Your Independent Journal from the Heartland
In the roller-coaster horror show we’re trying to survive in the second year of the Second Coming of Donald Trump, the unprecedented miracle is that each day seems to bring something more infuriating or frightening than the day before. In the last week of March, as millions of Americans joined the “No Kings” protest marches against Trump’s outlaw administration, the fascista fiesta that calls itself the Conservative Political Action Conference descended on Dallas. A roster of speakers that included Steve Bannon, Matt Gaetz and Greg Bovino was guaranteed to hit all the dismal keynotes of the Ultra-Right. But it was an alleged man of God, North Carolina’s own Franklin Graham, who hit a high note of sanctimonious hypocrisy that defies all challengers.
“We’ll never get another president like Donald Trump. Never,” the evangelist warned the assembled authoritarians, meaning, “This is our last best chance to take over.” Then he proceeded to compare Trump to Queen Esther of the Bible, who was “raised up” by God to deliver the Hebrews from a Persian pogrom. “I believe God has raised him up for a time such as this, like Queen Esther,” Graham concluded.
Unless he’s an outright moron, the evangelist knows very well that his idol in the White House has violated most of the Ten Commandments and trampled every Beatitude in the Sermon on the Mount. To revere and virtually deify him magnifies hypocrisy well beyond the level of evil. As Billy Graham’s son, Graham is heir to a religious tradition that always seemed sincere, if slightly naïve and simplistic. What would his father, what would his Savior say to this? And he’s not the only MAGA sycophant who shames Christianity with his pulpit rhetoric. Pete Hegseth, the fierce befuddled warrior in charge of Trump’s latest war, chimed in with a “prayer” session at the Pentagon, where he prayed for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy” and signed off “We ask these things with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ.” (“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called Sons of God.”)?
Jesus wept. This White Christian, evangelical enthusiasm for the Great Orange Sinner always bewilders and disgusts me, and its persistence terrifies me. Assuming that all these people are heaven-and-hell believers, how can they bend and twist and risk their immortal souls to bow at the throne of an amoral madman? At the Final Judgment, would you point at Donald Trump and say “I’ll go where he’s going”?
Good luck to all of you who answered “Yes.” While evangelists and the benighted 30% of American voters who follow them were hailing Trump as The Chosen One, Frank Bruni of the New York Times was offering a different, far more cogent argument. Remember Keith Olbermann and his “Worst Person in the World” feature on MSNBC? In a column headlined “Trump Will Do the Jitterbug on Your Grave,” Bruni made his Worst Person case for Trump by reminding us that his trademark disparagement of the dead violates a code of basic human decency that may predate civilization.
The principled warriors John McCain and Colin Powell were among his posthumous victims, as was the liberal film director Rob Reiner, whose horrendous murder moved the president to dismiss him as “a deranged person, very bad for our country.” The latest outrage, of course, followed the death of Robert Mueller, who spent years of his late career trying to put the president in jail where he belongs. “Good,” Trump gloated on social media, “I’m glad he’s dead.” Rest assured that no public figure, far less a president, has ever uttered such an obscene curse in public. The ancient Greek myth of Antigone, immortalized in Sophocles’ tragedy, rests on the conviction that the dead must be respected. Bruni’s essay sums it up——“The way we respond to death says everything about who we are.”
If there are any Americans still neutral or undecided about this president, the Mueller outburst should have settled it once and for all. If Trump isn’t The Worst Person in the World, he’s the Worst Person who was ever, arguably, the most powerful person in the world. And certainly the craziest. We hold our breath, the best of us march in the streets with No Kings signs—-eight million, by recent count, in 3,300 communities. The spectacle goes on, along with this ill-advised, ill-conceived, potentially apocalyptic war. What a time to be an American. Deaths by drug overdose, multiplied 13 times in the past 50 years, are approaching 100,000 annually. Our social media have turned out to be as toxic as fentanyl. Lax gun laws, thanks to Trump and the NRA, have swollen the civilian arsenal to 400 million weapons, many in the hands of psychopaths who massacre schoolchildren. In the great immigration purge, masked government thugs kidnap toddlers and shoot down citizens in their own neighborhoods. Cranks and incompetents appointed by the president threaten our health, our environment, the air we breathe and the water we drink. Internationally, Daft Donald has managed to alienate nearly all our allies.
