Trump as Jesus
by David Archibald, author of Australia’s Defence (Connor Court) and Twilight of Abundance (Regnery)
8 June 2016
Religion is a part of culture, and culture is the continuation of evolutionary processes by non-physical means. Some cultures are better than others and lead to better outcomes for their adherents.
Big, successful cultures have a lot of information to impart to succeeding generations, with no idle moment wasted that could be put to the transfer of that knowledge. Hence the phenomenon of Sunday school, in which stories from the Bible are recounted for the instruction of the young.
The point of telling Bible stories in Sunday school is so that the pupils can recognise patterns of behaviour in their own lives and know how to react to them. A basic one is not to sit near the head of the wedding table, but to sit near the end of it, from which you might be called up towards the head.
One of those stories is of Jesus throwing the money-changers out of the Temple. Jesus was somewhat of a Jewish purist who didn’t like the fact that the priesthood of the Temple had rented out part of it for commercial services. There is a good account of that incident in Reza Aslan’s Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.
At the highest level, that is what Mr Trump will be doing as President — throwing the money-changers out of the temple. Followers of an older religion miss out on the stories from the New Testament, and thus don’t have the cultural template to recognise this. A Tablet Magazine hagiography of Milo Yiannnopoulos quoted him: “Trump supporters don’t care about the man’s policies, he said. ‘They want to burn everything down.’ Suddenly Yiannopoulos’ Twitter handle, @Nero (followed by more than 200,000 Twitter users), made all the more sense.” Tablet, in the hole for the far left even if that means the destruction of Israel, can’t understand why anyone would want to destroy the establishment.
Mr Yiannopoulos also has his analogy wrong. Nero didn’t care about Rome or its citizens. There is no doubt that Mr Trump cares about the United States and its fate. A better analogy, if the Dangerous Faggot wanted to confine himself to Roman history, would be Cato the Elder who ended each speech in the Senate, no matter what the topic, with the words “Carthage must be destroyed.” Substitute “The establishment” for “Carthage” and we have our man.
That is the promise of Mr Trump, for the Bible tells me so. Like Jesus 2,000 years before him, he is the only one who finds the established order wanting and will throw the money-changers out of the temple. As John Derbyshire noted, Mr Trump may yet break our hearts. But he is the only one providing any hope. Any other path is sliding towards what George Orwell feared, “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”
