Trump’s unholy America to collide with MLK | Will Bunch Newsletter

You gotta hand it to the Philadelphia Eagles. If they can’t be the best at being the best — the mirage they magically created in the first 11 weeks of the 2023-24 season — then they will be the best at being the worst. They are just one inevitable road playoff loss from a too early winter. To paraphrase one losing NFL coach, 2024 is what we thought it was, so far.

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“The question we have to answer is who are we? That’s what’s at stake. Who are we?“ — President Joe Biden, kicking off his 2024 presidential campaign last week in Montgomery County

Donald Trump wants you to know who he is, or, at least, who he thinks he is: a man of The Lord, as long as it’s the vengeful God, eager to smite Trump’s enemies on Capitol Hill or in the judiciary or in the news media with his terrible, swift sword. In seeking to crush his nominal GOP primary opponents in predominantly white and heavily evangelical Iowa, the 45th president, running to be 47th, even called in his own Christian hype man, or maybe call him a “smite man.”

The New York Times, in the kicker of its lengthy story about the new breed of self-proclaimed Christian fundamentalist backing the likely GOP nominee, said that a 27-year-old local evangelist named Joel Tenney got a tepid response from the crowd at a Coralville, Iowa Trump rally when he quoted the Scriptures, but the audience roared when Tenney and his God got political.

“This election is part of a spiritual battle,” the evangelist said. “When Donald Trump becomes the 47th president of the United States, there will be retribution against all those who have promoted evil in this country.”

These are not your father’s born-again Christians, according to the Times’ deep dive into the blending of religion and politics in the American heartland and especially Iowa, which continues its run as a highly unrepresentative kingmaker when it holds the first-in-the-nation GOP caucuses on Monday night. Many of these new evangelicals go to a physical church rarely or not at all, preferring to get their Biblical interpretations on YouTube and other sites that side-by-side also promoted Trump’s Big Lie of 2020 election fraud.

They seem to crave what churchgoers have desired for centuries: the certainty of authority, with Trump as divine retribution made flesh. The writer Tim Alberta, whose own evangelical family roots have made him an insightful analyst of modern Christian conservatism, said adherents don’t mind rallying behind the twice-divorced and mostly unchurched Trump as long as he promises to fight the modern, multicultural forces they believe are against them. Alberta told NPR that those feeling persecuted in today’s world “would gladly embrace a sort of lurch toward authoritarianism if it meant preserving what they see as a Christian America, rather than lose in a liberal democratic fashion.”

America is — slowly, sort of — waking up in 2024 to the notion that fascism can happen here, wrapped in a flag and bearing the cross. When push comes to shove, so-called cultural traditions — too often the polite term for toxic hierarchies like white supremacy or the patriarchy — matter to many of our fellow citizens a lot more than preserving abstract notions about democracy.

It was just five years ago that Biden announced his presidential bid by insisting Trump and his 2016 election was “an aberration in American history ... because this is not who we are.” But if Trump wins the White House a second time, then this is who we are. No wonder an older and perhaps wiser Biden hedged his bets in Blue Bell last week, adding that large question mark: Who are we? Streaks of racism, authoritarianism, and violence are rippled through the American saga like a shiny marble floor at Trump Tower, but Biden doesn’t believe this is the full story.

Neither did the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

In an alternate timeline, MLK might have turned 95 this Monday and lived to see an America that elected a Black president but then eviscerated the Voting Rights Act that King had marched for in Selma. Instead, we get a federal holiday for a martyred civil-rights hero that for a few short years nodded toward service and reflection, but which in 2024 will be overshadowed by Republicans deciding which brand of white supremacist moves on to Milwaukee’s GOP convention and maybe the White House. It’s truly hideous.

Who are we? King was brutally candid about America’s original sins, expanding his worldview from his initial focus on racism and segregation to a damning critique that included the social costs of runaway militarism and the soul-crushing nature of capitalism. But he also believed in the American Dream, an uncashed promissory note that would pay off some day, even as he knew he probably wouldn’t live to see it happen.

Trump thinks he has enemies? King was arrested 29 times, stabbed at a book signing, hit with a rock or two, and ultimately assassinated. But this pastor’s plans for his adversaries never once included retribution. His secret weapon was love.

