You can still extend grace to Trump while calling him out
While it would be wrong not to extend grace to Trump in light of the abomination in Pennsylvania, it would be equally wrong to deny that he is still an existential threat to the republic.
If you listen to Donald Trump’s diehard supporters, we aren’t supposed to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. That’s about the only conclusion you can draw from their reaction to Trump being shot at during a rally this past Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania. With the notable exception of a staffer for Congressman Bennie Thompson of Mississippi who either resigned or was fired after telling the shooter, “don’t miss next time,” Democrats have risen with one voice to condemn this for the abomination that it is.
As I write this, a little over 50 hours have passed since the shooting. In that time, the Democrats have extended more grace to Trump than he ever has extended to them in the eight-plus years since he came down the Trump Tower escalator. The same people whom Trump attacked as enemies of the American people and targeted with degrading and sometimes blatantly racist language showed Trump a concept that he hasn’t even begun to understand—mercy and compassion.
As the messages from Democrats poured in, I was reminded of passages in Scripture that liken showing compassion for your foes to pouring “hot coals,” “burning coals,” or “coals of fire” (depending on the translation) on their heads. Specifically, Proverbs 25:21-22 (from the Amplified Bible, my favorite version):
If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat;
And if he is thirsty, give him water to drink;
For in doing so, you will heap coals of fire upon his head,
And the Lord will reward you.
This verse is repeated almost verbatim in Romans 12:20:
But if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him a drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on his head.
While digging into this, I learned that the reference to coals came from an old Egyptian custom in which penitent men carried bowls of burning coals on their heads as a sign of repentance. Supposedly, showing kindness and compassion to an enemy could lead to shame and repentance.
Unfortunately, any hopes of Trump showing any sense of shame were put to rest on Monday when he named Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio as his running mate. Vance is part of a long list of never-Trumpers who have morphed into full-on Trump diehards since 2016. If Vance’s morph isn’t the most opportunistic, it’s pretty close. In 2016, he told PBS Newshour that from where he was sitting, part of Trump’s appeal was based on racist tropes.
A month after the 2016 election, Vance said that those very tropes “really bothered me,” and likely informed his decision to vote for third-party candidate Evan McMullin. However, by 2022 Vance was openly apologizing for his attacks on Trump. While in the Senate, Vance has openly hinted that he would have gone along with Trump’s calls to reject the Democratic electors from closely-fought states in 2020. But it looks like the moment that clinched his place on the ticket came hours after the shooting, when he claimed it was directly caused by Democratic attacks on Trump.
But that doesn’t go far enough for a number of Republicans. A number of them have claimed that Democrats from President Biden on down bear responsibility for this tragedy for spending the last three-plus years attacking Trump for his not-so-veiled authoritarian inclinations. That rings extremely hollow from a party with a smorgasbord of elected officials who openly traffic in violence.
But on a more practical level, Trump’s diehards expect Democrats to ignore the facts. They expect us to ignore the mountain of evidence from the published record that shows Trump was ranting about the election being stolen from him when he knew or reasonably should have known that he had lost. Specifically, it has been amply demonstrated that as early as a week after the election, Trump had to have known he had lost. Specifically, Trump campaign lawyer Steffan Passantino told The New York Times that his colleagues had known by then that talk of Dominion-powered voting machines in Georgia switching votes—the very basis for the Big Lie—was complete, unadulterated bullshit. He certainly knew by November 20, when the Republican leaders of Michigan’s Republican-controlled state legislature told him that they had no information that could overturn Biden’s lead there. The lawmakers later told The Washington Post that they believed at that moment, they believed Trump’s “blinders had fallen off.” This is critical, because Trump absolutely, positively, could not win without holding Michigan.
They also expect us to ignore people like Roger Stone. In the Danish documentary “A Storm Foretold,” a film that figured very prominently in the January 6 hearings, Stone was caught on tape admitting that he knew Trump had lost. This footage aired legally for the first time in August 2023 on MSNBC; watch here.
