The Pope versus the “King”: United States President Donald Trump seems intent on fulfilling a self-appointed tragic destiny. Every step he takes to avoid being thought weak is leading him towards the inevitability of a disgraceful end and an apocalyptic legacy. Worse still, every step he has taken to show strength has deepened his descent into the abyss of despicable authoritarianism. The world thinks the man is weak, confused, a drawback to America and a danger to the world as we have come to know it. A man trapped in the web of power can hardly find solace in statesmanship or diplomacy because he has made war and the reckless show of military strength the sole business of his powerful office.
President Trump and Pope Leo
By Chidi Amuta
United States President Donald Trump seems intent on fulfilling a self-appointed tragic destiny. Every step he takes to avoid being thought weak is leading him towards the inevitability of a disgraceful end and an apocalyptic legacy. Worse still, every step he has taken to show strength has deepened his descent into the abyss of despicable authoritarianism. The world thinks the man is weak, confused, a drawback to America and a danger to the world as we have come to know it. A man trapped in the web of power can hardly find solace in statesmanship or diplomacy because he has made war and the reckless show of military strength the sole business of his powerful office. Just check: he has helped Israel to assassinate Islam’s Supreme Leader of Iran in the holy week of Ramadan. He has invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its authoritarian president. He has incapacitated a harmless Cuba and returned its populace to medieval conditions. In recent days, he shifted attention to an unrelenting insults of the Christian Pope.
Habitually condescending towards every other world leader, Mr. Trump has placed himself above all earthly dominions. He now seems to want to rise to contest the supremacy of ambassadors of every divinity. Anyone who accuses him of displaying all the attributes of a tyrant will not be too far off the mark. His absolutist mentality is troublesomely veering far from the rational and normal.
In the White House, he plays God. At cabinet meetings or his numerous rambling briefings or audiences with visiting world leaders, his cabinet secretaries, advisers and other courtiers are kept standing literally in awe of their egocentric overlord while he endlessly rambles in illogical lie infested tirades. A president who was elected on the basis of the world’s showpiece democratic constitution has spent nearly two years behaving like a medieval king, prompting stunned Americans to stage intermittent “No King” protests in over 3,000 cities and towns.
Very recently, he briefly donned the costume of Jesus Christ in a controversial social media post that put his mental health open to serious question. To crown it all, he has engaged in an open quarrel with the Pope, the Christian God’s only ambassador on earth from time immemorial. No president or world leader is on record as having challenged the authority of the Pope on any subject let alone openly quarreling with the pontiff in discourteous language. He has blasphemously claimed that Pope Leo was chosen because he (Trump) is in the White House.
The Pope’s sin is to have criticized the fundamental morality of his Iran war and the multiple human rights abuses Trump has committed in collaboration with Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu. Both men have committed multiple war crimes in the prosecution of the unprovoked wars in Iran, Lebanon and Gaza. The International Court of Justice has already convicted Netanyahu for human rights violations and severally declared him wanted. But Trump insists that the Pope is “weak on crime”, bad for his rabid immigration and war mongering foreign policy. He and his minions would rather that the Pope restricts his public utterances to matters of morality and spirituality and leave the political field for Trump and his like.
The Pope has contested this rhetorical confinement of his otherwise universal moral authority, insisting, of course, that war and the conduct of international affairs involving the loss of lives and the unleashing of humanitarian catastrophes are fundamental moral transgressions of the laws of God. Who else is better positioned to caution the leaders of humanity about war and peace and the wanton destruction of God’s work? This first American Pope in history is not one to shy away from controversy and principled assertions. He has said it again and again that he is not afraid of the tyrant in the White House.
The public relations obsessed Trump is perhaps troubled by his abysmal approval ratings vis-à-vis the very popular Pope among Catholics in America and both Christians and Muslims worldwide. Having assisted Israel to assassinate Iran’s Supreme Leader, perhaps the Pope is now the only remaining beacon of power standing between Trump and the universal acclaim of God! A president who started out parading himself as the liberator of Christians in distress all over the world is now antagonizing the prime symbol of institutionalized Christianity, the Pope himself.
To both the Pope and other world leaders, Trump speaks with the irritating arrogance of a typical tyrant and supremacist leader. He has assumed the leadership of the nations he has conquered or frightened. From his recent utterances, he is now at once the President of the United States, Israel and Venezuela, even Cuba and still counting. His appetite for conquest is limitless just as his desire to appropriate the spoils of war from oil and gas to rare earth minerals is unequalled even in the history of his imperialist nation.
In a classic demonstration of his might over right doctrine, Trump keeps brandishing the supremacy of the US military over all other powers on earth. He is therefore at war with literally every nation on earth. He has invaded and kidnapped the president of Venezuela, taking away an instant war chest of 50 million barrels of oil that his invading forces found loaded in a vessel at the point of conquest. He has invaded Iran, killed its Supreme Leader in the middle of the Ramadan fast. He has threatened to take all the oil and treasures of the Iranian state that he can cart away as spoils of war. Threats against Greenland, Canada and Mexico have only been muted by his weightier meddling.
