone else, such as names like Dole, McCain, and Romney. Even throw in George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Gerald Ford. Trump truly raised the bar over these men.
I want to argue just a little. You say, Trump is authoritarian. He’s a fascist. By far. By far, the greatest threat of fascism is the progressive left, like Ronald Reagan said:
America stands on four main values: Faith in God, Freedom of Speech, Family and Economic Freedom. If fascism ever comes to America, it will come in the name of liberalism.
Trump in his presidency practiced the separation of powers. He picked federalist Supreme Court justices, who did more to decentralize the federal government than in decades. Trump supported that. You’re just swallowing a lie when you say he’s a fascist or an authoritarian. He gave freedom to become energy independent, turning loose the American people.
Maybe you say he’s a want-to-be dictator because of January 6, 2020. Nothing like that came close to happening on January 6, nothing even nearly as bad as what did occur in Seattle, Portland, and the Twin Cities of Minnesota in the previous summer. The Russia hoax disenfranchised Trump voters. Illegal ballot harvesting did too. The perpetrators walk free. Does anyone think that we live under a fair justice system today? Where is the abuse of power? Who has attempted to criminalize parents who speak up in school board meetings?
I don’t apologize for President Donald Trump any more than I do for the minutemen on the Lexington Green.
Ballot Harvesting, the Big Lie, and the 2020 Election
Just to be clear to you reading, I don’t think President Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Even if I can’t show you the evidence yet, it’s still what I think. Most who join me in thinking the same thing don’t have access to what they would need to prove it. Others are already proving it. I hope they do.
I did not take the tack of blaming computerized voting systems, the Dominion voting machines. It sounded very fishy and I still think people might prove people rigged that too. However, I pointed to the ballot harvesting made easier with the use of the Pandemic, the strategy of not letting a good crisis go to waste.
President Biden received 81 million votes, but I don’t think he got them legally. Like many others, I say “no way” he got that many votes. He did the least I’ve ever seen to win an election. William McKinley had his “front porch campaign.” Joe Biden had his basement camera campaign. Trump filled arenas and Biden very often couldn’t fill classrooms. How did President Biden get enough votes? Ballot harvesting.
So much corruption went into a Biden win in 2020. The media concealed and censored the Hunter Biden laptop story. The media and big parts of the government helped and promoted the Russian collusion hoax. Tech giants like Zuckerberg helped Biden in likely illegal ways. The Trump impeachment was a fraud. The media shielded the country from Biden family crimes. Without all of those, even with ballot harvesting, maybe Trump wins. On the other hand, with all of those and also without ballot harvesting, probably Trump wins.
I’m not saying President Trump ran the perfect campaign, but those who blame the election loss on Trump, this including recently Attorney General William Barr, I think they’re very wrong. The things that Barr and others like him say lost Trump the election are also what won Trump the election. You can’t separate the two. People come out for Trump because they like what others say lose Trump an election.
In the background of Elon Musk buying Twitter is Trump ousted from Twitter. The bigness of the conversation about Musk and free speech connects to Trump canning by social media. This doesn’t even start with the search algorithms that send people to biased locations, helping promote the choices of the tech titans.
To remind you, ballot harvesting occurs when operatives essentially vote for massive numbers of people who would not vote otherwise. They fill out the ballots for people who would not vote. Many more votes could come from nursing homes and other large institutions. This also explains the opposition to voter identification by those who want ballot harvesting. They call this Democracy. If you do not like the corruption, you oppose democracy or better, you’re a threat to democracy.
Part of hiding the crime and corruption came and comes by calling the investigation of or even accusation of crime and corruption, the Big Lie. Those who say people stole the election are co-conspirators of the Big Lie. If someone says the other side stole the election, they join the Big Lie. The allegation of the Big Lie is a Big Lie. The Big Lie isn’t a lie. The lie is the claim of a Big Lie. It is just another lie among many.
Even if entering the capital on January 6, 2020 was the wrong move, the treatment or coverage of January 6 is part of the cover-up of a stolen election. Many reading here probably know the possibly true story that government operatives joined and helped lead the crowd into the capitol that day. Whatever happened, they helped push it into something they could use to conceal all the real corruption.
You may have heard the terminology, “useful idiot.” It is technical for being used, really manipulated, by the wrong side in propaganda necessary to promote the wrong cause and ideas. If you cooperate with those accusing the Big Lie, you’re useful to them. You help them silence those uncovering the truth.
Like me, you might be thinking there’s no way Joe Biden got 81 million votes in the 2020 election. Maybe he got those votes. It’s just that someone else filled out the ballots than those whose name was on them.