Specifically, Stone was seen shortly before the infamous march to the Capitol saying that the Trump campaign was “infuriating,” “childish,” and “amateurish”—and “it’s why they lost.” And yet, he’d spent the better part of the aftermath of the 2020 election yelling “Stop the steal!” If Stone knew Trump had lost, it’s safe to say a good number of Trump’s inner circle—and likely Trump himself—knew as well. If the Republicans expect us to ignore that just because of the abomination that took place in Pennsylvania, they aren’t just trafficking in alternative facts. They’re living in an alternative universe.
Looking at this episode reminds me of an experience in my college days that, in hindsight, was a preview of our current state of affairs. As many of my longtime friends and readers know, in my freshman year at Carolina, I was suckered into joining Waymaker Christian Fellowship, an abusive and outright cultish hypercharismatic campus ministry. What I thought was a smaller version of InterVarsity or Campus Crusade was actually something out of the worst elements of Christian TV in the 90s. It took me six months to get out of there—a little over 180 days. By my count, I was lied to at least 180 times, if not more.
But the biggest lie of all came to light in my sophomore year. Their church, King’s Park International Church in Durham, had once been the Carolina chapter of Maranatha Campus Ministries, one of the more notorious campus cults of the 1970s and 1980s. However, neither KPIC’s founding pastor, Ron Lewis, or anyone else bothered to share that minor detail with anyone. And yet, when I told my former compatriots about it, their response was basically, “So what?” All that mattered to them was that people were being saved through that church.
So let’s review. My now-former friends in that bunch knew or reasonably should have known “Pastor Ron” was a bad guy, and yet they were willing to overlook this deceit. Worse, they were willing to be complicit in it—all in the name of “bringing the good news of Jesus to UNC.” If that scenario sounds familiar, it’s exactly what the religious right, and a good chunk of the GOP, did with Trump in 2016. They knew he was a boor, a bully, a buffoon, and an outright gangster. And yet, the prospect of more conservative judges, as well as a tax giveaway to the rich, trumped all of those considerations (the pun was intended). It still trumps all of those considerations even though you can now add “traitor” to that list.
I’ve been screaming from the rooftops about what these guys did to me ever since, and even went as far as to pretend to have become one of them for a brief time in my sophomore year to get evidence of their massive snow job. I’d hoped to get them run off campus, but that went nowhere. A year later, a week after Labor Day, I got wind that they were trying to use a new program to help foreign exchange students find new friends as a window to funnel people into Waymaker and KPIC. I set up a meeting with the person in charge of the program, and she assured me this would be nipped in the bud.
They responded a few weeks later by trumping up claims that I had harassed them. However, they shot first and never bothered to ask questions. When I met with one of the deans and learned they offered no evidence of what I had supposedly said or did, I was in a mood to not just turn the tables on them, but grab the table and flip it on top of them. But the dean said that in his view, the Waymakers were beating “a horse that wasn’t there.” He thought a better way forward was a mutual agreement not to contact each other.
I turned it over in my head for a bit, and realized that the dean believed this was just a dispute between students in which they normally shouldn’t be involved. However, a little more than seven years removed from the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill situation, they had to do something to cover themselves legally. Seen in this light, it was almost taken for granted that they would apologize. In the absence of a smoking gun proving they were retaliating against me for speaking out, nothing I could prove they had done to me would have justified refusing them that chance. In other words, I was pouring a barrelful of hot coals on the Waymakers’ heads. But they never did apologize—and they still haven’t.
And yet, by the logic the Trumpers are using, I should have quit speaking out against the Waymakers. My answer to that would be the same answer that any Democrat should give when asked to back off on calling out Trump—not just no, but hell no. The fact that I was willing to give the Waymakers a chance to apologize did not change the fact that they were willing to be complicit in deceiving people. It did not change that in so doing, they proved themselves unfit to be within an area code of influencing other college kids, and potentially high schoolers. For that reason, I haven’t let up—especially since learning that a number of my compatriots in that bunch have gone fast and far in KPIC and in KPIC’s network, Every Nation.
All they had to do was sell out their integrity—just like a large segment of the GOP sold out its integrity by knuckling under to Trump. If they’re trying to convince us calling that out caused this shooting, then they’re insulting the intelligence of the American people. And if they believe we can’t do so while calling out this shooting for the un-American and undemocratic abomination that it is, it’s an even greater insult to our intelligence.