A "Deranged" Election

I may be wrong, but it looks like the tide is turning against Donald Trump. I think he recognizes that himself, which is why he's going full-bore apocalyptic. If Hillary wins, the end is nigh. The fate of America hangs in the balance.

I suppose this sort of thinking is an undercurrent in most elections, but it has never been so pronounced, so uninhibited, as this year. Indeed, most all the arguments in favor of Trump are based on an apocalyptic view of Hillary Clinton. She is the anti-christ, bar none. The floodgates will open, the deluge shall be complete. Kiss America goodbye.

I tend not to believe end-times scenarios because, well, they've all been wrong so far. Not to say that someday someone will be right when he shouts, "It's the end of the world!" But the fact that this sort of rhetoric is applied to a politician may be something new. Where does it come from?

During the Bush II administration, the opponents of George W. Bush were so rabid at times, so extreme in their vilification of the president, so over-the-top in their ire, that Bush's defenders coined a phrase for it: Bush Derangement Syndrome. And it did seem like a form of derangement, kind of  a political-charged mental illness.

But here's the thing: there had been a Clinton Derangement Syndrome before that, and then after that there was clearly an Obama Derangement Syndrome. The signs that it is a derangement and not a valid political stance is when people are quite willing to believe and perpetuate obvious and traceable lies about the candidate, or when the content of their critique is almost entirely filled with extreme distortions of fact and apocalyptic shouting. And when reality doesn't seem to jibe with your vision, that must be explained away with elaborate conspiracy theories.

Indeed, when some is suffering from one of these syndromes, they believe that the situation is so dark that all sort of things might be tolerated in the cause of righteousness: lying, violence, and sexual depravity. When the end is nigh, it's not time to be priggish.

I contend that most of the arguments for voting for Donald Trump are very much of this falsely apocalyptic nature and as such are rooted in a Hillary Derangement Syndrome. All evil is ascribed to Hillary, while any criticism of Trump is derided as coming from a brainwashed victim of "The Establishment."

I'm not saying their isn't a valid case to be made against Hillary Clinton. And many on the right have made the case and made it well. But the thing is, a political argument against Hillary, however valid, is just not as powerful as the sanity case against Trump. Or to put it another way, this is the choice between a madman and a political hack. We know what to expect from a political opponent and know how to fight it, but put a madman in office? Who can predict the kind of turmoil and tragedy that might follow?

You see, if you consider this election a binary choice, well then, that's the choice we have. Trump's defenders want to say, but what about abortion, and what about the Supreme Court? But I just point to their candidate and say, but what about his mind?

Debate Reaction, part 2

So I've become a little bit obsessed with the political scene lately. I've never intended to turn this little-read corner of the blogosphere into yet another political junkie's rant-page, and Ill try not to let it get that far, but there's still a thing or two I want to say before I drop it.

Although most of Trump's followers seem to dismiss all polling and insist that we're headed for a big Trump victory in November, they never cite any reasons for such optimism. They simply dismiss polls as products of anti-Trump bias. But Trump is going to lose. This past weekend was probably his moment to roll out the damning evidence of some sort of criminal complicity on Hillary's part, but all we got was the usual gossip about her husband's scandals and talk about missing emails. Nothing like a smoking gun, an October surprise moment, something a grand jury couldn't ignore, rather than just intimations of shady dealings.

My point is not to say Hillary is a babe in the woods, but simply to note that Trump needed something more definite, more damning, than the usual conspiracy theories of the Hillary-haters. This may be hard to accept for some, but Americans are not going to choose a man that seems to them to be disturbed in mind for president because of a whitewashed hard drive. They're not. If the Republicans had nominated someone who was within hailing distance of virtue, that candidate might have presented a problem for Hillary. But the regurgitation of her husband's 90s scandals, coming from this tabloid candidate himself, is just going to leave everyone disgusted with the process that produced such choices.

And that's all he had last night. Oh, it was red meat for the "deplorables," and they'll say he really scored big, but it won't move the needle one whit in his direction. Sure, the polling in the coming days may prove me wrong, but I don't think so. People who were reluctant to vote for him yesterday are not going to be less reluctant today. It wasn't that kind of performance last night.