The Globalist and Leftist Institution and Media Use of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine
Many reading know President Trump’s expressing genius to Putin is his way of playing American leftists. He is also fond in calling those in power, “our stupid leaders.” Those on the left turn this into Trump and his supporters advocating for Putin and Russia. When the media calls Trump a Putin supporter, he doesn’t back away from his “genius” language, because he won’t submit to their lie. This works nicely with the Russia narrative invented by the left between 2016 even until today. They conform that narrative, which is a lie, to the Russian invasion. The globalist left supports the Ukraine, which makes the invasion difficult to sort.
The left didn’t support Ukraine. President Obama gave them blankets. Trump gave them javelins, perhaps the most effective weapon against Russian conventional warfare. Ukraine did not gain NATO membership under any president. The country became useful in the Obama years for Vice President Biden to benefit through its corruption. Ukraine did not gain membership because of a malfeasance utilized by Biden and his son, Hunter. Trump dug into the corruption by asking Zelensky for help with the investigation, attempting to tie U.S. aid to elimination of criminal crookedness. The left impeached Trump for that.
Russia took Crimea under Obama and Biden. Russia invades Ukraine under Biden. Putin does nothing against Trump. Trump hurts Putin, because he increased oil production until the United States became energy independent. The lowered prices hurt Putin more than anything. Look at the gas prices now. This helps Putin, and President Biden does not ban Russian oil exports. The United States then looks to Venezuelan oil production instead of increasing U. S. generation.
Putin in a religious manner sees the Ukraine as Russian. Russian history started with Kiev, the Rus emerging there in the 10th century AD. Vladimir I adopted a unique Russian Orthodoxy in 988. When a cynical Putin became mistrustful of a Communism and a secular state, he embraced his version of religious nationalism, somewhat like a leader of a Moslem nation. Like conservative Jews see Palestine as Israel, Putin sees Ukraine as Russian. His version of Russian Orthodoxy plays a role in his aggression, irrationality, and brutality, much like a grand inquisitor burns heretics at the stake.
Trump understood the nationalistic instinct of Putin. Yes, Putin wants to make Russia great again and with a religious fervor. I’m sure he saw men like Putin in business. He could respect his opposition in the business world and on the world scene without supporting them. He states recognition of their toughness, a trait missing in those who allow homeless to defecate in our streets.
If the media and the Democrat Party cared about Zelensky and Ukraine, why did they not urge Obama or Biden to do more before the invasion? They care now, because they see an opportunity to blame on inflation and the related high gas prices. If they care about border security in the Ukraine, why not in our own country?
The underdog Ukrainians stand against Putin. By nature, Americans reject imperialism. The United States fought an imperialistic power for its own freedom. Americans want a free Ukraine. The left commandeers Zelensky like they did during the impeachment.
The left doesn’t represent freedom. Their wokeness didn’t stand for Hong Kong against China. President Biden and his son Hunter took money from China. The left rejects freedom of speech. They’re for allowing perversion, a college male swimmer winning medals against women in the name of transgenderism. They elevate a transgender general wearing a dress in the United States military. The left doesn’t want the freedom of adversarial speech. They shut-down and cancel political opposition to vaccines, vaccine mandates, Covid origination, Covid restrictions, religious freedom, the Russian conspiracy, critical race theory, and voter fraud. They don’t allow creation in the school system.
First amendment freedom originates for political speech. The left shuts down speech. They control the public schools like Putin puts down his protestors. Theirs and Putins are a religious fervor each with their own totalitarian values.
The United States has its own religion that sacrifices babies to abortion, defunds the police, and stops energy production for their apocalyptic eschatology. When they pose to support the Ukraine, they calculate this for opposition to Trump. They see a political opportunity.
I support the Ukraine. Some doctrine consistent with true American values should guide our present and future involvement. I’m against Putin. However, everyone should understand the left’s intentions of using this war for furthering its own agenda. I don’t know if Putin is worse than the leftists who appropriate the Ukraine to further their insidious causes.
Reality and Truth: Celebrity Conservatives Versus True Bible Believers
Perhaps you, like me, as a Christian, pay attention to certain celebrity conservatives, who take many of the same or similar viewpoints as you. You know there are differences. Where is the overlap?
Questioning Christianity Because Of What One Sees Occurring In the World or From People Who Call Themselves Christians
My Christianity isn’t tethered to what other people are doing or have done. Christianity is the truth. If I were one of eight remaining believers on earth, it would still be true. I don’t doubt it when people don’t live it. I feel sorry for them, but they haven’t affected what I think about Christianity itself. My Christianity is tethered to the Bible, God’s Word.
