Donald Trump is Selling Bibles and WE can’t be this stupid
This week on the corner of hope and despair, Donald Trump selling Bibles proves my longstanding theory: reality is just a writer’s strike.
It is the only logical explanation
Donald Trump is selling Bibles.
The Bibles include a copy of the Pledge of Allegiance (our bizarre daily loyalty oath), the Founding Documents, and the lyrics to Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to Be an American.”
The only possible explanation for this is that we are living in a sitcom, and the writers aren’t even trying.
Those founding documents are clear about the separation of church and state (see also, the Establishment Clause). So, the people who would pay for things you can easily download for free (National Constitution Center), must do so out of some great love of the documents themselves. No one who truly loves the Constitution or US democracy would purchase any of America’s founding documents while they were, in a deeply anti-American fashion, printed in a Bible. The logical underpinnings of our entire democratic structure forbid it.
The same can be said of tying the Bible to one specific country: no self-respecting true believer would fall victim to such base (and textbook) idolatry. Christian Nationalism is idolatry. Printing the flag, Pledge, and Founding documents of any country on the Bible is, if not a sin, certainly a no-no. The kinds of people who believe the Bible and actually build their lives around its contents would not purchase one that is so clearly a political ploy and so obviously opposed to at least one of the Ten Commandments (idolatry).
Faith is a beautiful gift, and the idea that hundreds of thousands of men and women of good faith would sit idly by or actively participate while their belief system is coopted and corrupted by phony religious leaders and politicians cannot be explained by anything other than us living in a sitcom. Simply put: this cannot be real. People cannot be this catastrophically gullible.
Why else would you not see Christians protesting these “Christian” Nationalists at every turn? Who has more cause to call out the twisting of faith for profit than the people who value and cherish that faith.
Ergo, the whole situation is a plot device by some scab writer Nepo babies who have clearly not watched the previous seasons. Part of what hurts is that it’s not even good writing.
But wait, there’s more
It just makes sense that “everything that’s old is new again” not because humans are that deeply tied to white and western supremacy, capitalism, settler colonialism, and their own desperate need for acceptance. We have therapists, if this were the real world, people would just go to therapy for their issues not commit mass murder.
The resurgence of Nazis, fascism, the John Birch Society, genocide, and having the same people in government for the last several decades, all indicates that we’re in a writer’s strike season. They needed a quick drama boost, so they pulled out the villains from previous episodes because they weren’t clever enough to think of new ones. Clearly, we’re in a flashback episode because the World’s Oldest democracy™ would not be so lazy in its selection of leaders that we’d have the same hoard of geriatrics at all levels of power. It’s like those Golden Girls episodes but with less cheesecake.
No one who actually has access to all of the lessons of history would deliberately choose this.
And the jokes are just too on point. The Republicans who claim to stand for Christianity made a literal golden idol of Trump (and it was wearing American flag shorts). Rudy Giuliani actually went to the wrong Four Seasons and his hair started leaking. CPAC (the conservative political action committee) used Nazi symbols in their events, and their formerly favorite dolls, the Moms for Liberty, literally quoted Hitler in their newsletter.
In a truly fair and free, educated and God-fearing country, this simply could not be possible.
Other explanations
Sure, there are other possible explanations. That many Christians really could be so easily led by someone who fits the Biblical paradigm for the Anti-Christ. It could be that a handful of billionaires control the world and are actually trying to destroy it for the rest of us because they believe their money will save them. It could actually be the End Times.
But there’s no way the mass of people who had access to this information would just plod along quietly as generation after generation of our lives and our planet are slowly sectioned off to feed the beast of greed. This is clearly a ploy by the Network to remind us how much we love this show, so we’ll write in and get another season. There’s no other excuse for thinking God made a world for us while simultaneously wanting to kill everyone and everything in it.
Trump’s Bible sales could just be a clever money-laundering scam. Churches can’t donate outright to Trump, but they can buy Bibles.
Of course, that would mean that masses of so-called Christians in this country were more concerned with earthly prideful things like maintaining political power than the actual tenets of their faith. If that’s true and Jesus does come back, I want to be a fly on the wall for that conversation: “I told you to love everyone, how’d that go?”
It’s not actually funny
Okay, in some ways, the jokes write themselves. Trump the Grifter has put a lot of companies out of business, but he’s done generational damage to comedians and dystopian fiction writers. Nothing we can come up with matches the unhinged way people follow him. They’re addicts for him, and that’s horrifying.
In other ways, it’s just not funny. Being in a society where information and education are so freely available makes it impossible that this many people can be duped this easily over this long a time, but truth is dumber than fiction.
I like the idea that we’re in a writer’s strike. That means sooner or later someone who knows what they’re doing could come back and set us on the right path.
But at the end of the day, it might only be us. And when a number of us are incapable of rational thought, that’s terrifying.