Does anyone even think it is possible for Donald Trump to actually string a series of rational thoughts together on any one subject? To speak about one issue as if it were a little more complex than, it's very very bad now, but I will make it very very great when I'm president. Because whatever one may imagine about Trump's great intelligence, and whatever he may claim about his own smarts, I know high-schoolers more capable of staying on topic for more than one and a half sentences than him. I posit to you that the remaining undecided voters, voters who don't like either candidate and may even be thinking of going third party or not voting at all, will not have been swayed to vote for Trump after watching last night's debate.

He's going down to defeat and I think it may be relatively big, with Trump garnering no more than 42 or 43%. The period of recriminations that will follow among Republicans will not be pretty.

Thoughts on last night's debate

So I watched the debate. I never watch the debate. I can't believe I watched the debate. But when Republicans started bailing on their candidate over the weekend I became curious about how Trump would respond. It seemed like a historic moment in American political history. And perhaps it almost was, if the party leaders ever seriously thought about dropping Trump from the ticket (and if that's even possible). I thought Hillary would bring the matter up ("Even your own party is turning its back on you!"), but she didn't.

This morning everyone is saying he staunched the bleeding but probably didn't make any gains among the remaining undecided voters. I think that's true. The undecideds are probably unhappy about their choice, not liking either of them much, so to win them over you'd have to overcome their distaste. In Trump's case, their distaste often has to do with his character as a human being, and nothing that he said or did last night will cause anyone to put aside their misgivings. But I do think that some of their misgivings about Clinton might have been allayed, simply by reason of the fact that she remained calm and reasonable as against his calling her the devil and talking about throwing her in jail. For that reason, I think the debate may turn out to be a marginal win for Clinton.

Sometimes, often, Trump seems like a man who spends too much time filling his mind with info gleaned from the alt-right online echo chamber. The frequent mentions of Sidney Blumenthal's name, for example, as if America should react with horror ("he's a very bad person"), or the brief mention of Michelle Obama's anti-Hillary commercials from 2008. Who cares? Some of his screeds were a mash-up of talking points gleaned from the anti-Hillary Twitterverse. The denizens of that realm may have cheered, but the rest of us were still trying to remember the question, which he hardly ever actually answered.

Real content, real depth, was lacking. But of course. That's how these things are designed. I don't care for Hillary, but she conducted herself like an adult. She wasn't "shrill," as she is so often accused of being. Knowing Trump would go low, she staked out the high ground. Against Trump that's easy enough to do. Anyone can look like an adult next to him.

If Trump was trying to intimidate Clinton by stalking around the stage while she spoke, it didn't work. I thought the question about discipline that Anderson Cooper asked was a good one. Of course Donald failed to actually answer it, but went on about how Twitter and Facebook are a form of communication. But questions about personal discipline lead our attention to the fundamental problem with Trump as a candidate and a prospective president.

Finally, in what may have been the lowest of many low points, Trump told the audience that Clinton "has tremendous hate in her heart." Again, the anti-Hillary crowd, who should know something about hate in the heart, probably cheered, but he's going to need more votes than that. To the rest of us, it just seemed like more of the usual arrogance.

The Tragedy of Donald Trump

This election is transitioning from total farce to all-out tragedy before our very eyes.

The latest is the off-hand "locker room banter" caught on a hot mic in 2005. I suppose my readers know what I'm talking about, so I don't have to repeat. There has been a storm of criticism in response, not least from his own side. Some holdouts still try to change the subject to Bill Clinton or say it's not really a big deal compared to Hillary's transgressions. But the failure to call this particular spade a spade because someone else's sins are worse is a prime example of how politics demeans us. We cannot look at our guy, our chosen one, with absolute honesty. We cannot call a spade a spade.

Is it significant? We used to hear all the time, way back in 1992 and 1996, that character matters. And I think it was Winston Churchill who said, "Character is destiny." In the 90s, Clinton defenders sometimes argued that his sexual issues and his political leadership operated on two different levels, private and public, and had nothing to do with one another. His detractors quoted Churchill and said once we excuse this kind of conduct we lose our soul as a nation. The case for the defense was essentially political, while the case for the prosecution was essentially spiritual.