I’m writing about this, because of an article in Newsweek that came out on Tuesday this week, written by Issac Bailey, “I’m Struggling with My Christianity After Trump.” Something with that title in a major publication would be a head scratcher, except that most “Christianity” today and probably for most of history isn’t and hasn’t been actual Christianity. No one should be surprised about counterfeit Christianity. Bailey says he got his doubts about Christianity itself from the reality that professing Christians voted for Trump. I’ve heard other people say this.
According to scripture, anyone who leaves actual Christianity was never saved in the first place. Nowhere says a true Christian can lose his salvation. He can’t leave it, because he’s kept by the power of God (1 Peter 1:5). A believer cooperates with what God does in saving him, but it is God who keeps him saved. Scripture is clear on this. Many passages teach the eternal security of a believer, but two verses are definitive on the point that, if a professing believer defects, he was never saved in the first place: first, 1 John 2:19.
They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us: but they went out, that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us.
Second, 1 John 3:6.
Whosoever abideth in him sinneth not: whosoever sinneth hath not seen him, neither known him.
Read both verses. The first one says that when someone does not continue, he never had salvation in the first place, that is, he was “not of us,” said twice in the verse. If he was “of us,” he would “no doubt have continued with us.” No doubt. The second verse says that a person who sins as a lifestyle, as seen in the present tense, “sinneth,” “hath not seen him, neither known him,” that is, a person who takes on a lifestyle of sin never saw or knew Christ in the first place. A true Christian can’t walk away from Christ. As Jesus said in John 10:28-29, no man, including himself, can pluck a true believer out of either Jesus’ or His Father’s hand.
If you read the Bailey article, you can see he doesn’t have biblical Christianity. I’m not saying that to be unnecessarily offensive or condemnatory. People call themselves Christians, who are not, because there are many various forms of popular “Christianity” in the world. That could be a whole separate article, all the different types, that aren’t Christianity. They are fraudulent perversions of the real thing. There is more false Christianity by far than there is true Christianity.
Most Christian denominations don’t even preach a true gospel. You should know that. They are preaching a false gospel. Most professing Christians to whom I talk don’t even know the gospel. I repeat, they don’t know it. Churches are not clear on the gospel. Even the ones who might believe a true gospel are more concerned about having a bigger congregation and so they do more to pander to people than tell them what they need to hear. There has been a cumulative and comprehensive erosion of the gospel in the United States for awhile and for a number of reasons.
In the first paragraph, Bailey says his “faith is in tatters.” Before I provide an assessment of what he says in his article, I have an opinion about what he’s doing. I don’t think he’s going to leave his spurious version of Christianity. He’s threatening to leave it like a child threatens to hold his breath until he dies if his parents don’t give him what he wants. True Christians are concerned that their testimony could result in defections from the faith. Jesus said at the beginning of Matthew 18 that it would be better to put a millstone around your neck and jump into deep water than to cause one of these little ones to stumble.
Bailey is saying that Christians are sending him into apostasy because of their vote for Trump. This is meant to strike fear into Christians, so that they at the least become non-political or disengaged from political action. Bailey will keep supporting actual murderers greater than any holocaust in the history of the world, the same people who booed God at their party convention, but a vote for Trump will send him off the deep end. He’s already off the deep end. His party is the party against divine design of the family, which is the most rudimentary and rebellious form of opposition to God in existence.
The people Bailey addresses specifically are the pro-life supporting Christians, implying that there are non-pro-life Christians. You can be a Christian, a true one, and not be pro-life. There is only pro-life Christianity. Everything else is an impostor. Sure, it might take a new Christian some time to get up to speed on this point, but he will get there, because he is indwelt by God the Holy Spirit, if he is really saved.
Many of the Trump voters, who claim to be Christians, are not. They do have a different Jesus. That includes some, if not all, of the people in the picture posted in Bailey’s article. As a matter of religious or theological comparison though, these pseudo Christians have a lot in common with the type of Christianity Bailey represents. They both have a novel fabrication or improvisation of Christianity, that is very loose with scripture. They put more authority in their own experience than the Bible, relying more on allegorization than exegesis.
For all of Trump’s many flaws, in a political way he represented to a lot of Americans and most true Christians, a last opportunity to save the federal government from a trajectory of progressive, oligarchical totalitarianism and globalism. Of course, that’s just a conspiracy theory, wink wink. There is no new world order planned for the future of the United States with no borders and the eradication of Americanism. Christians would like to keep their freedoms, freedom of religion and of speech. They would like to stop the present course of the elimination the nuclear family, something basic like a father and mother of opposite sex with the authority to raise their own children. The support of vouchers for education is about the freedom to educate their children in Christian values away from the humanistic, pseudo-science of gender fluidity.