Add to these a grotesque billionaire-based economy, entirely Republican-designed, that enriches the rich and offers nothing but baseball caps and conspiracy theories to the Middle Americans who vote MAGA. No nation on earth can match or approach our income inequality. Nearly all of these nightmares, potential or ongoing, could be blamed on this man Franklin Graham calls God’s messenger. And still there’s worse, at least in the field of abnormal psychology. Trump’s raging hunger for self-glorification makes Napoleon Bonaparte (or Ivan the Terrible) look like a shy public servant. I’ve seen Napoleon’s tomb in Paris and it’s grand enough, but if no one stops Trump and his successors don’t tear down all his monuments, what he leaves behind will make Les Invalides look like a phone booth.
His lifelong passion for putting his name on things has escalated, in his dotage, into a cult of self-worship too weird to satirize—-though some of us still attempt it. When we read that Trump dreams of his stone face on Mt. Rushmore and a Trump memorial arch that will face and dwarf the Lincoln Memorial, we realize we’ve left politics behind and entered the eerie realm of pathology. This is a case of egomania so ravenous that it has devoured the brain of its host. Does anyone remember the poem “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley? The destruction and rebranding of public America has just begun, with the notorious giant ballroom Trump is attaching to the White House. But his name is already on the dollar bill, the Kennedy Center, the Palm Beach airport, a new class of warships and a new class of warplanes, and the U.S. Institute of Peace (!!!).
He has further naming designs on Dulles Airport in D.C., the Washington Commanders’ new football stadium and Penn Station in New York. So the plans for Trump’s presidential “library,” just posted online, should be no surprise. The video shows a skyscraper that towers over downtown Miami, complete with His huge glowing name, a replica of Air Force One, a golden escalator and a golden statue of Trump raising his fist. “It’s gross,” a local historian objected. “That thing would be an obstruction on the skyline of the city of Miami.”
There’s no limit, no precedent, no words to express the appropriate revulsion. Americans did this to themselves. The Emperor may have no clothes—-a chilling image—-but he has the Pentagon and the nuclear code, and sane people don’t. I offer one more thing to consider, an existential fear. Trump has embraced the current Artemis II moon mission and stressed that space exploration should occur on his watch. He has queried NASA about the possibility of a moon base and a further mission to Mars while he’s still in office, “in the 2028 window.” Where, in this galaxy, will Trump rebranding end? The moon has had the same old name for millennia. Will my great-grandchildren be speaking of “full Trump,” “harvest Trump” and “phases of the Trump,” will vintage songs be renamed “Trumplight Serenade,” “Blue Trump of Kentucky,” “Trump Over Miami”?
That last one isn’t much of a reach. They all give “lunatic” a rich new meaning. At the very least, I can envision astronauts digging gigantic trenches on the surface of the moon, under orders to form the letter “T” so large that it will be visible at night from the earth. So that earthlings will never be free from him, from the memory of his madness. You probably think I’m exaggerating.
Hal Crowther is a longtime journalist whose latest essay collection, "Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers: A Gallery of Memorable Southerners" (Blair, 2018) won the gold medal for nonfiction at the Independent Press Awards, as well as the gold medal for essays at the Foreword Review Awards. A winner of the Baltimore Sun's H.L, Mencken Writing Award, he is the author of "An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Arts of H.L. Mencken" (Iowa, 2015) and four previous collections of essays, with a fifth collection of essays, "Bible Belt Blues," published in November 2025.
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