These same arguments are being made today, only now Donald Trump takes the place of Bill Clinton. Many of the same people who held Clinton in contempt now eagerly defend Trump from the same charges. For them, the bar is very high for criticizing Donald, but extremely low for criticizing Hillary. Double-standards abound.

Just how character influences and poisons decision-making and leadership is hard to say, Certainly lousy creeps have sometimes done good things in office I suppose. And we aren't electing saints, as Trump's apologists like to say. But I still say that moral leadership is big part of the job-description. Presidential leadership has a significant impact on the moral climate of the nation. Trustworthy men and women are needed most of all. Donald Trump is all swagger and bravado on the surface, a manner that has served him well in his world, but under that surface, and not far under, is a lot of darkness. And as Christians ought to understand, the darkness in a man will make itself known, It's what's inside a man that stains him.

How do we overlook this and indeed reward it with power? We have been presented this election year with an extraordinarily poor choice. My contention is that as Christians we must distance ourselves from a system that does not give us a morally acceptable choice. I would be gratified if out of this the Body of Christ would re-discover that the way of the Cross is not a march toward political power. If we accept the alluring promise of influence from Trump, we make a devil's bargain, the very deal that Jesus rejected in the wilderness.

I suspect that the Trump campaign is finally sinking. I see this morning that another lurid episode has come to light. The Clinton campaign has of course had months to dig this stuff up and the timing of these stories, just before the second debate and right at the time that  early voters are receiving their mail-in ballots, is no coincidence. And everyone seems to agree there will be more.

And that's the thing. This is turning from farce to tragedy, as I said, because the Republican Party willfully chose and blindly followed a path that many saw would end exactly here. The Republican brand is smeared, of course, but that's the least of it. The Trump brand, the promotion of which has been Donald Trump's career for many years now, is irreversibly tarnished, but neither is that the worst of it. The seeds of this downfall were present from the start, and that is the essence of tragedy. We know that Macbeth's lust for power will get him in trouble, or that Oedipus should not sleep with that woman. Only downfall can follow.

I may be wrong, but I think we are in the "downfall" phase of a tragedy that began with Trump's triumphant march through the primaries (although it really began somewhere in his boyhood, at a level that none of us will ever know), and is ending now in the collapse of the storybook Trump and the revelation of the truth of his soul before the eyes of millions. It is not a pretty sight.

Have you ever seen A Face in the Crowd? A no account drifter rises to become first a television phenomenon with the persona of the good-hearted straight-talking country boy, then on top of that a political force. The new medium of television makes him a star. People believe in him, trust him, but behind the scenes he is a contemptible creep. But character will out, of course, and in the end we see first the revelation of the lustful bully, and finally, deeper even than that, when the last layer is peeled away, the boy-man crying pitifully for attention.

As I say, I may be wrong, and the resilient Trump may bounce back from this as well, but former friends (however reluctant, like Paul Ryan) are starting to disassociate themselves from him. Even the Trump camp has done the rarest thing, issuing an apology of sorts. They had gambled that an America that seems to wallow in so much sin would surely have no problem with Trump's spotty past. But though a good man is proverbially hard to find, we still want at least the good actor playing the part reasonably well. Trump has lost his chance at that.

Several times during the primaries Trump said that he didn't really need to be president. He could walk away and go back to his life of promoting the Trump brand (Trump hotels, Trump wine, Trump steaks, Trump airlines) and be fine with that. The thing is, the brand itself is in trouble too. When the man is revealed, the brand is destroyed. Can he save himself from this? I don't know. It will be interesting to see. But we may be watching the slow-motion crash-and-burn not only of a candidacy, but of a man.

On Not Voting

Norman Geisler wrote a piece for Christianity Today telling everyone why he's for Donald Trump and why that's what Christians ought to do. That he is a theologian might lead you to expect he's going to make a Biblical case for Trump, and he does try to drape some verse citations here and there, There is the one remotely reasonable argument (Supreme Court appointments), and then there are knee-slappers like, a vote for Trump is "a vote for international respect." And also, a vote for Trump is "a vote against national corruptions." Say what?

