The Bullying Pulpit

According to Trump, making America great means doing whatever he wants

Photo by Ryan Franco on Unsplash

In his inaugural address, Donald Trump said, “I was saved by God to make America great again.”

At Trump’s inaugural prayer service, the Right Rev. Mariann Budde, Episcopal Bishop of Washington, D.C., suggested that Trump might have mercy on others after feeling the “providential hand of a loving God”:

I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and Independent families, some who fear for their lives. The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals. . . . Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land. May God grant us the strength and courage to honor the dignity of every human being, to speak the truth to one another in love and walk humbly with each other and our God for the good of all people.

Mercy. Dignity. Truth. Love. Humility.

These qualities are alien to Donald Trump’s psychological makeup. He does not operate on a frequency where he can receive Bishop Budde’s message. If he reads it at all, Trump reads the First Commandment—you shall have no other gods before me—in the first person.

This is why the second Trump presidency will operate from an entirely self-absorbed vantage point: I am the president. I can do whatever I want.

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Trump’s words and actions have made this clear, as he took the first steps this week to impose a new order on the country and the world built on bullying.