It is altogether fitting that Donald Trump became the all-but-certain presidential nominee of the Republican Party on the same day that he cited the ridiculous allegations of the National Enquirer that Ted Cruz’s father, Rafael, had involvement in the assassination of JFK.
This is not so much an indictment on Trump as it is an indictment on the American people. God could well be giving us exactly what we deserve.
After all, we are the generation raised on a steady diet of amoral and immoral reality TV, also feasting on shows like Jerry Springer and Howard Stern and regurgitating meaningless sound bites as though they were pearls of wisdom.
No wonder, then, that Donald J. Trump appeals to so many Americans. He is a National Enquirer candidate for a Jerry Springer generation. What a match!
Of course, there are fine people who also believe in Trump’s candidacy, people of conscience, spiritual people, patriotic people.
I certainly do not condemn all of their judgments, nor is it my place to do so.
I have also listened carefully to the prognosticators who have predicted for months that Trump would be our next president—some even claimed prophetic inspiration for these predictions—and that he would be a tool in God’s hand to destroy the corrupt political establishment and do good to our nation.
I fervently hope that these prophecies will prove true and that I will have to eat every word I have written—and I am writing.
I have no desire to be right; I do have an intense desire to see America blessed; and I would far rather say, “I was so wrong about Donald Trump,” than say, “I told you so!”
That being said, it appears today in America that God has given us over to delusion, a phenomenon mentioned several times in the Bible when God takes away a people’s moral and spiritual sensibilities as a judgment on their sin.
In other words, because people reject Him and His standards, He says, “Go ahead then. Have at it,” further pushing us into our folly.
That seems to be the only way to explain how we are suddenly at the point in America where people are saying there’s nothing wrong with grown men using women’s locker rooms and bathrooms and where states like California have ruled that boys who identify as girls can play on the girls’ sports teams and share their shower stalls and changing areas.
This is cultural insanity, yet many are too blind to see.
How else do we explain college students telling a young Caucasian man that if he identifies as a woman, he is; if he identifies as Chinese, he is; if he identifies as a 7-year-old, he is—but if he identifies as 6′ 5″ he is not—how else do we explain this unless we have been given over to a spirit of delusion?
I see the Trump candidacy in the same way.
Tens of millions of Americans are not put off by his blatant, well-documented lying.
Tens of millions of Americans are not put off by his consistent practice of vile character assassination for the purpose of political gain.
Tens of millions of Americans are not put off by his vulgarity and profanity.
Tens of millions of Americans are not put off by his ignorance of critical issues and his complete flip-flopping of major positions.
And among these tens of millions of Americans is a significant percentage of professing evangelical Christians, despite Trump saying he has never asked God for forgiveness, despite his failure to renounce his previous adulteries or to acknowledge the wrongness of making money off casinos and strip clubs, despite his taking offense at the distribution of the near nude photo of his wife Melania—not because he thought it was a bad picture but because it was made out to be bad.
And evangelicals continue to flock to him.
How do we explain this phenomenon?
Trump is obviously a brilliant salesman and promoter, a master of the media.
And he has masterfully appealed to American fears and anger—fears of terrorism, fears of economic collapse, anger with the political system, anger with American weakness—to the point that his supporters are looking to him as a quasi-savior figure. Only he can get the job done!
But in almost any other time in American history, Trump’s negatives would have so outweighed his positives that he would have quickly disqualified himself as a candidate.
Not today.
Instead, we find ourselves with the increasingly likely possibility that either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton will be our next president, and to me, there is only one satisfactory explanation for this: God is giving us what we deserve and handing us over to judgment.
All the more, then, should we be on our faces, repenting of our own sins.
All the more, then, should we be asking ourselves, “How much is Donald Trump a reflection of each one of us?”
All the more, then, should we who profess to know the Lord be asking Him, “How have we failed as Your people? How have we failed in our calling to be salt and light? How did things sink so low on our watch?”
All the more, then, should we be praying for Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
Barring merciful divine intervention in their lives, America is on the verge of a great and fearful shaking.
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