The rest I’m still working on.
I’m focused on Trump’s defeat. The rest I am still working on.
Let’s sort out the danger in a Trump presidency. He is, without question, an ignorant, undisciplined, ranting bully who exaggerates and lies without shame. . . .
Repulsive though he is, nominee [Donald] Trump’s character defects aren’t what make him a threat. What does sicken and alarm, and what ought to concentrate African American minds, is the thought of Trump with the powers of the presidency in his hands. Therein lies the danger.
The question is whether [Joe] Biden is prepared for the insults, untruths and uncouth behavior set to come his way. Either way, let’s hope [Chris] Wallace doesn’t put up with Trump’s distractions for long, because the designated debate topics offer a rich field for exploration. The voters want and deserve a clean contest.
Said Trump in remarks to reporters on March 6: “Anybody that wants a [coronavirus] test can get a test. ” That was false then, and it’s still false now.
I was wrong four years ago when I thought that America, fully informed of Donald Trump’s rancid nature, would never elect him president of the United States.
And I was wrong one week ago when I wrote that the moderator of last Tuesday’s presidential debate, Fox News’s Chris Wallace, would be ready for Trump’s lying and displays of rank incivility.
But I was right in March, when I said it was wrong for Trump to falsely tell Americans they could get that which they couldn’t. Now, after his repeated flouting of public health protocols, encouraging of others to follow suit and claiming that covid-19 will “fade away,” a Trump coronavirus test on Thursday night depressingly proved positive.
With less than five weeks before Election Day, would I be wrong, once again, to focus on anything other than his departure from office — but hopefully in good health?
Why spend more time on a president who mishandled the worst public health crisis in a generation and is lionized by white supremacists?
Because if all goes as planned, on Sunday, I will join an online gathering at the Washington National Cathedral where worshipers will say together, “And we pray especially for Donald, president of the United States.”
In one form or another, Sunday’s message is also likely to touch on the command to love: to love our neighbors; to love our enemies.
I will join the gathering as a congregant, not a journalist. But just as I am not expected to bring a reporter’s notepad to church, neither can I suspend my faith’s command to love while out on the streets or in front of a computer.
Yet I wonder — when I sit in church and voice a prayer for “Donald,” am I putting on a false appearance and saying something I don’t mean? Does “love your enemy” get suspended or thrown out the window when I write about white supremacists and the hate group Proud Boys? Are there exceptions?
This week, I returned to “Loving Your Enemies,” a sermon delivered on Nov. 17, 1957, by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala. I reread it with Trump, his far-right partisans and the times in which we live in mind.
King provides no wiggle room. Loving one’s enemies is basic, he said. It is a command to live by.
We obey the command, he said, by first looking at ourselves, our shortcomings and the things we do that arouse a hate response in others. (An uncomfortable exercise indeed.)
We should also acknowledge, King said, “that within the best of us, there is some evil, and within the worst of us, there is some good.” “The person who hates you most,” he said, “has some good in him. . . . Even the race that hates you most has some good in it.”
I’m letting that sink in.
But King stretches me further. Refuse to try to break a person, he said. “When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power, you seek only to defeat evil systems. Individuals who happen to be caught up in that system, you love, but you seek to defeat the system.”
Because God loves all, King said, loving your enemy means “you love the individual who does the evil deed, while hating the deed that the person does.” Which gives me a better perspective on this world.
King’s statements on hatred — hate “distorts the personality of the hater” and “is like eroding acid that eats away the best and the objective center of your life” — backs me off deeper thoughts about Trump and his white supremacists.
King concluded by telling people in 1957 Alabama: “I love you. I would rather die than hate you.” Not quite there yet.
But now, thanks to King, I know I can root for the defeat of Trumpism in all its ugly forms, while I keep working on my feelings about Trump and his “boys” — and despite it all, wishing the Trump family a full recovery.