His supremacist mindset unfortunately recognizes one color: White. His exclusionary concept of America defines the US as white America. His pet slogan of “America First” follows from his isolationist and supremacist assumptions. It is an absolutism that initially emboldened him to impose stifling tariffs on virtually all nations of the world. It took a ruling of the US Supreme Court to rule him out of order and convert those illegal tariff collections into debts owed to the various nations who now have to press for a refund along the line. His concept of power is an extremist and conservative right wing absolutism with a constant primitive “might is right” hallucination.
In Trump’s mind, the leader of the most powerful nation on earth might as well be the most powerful human being on earth. There is only one step left for him to ascend to celestial divine heights, to attain divine heights by assaulting and toppling everything that conveys the supremacy of God. So, he has chosen to insult and harangue the Pope. He has also posted an image of himself clad in the costume of Jesus Christ only to cowardly pull it down claiming he was mimicking a doctor which he could never be with his dismal academic records as an undergraduate.
Trump’s spat with the Pope resonates with his earlier expressed supremacy of personal morality over the morality imposed by international law and the global rules-based order. His present quarrel with the Pope is therefore a confrontation long foreseen and foretold.
After his invasion of Venezuela and threat on Cuba, he was asked what could check his power mongering escapades and military adventurism, he responded: “It is only my own morality.” Not even the moral code of organized religion appeals to Trump as a restraining moral force. Perhaps his guiding morality is the code of pirates (summary execution of occupants of drug boats at sea!) and free-lance criminals!
But his is the typical moral insensitivity of every tyrant, undeterred by constitutional constraints. It is a morality that can only be self-defining and self-justifying. It is a morality of depravity, of tyrannical insensitivity to group feelings and long established norms of civil order and international law. It is the moral recklessness of a leader who launched a war on a Moslem nation in the holy week of Ramadan.
His moral insensitivity is mirrored in the behaviour and utterances of his principal lieutenants. Pete Hegseth, his adolescent war hound equated the plight of a rescued pilot whose plane was shot down over Iran to the passion of Christ and the resurrection. He equated the plight of the rescued pilot to the resurrection of Christ over a three day period, not minding that such an analogy could weaponize the Iran attack into a religious war in a part of the world where the battle of civilizations overwhelms the clash of national interest.
There is something very troubling about the moral implications of Trump’s brand of right wing conservatism. It is also threatening the very foundations of American civilization and culture. The dictum “in God we trust” is so cardinal to the American ideal that that is imprinted on every dollar bill. It implies the supremacy of Christianity in everything America has tried to do in the world. America’s soft power, the assistance to WHO, USAID and other aid agencies were informed by the deeper humanism of the American Christian ethos which Mr. Trump has since overturned and reversed. To seek to overturn that moral order in pursuit of earthly dominance is to overturn the puritan moral departure that informed the foundation of the New World.
Worse of all, Mr. Trump has placed nothing on the agenda to replace the moral order he is subverting. Perhaps anarchy is his moral replacement. Yet he keeps reverting to a Christian order by either public reading of the Bible to a TV audience or preaching to Christian audiences in places like Nigeria where he wants illiterate masses to see him as a saviour of Christians who are ostensibly being persecuted and murdered.
Whether or not Mr. Trump and his devotees believe it, the global appeal of the United States as a global power has always been its delicate balance of military strength and overwhelming compassion towards the afflicted. This balance is the morality of America’s supreme power.
Power without morality is a return to the Hobbesian brutishness of nature. Might as right is to wield authority without restraint which is authoritarianism. Absolutism is power without legal or constitutional constraint. Trump’s systematic thrashing of institutions has reduced America’s treasured democracy to a laughable banana republic despotism.
This is where I encounter a great contradiction in the overall perception of Donald Trump by my Nigerian compatriots. The southern Christian elite tend to see in Trump a redeeming almost messianic figure who will overturn the hegemony political order of an Islamic northern political elite and replace it with a certain fictive reversal of the rampaging Jihadists order. The current indiscriminate killings of poor Nigerians all over the country by their equally poor and ignorant compatriots will hopefully be assuaged by Trump in his empty pro-Christian showmanship.
This misperception was so widespread among Nigerians that when US forces bombed an uninhabited arid savannah location in Sokoto, the strike was hailed as the onset of the redeeming mission. But no marauding jihadist zealots were killed. Neither were any captive Christian worshippers rescued. Christians hailed the symbolic strike while Muslims screamed abomination.
Since then, Trump’s interest in Nigeria has relapsed into the usual US national interests in oil and gas. The usual scare mongering travel advisories have since returned. Nigeria’s serial insecurity has since resumed its bloody march as badly trained and ill-equipped soldiers and greedy politicians exchange blames over a growing avoidable national disaster.
Hubris is when an earthly sovereign also aspires to celestial pre-eminence. A king pretending to be or behaving like God or a god is an abomination in every faith and culture. Donald Trump, does not seem to be quite content with the awesome power of the President of the United States. He seems to want more and behaves like a godling who neither respects international law nor the limits placed by the distance between God and man in the cosmic order.
In the old world, it used to be the task of the Pope to anoint kings and assure them of divine blessing! In the medieval world, a worldly leader who commits the heinous hubris of assuming divine manners and powers would qualify for only one thing: to be burnt at the stakes for blasphemous infidelity.
