Remonstrations

 It's not every day that you get to see someone enact one of your personal fantasies. But yesterday, it happened. Bishop Budde of the Episcopal Church had the unique privilege of having Trump's ear as a captive audience for a morning worship service. And she did not let the opportunity go to waste. She gently but unmistakably chided Trump for the cruelty of his policies. She reminded him of all the people who are living in fear right now—LGBTQ people and immigrants especially—because of his threats. And she pleaded with him to show mercy. 

You may recall that I fantasized about exactly this moment eight years ago. Back in the fall of 2017, I was attending a DACA protest in front of the White House, when the police ushered us out to make way for the president's motorcade. When we asked why, they told us he was going to church. As I recall, it was a national day of prayer for the victims of the hurricane that September—so Trump had to put in a pro forma visit to a Protestant house of worship—Episcopalian, in this case. 

And when I found this out, as I wrote at the time, I briefly considered shedding my current job, becoming ordained in the Episcopal Church, and slowly working my way up the ranks—so that I might one day hold that church's pulpit and be in a position to give the seated president a piece of my mind. As I wrote at the time: 

From our spot a block away from St. John’s church, we had a good view of the people in their nice suits and dresses coming in to join the president for the church service in this bland and utterly uncontroversial house of worship. It was Episcopalian, but it could have belonged to any number of other interchangeable mainline Protestant denominations. It suddenly occurred to me that whoever was preaching the sermon that morning had an extraordinary opportunity before them that they were almost certainly not going to take. [...]

It suddenly seemed to me that I ought to change my entire life plan. That it would be worth years or decades of being a double agent in the role of unprepossessing Episcopal priest, angling my way toward the job at this one D.C. church across from the White House, just so I could one day offer the titanic and earth-shakingly condemnatory sermon I was certain to give before the corrupt powers of the world. Suddenly, the whole panoply of wrathful Biblical rhetoric that I had always spurned before would be opened to me. A whole new toolkit of words and metaphors. “Ye hypocrites!” I would shriek. “Ye nest of vipers!” “Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and do not the things I say?”

Ah, to be able to have this president as a captive audience to one’s castigations. Presumably his dull face would not register what I was even getting at. The nice, polite people in their nice clothes wouldn’t either. They’d be checking their watches, checking their phones and Blackberries, trying to remember why they came in the first place.

(A friend mocked me this morning, after I sent him the old post, for still talking about Blackberries in 2017. But that's what I said at the time, and I will not alter it for appearances.) 

As of yesterday, Bishop Budde has actually done what I could only dream about doing in 2017. In the wake of Trump's gonzo flurry of executive orders declaring an "invasion" at the southern border and suspending asylum law and writing the existence of trans and nonbinary and intersex people out of the cognizance of the federal government, she had the courage to tell Trump to his face that he ought to show a bit of compassion and human decency for a change. 

It wasn't quite as much fire-and-brimstone as I unleashed in my fantasy-version. She didn't exactly heap live coals on his head, to borrow Paul's phrase. Her plea was more strategic than that. As a friend pointed out: she flattered Trump's sense of power. By framing her request as one for "mercy," she granted to him that he holds are the cards. "You have the upper hand here," she seemed to be saying. "We know you can crush us all like a bug, O Mighty Emperor, if you should see fit. So, you have nothing further to prove. Why not show mercy?"

In this role, she sounded a great deal like Abraham pleading with Yahweh. "Far be it from you to punish the guilty and the innocent alike! Far be it from you! Will not the Lord of all the Earth do right?" (And was Abraham not pleading for the people of Sodom? Was he not saying, when he said that there may be fifty righteous people among the wicked, that, in so many words, "they are not all criminals"—just as Bishop Budde said of the nation's undocumented population yesterday?)

I would not have been so strategic if I had held the pulpit in her place. I would have feared that this way of framing it—the plea for "mercy"—would have been too subtle for the likes of Trump. 

But clearly, Bishop Budde knew what she was doing. Her words got the job done. Trump looked annoyed and uncomfortable during the prayer, shifting about like a guilt-ridden schoolboy. J.D. Vance, sitting next to him, smirked and rolled his eyes and whispered in his wife's ear, while she stared stonily forward—no doubt repeating to herself mentally, over and over, "this is normal; this is normal; I didn't marry into a fascist conspiracy to destroy American democracy; I'm still just a regular Big Law attorney; this is normal..."

Clearly, Bishop Budde's words—while subtler than the ones I would have been tempted to use on this occasion—were more than enough to get the message across. 

Part of what worked so well about her prayer is that, while appearing to flatter Trump's power, it also revealed his weakness—for who is weaker in spirit than a bully who abuses his strength? Who is more pathetic than someone who doesn't even have the self-control to keep himself from hurting the innocent? In all those Bible stories, after all—whenever Abraham or Job or whoever remonstrates with Yahweh—they always get the better of him in the argument. Yahweh may have the power to strike them dead—but they have the moral upper hand, and Yahweh knows it. 

That's no doubt what Trump was actually responding to, when he shifted uncomfortably in his pew; or what Vance was noticing, when he tried to minimize the experience by putting on a sarcastic expression. They were both sensing the moral humiliation of their position. In the very act of flattering their power, Bishop Budde was also pointing out to them their paltriness. For all their "death and thundering," as Heinrich Heine's Adam says, they are actually "small and insignificant." 

And surely, this is what many a Trump voter is realizing today as well, at the sight of them. Surely, plenty of them are feeling a wave of buyer's remorse today. Trump may have promised them a "new golden age" and a dalliance with the stars in his inauguration speech. But then he followed it up with a bunch of Mickey Mouse messaging orders, symbolic commands, and mean-spirited squibs. He proved he has the legal power to remove the Indigenous name from a mountain in Alaska, say—but are even his most die-hard supporters convinced that doing so will imminently usher in the "golden age"? 

Surely, they too sense—with Heine's Adam—that this man is actually "small and insignificant," for all his "death and thundering." Surely they too have had a feeling of bathos, as Trump's bold promises of walking on Mars were followed up by little more than rewriting bathroom rules for federal buildings. 

But—then again—we're still only two days into this thing. And if Bishop Budde dressing down Trump is analogous to the role of Abraham upbraiding Yahweh for trying to destroy a whole town, we do have to remember—Yahweh still went ahead and killed all but one of the city's inhabitants. All Abraham's remonstrating only managed to spare a single life. 

And then—the only person who was willing to look back with any regret on the destroyed city was Lot's wife—for which act she was turned into a pillar of salt. 

But at least she was willing to do that. At least she was willing to bear witness. And so too, if that's all Bishop Budde's words end up accomplishing—they were nonetheless worth saying. Suppose she doesn't manage to save so much as one life, or comfort a single soul afflicted by Trump's policies. Suppose—as seems likely—he proceeds to be just as cruel as he would have been otherwise. At least the good Bishop bore witness. Even if she turns into a pillar of salt for it. 

And of her then, if it happens, I will say what Anna Akhmatova did of Lot's wife: "In my heart I never will deny her/ Who suffered death because she chose to turn." (Kunitz/Hayward trans.)