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that,” King said in a sermon that was republished in 1963. “Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”

Trump’s expected Iowa leap toward dictatorship is an American travesty, but we can’t let this become a stain on King’s memory, especially not on his birthday. Who are we? Are we a nation that kneels down before vengeance, or looks to the light? Will we embrace Trump’s God of wrath, or King’s God of love? That’s what’s at stake.

Question: What is stopping Dems from expelling on-the-record insurrectionists from Congress? — Via Dr. Nick (@NM_Wilkinson) on X/Twitter

Answer: Well, there’s an easy answer in that the Democrats don’t have the votes, with a minority in the current House when it takes a hard-to-reach two-thirds vote to expel a member. Ideally, members would uphold the 14th Amendment and crack down on the insurrectionists among them, or at least the most active Jan. 6 enthusiasts like Pennsylvania’s own Rep. Scott Perry. In reality, the recently booted ex-Rep. George Santos, who created an utterly fake persona to fool voters into electing him, showed how high a bar exists for politicians to sanction their own. Just ask Senator Gold Bars, a.k.a. Bob Menendez of New Jersey. This necessary work, fairly or not, will be left to the voters in November, and members like Perry and Rep. Lauren Boebert should be looking over their shoulder.

I don’t know if it was a sense of dread or just last-minute holiday shopping, but surprisingly few of you weighed in with predictions on the 2024 election, and one of those was to promote Robert Kennedy Jr. ... um, OK. Those with an opinion on the two major candidates felt surprisingly confident about President Joe Biden’s chances. “Biden in a walk,” wrote Bob Kneebone from Santa Monica. “Polling has already shown it is underreporting the anger” — over shrinking abortion rights — “post Dobbs debacle.”

📮This week’s question: Let’s start 2024 by avoiding politics. Eagles coach Nick Sirianni has presided over one of the worst late-season collapses in NFL history, losing five of the final six regular-season games after starting with the league’s best record. Ahead of a possible playoff debacle in Tampa Bay, do the Birds fire Sirianni, just a year after going to the Super Bowl? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer. Please put “Nick Sirianni” in the subject line.

This holiday season was marred in my family by the loss of my father-in-law, Fred Boccella. Born in South Philadelphia in 1926 when Calvin Coolidge was president, he made the most out of his 97-plus years. As a kid, he went out on house calls with his dad, a physician who served many of his fellow Italian immigrants, some of whom offered to pay with a chicken or a goat. He turned 18 in 1944 and made it to Germany with his Army unit in time for the American occupation, when he let freezing Berliners take coal from the large pile he was assigned to guard. That same helping spirit guided him for decades as a teacher and counselor in the Philadelphia public schools and later at the Overbrook Learning Center he ran until age 90, steering so many city kids toward a brighter future.

I learned a lot from Fred about how to be a better person, but he also helped me to understand all the fuss around the so-called Greatest Generation — that cohort of Americans forged by the twin nightmares of the Great Depression and World War II. People are people, and it’s not really that one wave of human beings is better, or worse, than the next one. Rather, we saw the greatness of Fred’s generation through the magnitude of the challenges they faced, and their courage to run toward them. But there was something else.

The Greatest Generation also understood that despite the hardships, much was given to them. When Fred came home from serving in Europe, the U.S. government paid his way through La Salle University, thanks to the G.I. Bill. It was the same for many of his peers. That small investment was repaid many times over, not just in the hundreds of kids he helped educate but in many other ways, big and small, that he gave back to his community. Some G.I. Bill beneficiaries became president or won a Nobel Prize, but many more were like Fred — unsung heroes who coached Little League or taught Sunday school because they heard a calling to give something back. America stopped doing things as big or as generous as the G.I. Bill, and we’re seeing the results. That’s why it’s no exaggeration to say that when Fred Boccella passed, we will never see another quite like him.

It feels like it was about three decades ago or so, but there was a time — eight years, believe it or not — when Barack Obama was the president of the United States. On Jan. 9, 2017, I wrote a lengthy post-mortem of the 44th presidency some 11 days before it ended in the orange tsunami that is Donald Trump. I tried to make sense of Obama’s successes in the face of constant GOP obstruction, from Obamacare to his personal style that defined White House cool, amid his many failures, especially the continued dropping of American bombs all over the globe. I wrote, “there was so much that the best president of my lifetime got wrong.” Read the rest: “Obama was the right man for the wrong time.”

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