It is not accident that today you hear the left use words like “cult” and “worship” as it relates to Trump. I’m sure they’re seen as effective propaganda. No Christian wants to be seen or known for being in a cult or worshiping a man. Bailey among many others uses this terminology. I don’t know anyone who follows Trump, let alone worships him. I understood why Christians would attend the rally on January 6. I know some people who were there and none of them knew anything about breaking into the capitol building to stop the counting of the electoral votes. I’ve explained this in previous posts, but they see both their voice and their vote being taken away. It’s obvious to them that a two tiered justice system already exists, where a true Christian can be prosecuted for not baking a cake for a same sex wedding and yet left wing anarchists can take over a large area of an American city without opposition. The mainstream of the media applauds it, likes it, has no problem with a Trump voter bleeding in the street.
Much of what Bailey wrote just isn’t true and other parts are misrepresentations, slanted in a dishonest way. He might just be deceived, but I believe he knows what he’s doing.
- True Christians don’t pray to Jesus. They pray to God the Father like Jesus taught.
- The group filmed “praying” in the front of the Senate chamber, it’s obvious, don’t represent biblical Christianity.
- True Christianity isn’t white or black, as in “white church” or “black church,” as Bailey represents it.
- All the things that Franklin Graham said about Trump are true. Graham doesn’t represent biblical Christianity, but I understand why a Christian would appreciate the list of accomplishments he mentions.
Look at the Trump years, 2017-2020, compared to the previous ones. This belies what Bailey writes, his assuming, it seems, that no one would fact check him, if it even mattered. Despite Bailey’s twisting of the meaning of pro-life, nevertheless, more civilians were killed in Iraq in 2014 during the Obama presidency than during the entire four years of the Trump presidency.
- Bailey blames Trump for the murders at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. No president has been more pro-Israel than Trump. Israel says this. There were fourteen mass shootings during the Obama years. It’s sheer political opportunism to blame mass shootings on a president. Was Trump also to blame for the 2017 Las Vegas shooting at a country western concert? Those were mainly Trump deplorables getting gunned down.
- Another argument Bailey makes is that abortion rates go down during Democratic presidencies, because of government programs. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were higher unintended pregnancies when Democrats are president, because of greater support for contraception, most of which is abortifacient. Those aren’t called murders, but they are. Since 1965 over 11 million have been murdered by abortifacients, that don’t show up as abortions. That would be a good explanation for lower abortion rates too.
Pro-life people, of course, want to end all abortion, so the rate would decrease to nothing if they had their way. Instead, with the support of Bailey, almost 70 million have been murdered in the United States, which would be enough to cause a Christian to defect, except that’s impossible for a true Christian. True Christians are happy about slowing down the abortion rate. They don’t, however, support contraception as a way of getting there. A true Christian opposes fornication and all sexual sin that results in an unintended pregnancy. For a biblical Christian, an unintended pregnancy is by definition one outside of marriage. If Bailey is a Christian, he should support the biblical position, which is abstinence. That would also end the AIDS epidemic.
- Insurrection occurred all summer with BLM and Antifa, doing far more damage and causing far more death than the capitol “riot.” Is that justified to Bailey, because he agrees with socialism and actual fascism? When you see the picture of unarmed crazies in costumes, a truly thinking person doesn’t see the comparison. One of the five “killed,” used as a statistic by the left, was an unarmed woman, who threatened no one with violence. Where is the outcry? Three Trump supporters died of natural causes. The one police death has hardly been covered. What happened there? Why isn’t there more coverage of his death? Not his funeral, not the way he’s been used politically, but what actually happened to him?
Bailey says that 60% of white Catholic voters voted for Trump, implying that Catholics are Christian. He lumps them with evangelicals who supported Trump. This is the most tell-tale evidence that he doesn’t understand biblical Christianity. He is pro-abortion. He is against the death penalty for murder. If you are a Christian, you support what God supports. You believe the Bible. Bailey does not.
The crucial aspect for a lasting faith, which is actually a saving faith, is the object of that faith. My faith doesn’t stand in men. The object of faith is Jesus Christ Himself, and He never fails. I believe the Bible. My faith comes by the Word of God. 1 John 5:4-5 say:
4 For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world: and this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith. 5 Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?
My faith has found a resting place,Not in device nor creed;I trust the Ever-living One,His wounds for me shall plead.I need no other argument,I need no other plea;It is enough that Jesus died,And that He died for me.Enough for me that Jesus saves,This ends my fear and doubt;A sinful soul I come to Him,He’ll never cast me out.My heart is leaning on the Word,The written Word of God,Salvation by my Savior’s name,Salvation through His blood.My great Physician heals the sick,The lost He came to save;For me His precious blood He shed,For me His life He gave.
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