My mom pointed out early in the day yesterday that Trump was bound to do or say something outrageous on Christmas—because he wouldn't be able to stand that people would otherwise spend the day focusing on something other than him.
I checked the news about 4 PM though, and didn't see much. "Guess not," I shrugged. I thought we might actually be spared Trump's lunatic bids for attention, for once.
But no. By 8 pm, I had seen the inevitable headlines. Trump had chosen the Christmas holiday, of all times, to announce on social media a series of military strikes in Nigeria—purportedly targeting "ISIS Terrorists," though we have only his version of events to go on.
These strikes were apparently conducted in coordination with the Nigerian government; they are therefore unlikely to affect the U.S. relationship with the country long-term.
Probably, then, this is mostly theater on Trump's part—designed to cater to the evangelical audience here in the States—except that there are actual human beings who lost their lives as a result of it.
Trump's strikes were of course defended under the slogan of avenging persecuted Christians in Nigeria. And apparently his bellicose posturing on this issue, in earlier social media posts and yesterday, is actually working to endear him to a particularly unreflective branch of the evangelical community.
At the Turning Point USA conference last week, Nicki Minaj cited Trump's social media post about persecuted Christians in Nigeria as one of the major reasons she had decided to join what she—rather pathetically—dubbed the "cool kids" of the MAGA movement.
If anyone seriously cares about Christians or any other people fleeing persecution in Nigeria, however, they might stop and think for a minute about the effects of Trump's other policies on this community.
Although he has sloganeered about avenging Christians—and apparently killed some people on Christmas Day in pursuit of this novel crusade—Trump has meanwhile also bragged about his intention to end all "Third World migration," including from African countries; he has included Nigeria in the most recent expansion of his travel ban; and he has slashed the U.S. refugee program to an historic minimum (while reserving most of the remaining slots for white Afrikaners from South Africa).
If Trump actually wanted to help victims of persecution in Nigeria—he wouldn't be eviscerating the international humanitarian programs, including foreign aid and refugee resettlement, that are expressly designed to help them.
It is a profound perversion of the Christian religion to be willing to kill people, ostensibly to stop persecution, but not to provide shelter or other non-violent aid to the actual victims of that persecution.
But this inversion of Christian ethics is, alas, fully consistent with the variety of the faith as preached and practiced by self-proclaimed Christians in Trump's government, such as Pete Hegseth—who notoriously sports a "Crusader" tattoo with a motto that hearkens back to those medieval massacres in the Holy Land: "Deus Vult."
One is reminded of the words of the French philosophe Volney: behold the religious sects, he wrote, "persecuting when strong, tolerant when weak, hating each other in the name of a God of peace, forming each an exclusive heaven in a religion of universal charity, dooming each other to pains without end in a future state, and realizing in this world the imaginary hell of the other." (Eckler trans.)
This is the version of Christianity according to which it is appropriate on Christmas Day—of all times—to blow up human beings in a foreign country, and then sadistically boast about it on social media.
"May God Bless our Military"—went Trump's ever-tasteful holiday message on social media yesterday—"and MERRY CHRISTMAS to all, including the dead Terrorists, of which there will be many more if their slaughter of Christians continues."
One is reminded too of the words of the poet Robert Burns:
Ye hypocrites! are these your pranks?
To murder men, and give God thanks!
Desist, for shame!—proceed no further
God won't accept your thanks for MURTHER!
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