Donald Trump yet again demonstrated his innate taste, further honed at Atlantic City casinos. To celebrate the forthcoming opening of the conclave assembled to appoint a new pontiff, Trump posted an AI photograph of himself as Pope.
Many commentators screamed ‘blasphemy’ and ‘mockery’, while the Republicans Against Trump website wrote: “Trump just posted a photo of himself as the pope. It’s full-on lunacy at this point.”
All those comments are correct. Trump’s idea of a joke is indeed blasphemous and mocking, and I too have wondered for quite a while whether the Donald is certifiable.
I’m no shrink, just a reasonably well-read layman, but to my eye Trump’s behaviour is increasingly bizarre. Most lamentable lack of self-awareness, huge mood swings, unrestrained narcissism, the tendency to mouth mutually exclusive things within days, sometimes hours, of one another – all these are symptoms of a personality disorder, and I’ll leave it for professionals to diagnose it accurately.
Whether or not he is going insane, Trump is still eminently capable of looking out for Number One, meaning himself and his family. As Dominic Lawson pointed out in yesterday’s article, the Trumps control a cryptocurrency business called World Liberty Financial.
He promotes it on Truth Social, a platform managed by Donald Jr. I don’t know whether the family takes advantage of the numerous possibilities for corruption the cryptocurrency offers, but the platform itself is quite lucrative.
Trump uses it, rather than official White House channels, to announce his changes of heart on tariffs, which are as regular as they are market-sensitive. Hence market traders feel they have to subscribe to the platform to stay half a step ahead. This boosts the family’s profits at the time when those same U-turns are beggaring millions of Americans.
Trump is also offering wealthy businessmen the pleasure of his company at a Mar-a-Lago dinner for a modest fee of up to $5 million. To quote Mr Lawson: “As one of Trump’s political opponents pointed out on the floor of the Senate, ‘If you were mayor of a medium-sized town and it was reported that you were selling meetings for, like, $200, you would be arrested’.”
But getting back to Trump’s witty photographic joke, the first word that came to my mind when I saw it this morning was neither ‘blasphemous’ nor ‘mocking’, although they do apply.
The picture was unspeakably vulgar, and it belongs in the encyclopaedia to illustrate the entry for Vulgarity, n. On second thoughts, any other snapshot of Trump would do as well, for vulgarity is the dominant trait of his personality.
However, when vulgarity has Christianity in its sights, it’s a deadly weapon, more so in my view than even blasphemy and mockery. It’s a steady imposition of vulgarity on Christian worship that’s largely responsible for Christianity’s demise as a dynamic social and cultural force.
As far as I’m concerned, Trump is no Christian, despite all his entreaties for God to bless America, which is de rigueur for any US politician. Britons tend to regard that sort of thing as tawdry, and I for one can’t imagine a British PM ending a speech with “God bless the United Kingdom”. If he tried, he’d be laughed out of Westminster.
Trump was raised as a Presbyterian, but back in 2020 declared himself to be non-denominational, whatever that means. Here I must admit to a weakness: for me, there exist two kinds of Christianity I readily recognise as such: Western Catholic and Eastern Orthodox.
On everything else, including all Protestant denominations, I agree with Hilaire Belloc who regarded them as heresies. Some of my friends, who are kinder than me, and perhaps also better Christians, talk about all those sectarians, denominational or otherwise, as ‘brothers in Christ’.
Yes, and Cain was Abel’s brother. Then, come to think of it, Arians, Gnostics, Chiliasts, Pelagians also believed in Christ, after a fashion. However, if their fashion had prevailed, Christianity would only be remembered, if at all, as an attempt to reform Judaism in the early days of the Roman Empire. Looking at what’s happening to Christianity today, it’s hard not to see Protestantism as the anteroom of atheism.
To paraphrase Wilde, all sects and heresies are vulgar, although the mainstream churches are doing their best to keep up. Just compare these two excerpts from Matthew 1:25, the first one from the King James Version, the second from the NRSV. Both talk about Mary, Joseph and the Virgin Birth.
KJV: “… and knew her not till she had brought forth her firstborn son.”
NRSV: “… but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son.”
What tone-deaf vulgarian thought that the new line was an improvement on the old one? How could any genuine believer introduce the ugly euphemistic locution ‘marital relations’ into a scriptural text?
If to Dostoyevsky beauty could save the world, vulgarity can destroy it. That’s why it pains me to see at the helm in the West’s most powerful nation a man whose salient traits Dominic Lawson describes, alliteratively, as “vanity, viciousness, venality and vulgarity”.
Oh well, as long as Trump doesn’t turn to translating the Bible in his retirement.