Non-sequiturs like these aside, Geisler's case come down to good old-fashioned lesser evil thinking. But don't let that word "evil" get in the way. Doing the lesser evil is actually equivalent to doing the greater good, he says. You're doing good by voting for Donald, don't you see that? And isn't do-gooding what Christians are all about?

All this lesser evil thinking is fine, but you'd kind of expect a Christian theologian might take some time to say something about, oh, let's call it the deep-in-the-grain rottenness of character that is called Donald Trump. I mean, even the rudimentary question, what would Jesus do?, would have to give us pause, wouldn't it? That is, if we even cared.

Me, I think that Geisler's article is just another example of how American Evangelicalism has, well, come unmoored. We have gradually slipped into being a crew of religious-y Republicans, lesser eviling our way from election to election, until now we can't even remember what we used to be and should be still. Though we are supposed to be ambassadors of a kingdom of peace, we make excuses for unending war. Though we are supposed to have put aside worldliness in favor of the message of the Gospel, we have bought into the dream of more stuff, and bigger stuff, and upward mobility, putting our hope in the pursuit of the almighty dollar, just as much as the most worldly unbelievers out there. To me, Geisler and his ilk (throw Wayne Grudem and Jerry Falwell, Jr. into the mix) are like people who hear the words of Jesus and say, "Jesus, I do want to follow you, but first let me campaign to defeat Hillary Clinton, then I will leave all to follow you." See Luke 9:57f or Mark 8:18f for a sample of how Jesus might respond to that.

Geisler does admit that Trump is a flawed candidate, which sort of understates the case just a wee bit. Yup, I do realize nobody's perfect, and we're not voting for saints, etc. But this election is requiring us to deduce somehow that the repercussions of putting one truly repugnant creep in office will be less baleful than setting up the other repugnant creep there instead. Maybe you can make this case with regard to one issue or another (and I do think the case could be made with regard to the Supreme Court, for example, that Trump is probably a better choice), but on the whole, given the precarious state of the world, guessing that less evil will come from putting Trump behind the levers of power than putting Clinton there is really just a fool's play. No one knows, and the thought of either choice leaves me praying for Jesus to come quickly.

Bottom line, this is not something I am willing to venture a guess about. I can't really predict just how the evil will repercuss when Trumpian self-regard, pomposity, dishonesty, and sham takes hold of the levers of power. It's beyond my abilities as an amateur prognosticator. And by the way, I don't respect Geisler's ability in that regard either. Just how far the evil will repercuss when we have Trump in office as opposed to Clinton, who can say?  Less far? Maybe. A lot farther? Also maybe.

Which brings me to my point. The third option, not voting at all. Geisler, citing no Biblical argument at all, calls this the the coward's way out. To which I'd like to say, where do you get off, Norman? I mean, I think a case could be made that not adding my voice to one of the two contending choruses for one evil choice vs. the other is a perfectly Jesus-y thing to do.

You go your way Trumpians. Clintonistas, you go yours. You both promise wonderful things if I will just follow you into the darkness, but I'd just as soon sit here by my campfire and wait for morning. I have no obligation to follow either, and you can't shame me into thinking I must by calling me a coward. In fact, I'm on my way somewhere, and the choices you two present are something like the choices the evil one presented to Jesus while he sojourned in the desert. They're meant to lead away, they're intentional misdirections. I've heard some Christians say Trump is God's choice in this hour, but I think the better reading is that he is the devil's choice, and so is Clinton. Jesus would respond, get away from me, Liar. The way of the Kingdom coincides with neither of these paths.

When I became a Christian I became a citizen of a far kingdom, a kingdom not yet of this world, although sometimes, now and then, the fog lifts and I can see it in the hazy distance. It's my home, and I'm headed that way, and you can follow me if you like. I'm following Jesus. I too sometimes lose my bearings, and I too chase after deceitful lights shining through the mist, but this time, in this election year, I'm not doing that. If you like, a non-vote is my way of saying, none of the above, but the truth is, I don't care how you interpret it. We Christians have an old cliche about being in the world but not of it. It was  lie we told ourselves, mostly. The truth is, we are all more "of it" than we'd like to admit. But this election is more "of it" than most. This time, I'm saying no to all that. I'm digging in my heals, going no further. I'll not be a part of this charade dressed up as a choice. I'm out.