As the start of his prison sentence approached, Roger Stone didn’t despair.
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“I had prayed fervently,” the felon told Mike Allen of Axios in a phone interview a few days ago, adding that he believed that “the whole matter was in God’s hands” and that “God would provide.”
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“And he did,” Stone said.
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No, Mr. Stone. President Trump provided. That’s who commuted your sentence and set you free, which you have no business being. And this conflation of human corruption and divine intervention, of “The Apprentice” and the Almighty, has gone too far and has to stop. It’s an insult to true faith. It’s cheap.
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I’m not going to detail the ways in which godliness and Trumpiness are at violent odds with each other. I’m not going to delineate the president’s digressions from the Commandments. That’s an exercise in the blindingly obvious.
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Nor do I care to revisit the question of why so many evangelicals and other conservative Christians support Trump, because it has been amply visited and there’s no mystery there. Trump has aligned certain positions of his — principally, opposition to legal abortion — with theirs. They’ll accept his profanity in return for his judges. It’s a calculation, pure and simple: a compromise. Politics is lousy with them.
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But I do want to flag the propensity for God talk among Trump’s unscrupulous minions. I want to object to their use of God as a cover, their nod to God to justify their service to a president who no doubt thinks that the Golden Rule refers to the requisite measure of gilding for a skyscraper or casino.
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They have turned God into a prop, a tic, and while they’re welcome to their rationalizations, they’re not entitled to their righteousness. I’m not offended on behalf of God. I’m offended on behalf of decency.
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Kayleigh McEnany, the relatively new White House press secretary, wears a silver cross around her neck. As a recent profile of her in The Atlantic by Emma Green pointed out, she publicly faith-shamed reporters who challenged Trump’s blasé attitude toward the pandemic as a group that “desperately wants to see these churches and houses of worship stay closed.”
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And in a recent interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, McEnany said: “I stand as a Christian woman, someone who believes in equality and truth and loyalty and honesty.” She also, by all appearances, believes in Trump, which doesn’t quite square with those other principles. But it does give her a pedestal.
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“Only God could deliver such a savior to our nation and only God could allow me to help,” Brad Parscale, who is managing Trump’s re-election campaign, tweeted last year. Hmm. I don’t know about that. Vladimir Putin and Mark Zuckerberg played their parts.
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Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who once had McEnany’s job, suggested that Trump was chosen for his current task by God. So did Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state.
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I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Bill Barr, the attorney general, more or less shares that view. The tenor of a big speech he gave last year at the University of Notre Dame made clear that he sees himself as a soldier in a holy war between the Judeo-Christian tradition and godless secularists. He must see Trump as the general, given how obsequiously he marches behind him.
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I have enormous respect for people of faith, or at least for many of them, because their conviction can be a wellspring of empathy, generosity, grace. But those traits also flourish in many people who don’t belong to any organized religion or, for that matter, don’t believe in God. And invoking God — as so many of Trump’s enablers do — is no predictor of rectitude or real devotion. Sometimes it’s just a reflex. Other times it’s a ruse.
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I myself am not conventionally religious. I’m not versed in theology, either. So I cannot claim to understand God’s design any better than the Trump aides who drone on about it do. I’m no more tapped into God than Roger Stone is.
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But I’m nonetheless confident that no God would smile on Trump’s stewardship of this pandemic, during which so many lives are being needlessly lost. No God would bless Trump’s march across Lafayette Square, which was cleared with force and tear gas, so that he could brandish a Bible for photographers, turning a sacred text into a partisan bauble.
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No God would fail to notice the void of penitence in a president with so much to atone for. And no God would put Stone, a dirty-trickster who has never demonstrated any discernible interest in cleansing himself, at the top of his to-do list, liberating him so that he could rejoin the ranks of Republicans intent on securing Trump another four years.
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Good luck to them. Polls, death tolls and the president’s increasingly unhinged behavior suggest that they haven’t a prayer.
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