God to Trump: Take My Name Out of Your Mouth!

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“PING!”:  Yet another sonic explosion was going off in my pocket. Who was texting now?

Somehow, I’ve gotten on a master MAGA list, so I’ve been receiving a steady barrage of texts from Rudy Giuliani. Before he became quite so sad and untethered, Rudy had stopped off at Joe’s — the one on State Street — during a fundraising trip through town where we had a very brief exchange of words. At the time he seemed quite rational. 

I also get quite a few texts from Trump himself — though we have yet to meet. I’d be honored — perversely perhaps — if I hadn’t read that the president is now cranking out about 158 such texts a night during the few hours left on the clock. I had an uncle who burned hot like that. He wound up committing suicide, in what they called a mental institution.

But this text was different from all the others — for one thing, it didn’t seem to be coming from Rudy or Trump. “The Bible warns us about those twisting the Scripture,” it read. “Do not give the Devil a foothold. We’re commanded to resist.”

Wow! Kind of spooky.

I say so because at that very second, I had been talking to a friend about just that very thing: Scripture and how it can be twisted. We both had just heard brand new allegations that military commanders — scattered across 30 military bases — were telling junior officers and enlisted troops that America and Israel’s attack on Iran will hasten the return of Jesus Christ for the Judgement Day. These commanders were said to be citing Biblical passages likening what’s happening in the Middle East to Biblical prophecies forecasting the Rapture, the End Days, the Battle of Armageddon, and, eventually, the Second Coming. In other words, that whole Book of Revelations thing.

Wow! Kind of kooky. 

So that’s what’s driving oil prices and why they’ve increased by 14 percent. And all the attendant stock market uncertainty. 

Is anyone feeling the Rapture?  

Could this actually be true, we asked ourselves? Were senior officers actually telling troops this? Or was it just another social media falsity engineered to pander to our already overactive confirmation biases?

These days, it’s all but impossible to tell. At the risk of twisting a few Biblical passages myself, doesn’t the Old Testament talk about the Tower of Babel where no one could understand a word the others were saying because God — pissed off by their hubris — had struck everyone with a different language.

If one was inclined to twist, one might note certain obvious parallels. 

The timing of this text struck me as curious. Maybe even alarming. Was my cell phone listening to me? Could “they” hear what I had just been talking about? Or would I soon be going the way of my poor uncle, trapped in his revolving door between hilarity and rage?

I searched all the usual sites. Nothing in The New York Times. Nothing on PBS. Not a word from Reuters either. But there it was — in The Guardian, USA Today, Fox News, and Al Jazeera — either written about or mentioned. 

Along the way, I stumbled onto a letter written and co-signed by 30 members of Congress, dated March 6, including one Jared Huffman, a congressmember who went to UCSB, all demanding an investigation into these allegations by the inspector general of the Department of Defense. With military personnel now placing themselves in harm’s way, the co-signers — yes, all Democrats — argued, troops need to have confidence in the people empowered to put them there. They should be consumed by the safety of the boots-on-the-ground troops, not some quasi-psychedelic, celestial prophesy incoherent even to the most ardent scholars of the Bible. When bullets fly, group cohesion matters. It’s the difference between life or death.

Does that make those allegations — reportedly 200 such complaints have been filed — true? Not necessarily. But it’s not unlikely either.

Since Trump has refused to provide any clear explanation as to what we’re doing in Iran — why; why so suddenly; why now; and for what ends — we, of course, are left with way too many blank answers.

When his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, tells one story one day — Israel forced us into it — and then, the next day, something else entirely — forget what I said about Israel, we are left to wander in the proverbial desert. Hopefully not for the 40 years written about in the Bible. 

But given Trump’s penchant to wrap himself in the cloak of religious devotion, the Battle of Armageddon might make sense.

Trump made a lot of noise about God during his State of the Union speech. “When God needs a nation to work His miracles,” he proclaimed, “He knows exactly who to ask.” As if, one might wonder, why an omniscient and omnipotent God would need to ask anyone? 

But Trump was just warming up. The nation’s destiny, he said, was “written by the Hand of Providence.” And he expressed pride in what he described as “the tremendous renewal in religion, faith, Christianity, and belief in God” that somehow coincided with his two terms in office.

I am not here to bag on anyone’s faith. I wish I had it. I am here, however, to bag on Trump’s facts.

As to actual metrics when it comes to this reported resurgence of faith, they show that things are exactly where they’ve been for a while now. Not going up. Not going down. Just holding pretty steady.

If I was God, I might come down from heaven and give Trump a stern talking to: “Take My name out of your mouth!” I’d command. Maybe I’d go Old Testament and smite him with a bolt of lightning. After all, God did exactly that to the father of St. Barbara — our city’s namesake — after he chopped off his daughter’s head for converting to Christianity. 

It was, I’m told, a more innocent world way back then. 

Right now, the government has admitted that they have, at last, found the 50 pages of Epstein documents that went mysteriously missing. As now has been widely reported, these documents contain very explicit allegations that Trump sexually assaulted a 13-year-old girl provided to him by Epstein himself. According to an FBI report, when Trump forced the girl’s face into his naked crotch, she told FBI agents, she bit his penis. Interviewed on four separate occasions, she claimed, Trump responded by punching her head.

Is this true? I don’t pretend to know. But I find it notable that the one and only document — out of several million — that directly accused Trump of sexual abuse would just happen to go missing. It seemed “duplicative,” his minions now tell us, so they put it in storage. I don’t understand how that explains anything. Are we to believe these documents were innocently taken out of public circulation because of some bureaucratic filing error?

I have no idea what God might say. “Take My name out of your mouth?”

Just as I managed to distract myself and calm down, my phone pinged again. At that precise moment, I was in the middle of telling another friend about the first ping. “Satan himself masquerading as an angel of light,” the new ping read, “Twisted Scripture is spreading like wildfire.” 

I still have no idea who has been sending me these pings, but if I was driving in a car, I’d check the rearview mirror to see what was lurking in the back seat. 

But this ain’t no movie. 

I get it. The Christian world is now in the throes of Lent, headed into Easter. The Jewish world is between Purim and Passover. And the Muslim world is right in the middle of Ramadan, its High Holy month. That’s a whole lotta holy going on at one time. 

All three faiths trace their existence to the prophet Abraham. God made a deal with Abraham. The Jews would be the chosen people entitled to the chosen land. And in exchange — as a symbol of their spiritual submission — Jewish males would be circumcised. The only problem here is that Muslim men get circumcised, too. But when they do it, it is seen more as a prudent hygienic precaution than any spiritual pact. They are not chosen. Why is one man’s circumcision seen as holy in the eyes of God and another man’s circumcision is not?

I don’t pretend I can make sense out of this. All I know is Benjamin Netanyahu has no interest in any peace not achieved through the barrel of a gun or an aerial bombardment. 

Twice now, he has recently cited the Biblical story of Amalek, an implacable enemy of the ancient Jews. Amalek and his followers ambushed the Jews as they made their exodus out of Egypt. When the Jews had the chance to return the favor, at the city of Jericho, they made the most of it. God famously commanded them to kill everyone: women, children, babies, old men, sheep, goats. Everything. Obliterate them from human memory. 

I know it’s more complicated than that. I know I am not competent enough to make sense of sacred texts. But 2,000 years later, it appears everyone still remembers way too much. As long as we walk with Netanyahu, our hands will be bloody from fighting his forever wars in faraway lands. 

At the rate we’re going, we better hope and pray Jesus never comes back to make his Final Judgements. 

Ping!