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Trump's nominations suggest he truly understands the stakes and what we're up against.Donald Trump’s recent cabinet selections suggest that he’s been radicalized. I do not mean that he’s become violent, extreme, or a threat to American values. I mean, he’s thoroughly thought through his ideas, consistently brought them to their logical conclusions, and seen what must be done to implement them. Radicalization is the process of becoming a consistent, integrated adherent to one’s basic beliefs. Whether this is good or not depends on what you’re being radicalized by. If your basic belief is that a severe God spoke to a seventh-century, libidinous, Arabian merchant in a cave through an angel (whose name he couldn’t spell correctly), commanding him to impose his revelations on others with the edge of the sword, killing any who resisted, being “radicalized” is bad. If your basic belief is that the gracious God came in human flesh as a baby in Bethlehem to bring “Glory to God in the highest and peace on earth,” then being radicalized is good. If your basic belief is that you can apply the common sense of your business acumen that made you billions of dollars to the U.S. government, being radicalized is useful. Trump’s radicalization is useful.
How did this happen? Trump is famously a multi-tasker, likely working with a TV on, a phone in one hand, engaging with someone in front of him, while scanning documents, all simultaneously. Dr. Brett Osborn, a neurosurgeon noted, “The fact that he attended 120 events in 7 months — often multiple rallies in a single day in different states — is proof-positive that Trump has a tremendous amount of stamina, mentally and physically.” Newt Gingrich commented, “I’ve never seen anyone with the stamina and energy that [Mr. Trump] has. He can go for hours and hours, and he does it day after day.” His TDS-infected detractors find a way to spin this as if it were a negative. Dr. John Kruse claims, “He is a veritable poster boy for Adult ADHD.” Trump’s biographer, Michael D’Antonio, asserted, “I think he’s definitely got attention deficit disorder.” However, one person’s attention deficit is another person’s haste to move on to the next task. In other words, he’s a dynamo – always in a hurry, wanting briefings, meetings, and everything else presidents do accomplished in a New York minute. That sounds like a positive to me.
Now, imagine what it does to this perpetual motion machine, this Energizer Bunny, this human humming-bird, this unstoppable freight train of activity and output to be confined to a court-room for six weeks with nothing to distract him from the mind-numbing technicalities of a trial purportedly on business records. Set aside the Kafkaesque absurdity of the case: charged with covering up embarrassing accusations, which is only a crime if those accusations involve an actual crime; yet the prosecutor didn’t have to prove that a crime occurred. The judge instructed the jury that they did not even have to agree on what the original crime was that Trump was allegedly trying to conceal. If he didn’t record the transaction as “hush money” in his business ledger, he’s a criminal, according to that mockery of justice. But, for now, let us put aside the banana republicization of our justice system and think what it does to a dynamo like Trump to force him to sit through that ordeal undistracted.
Trump was forced to watch – like “Alex” in A Clockwork Orange with his eyes wired open so he can’t even shut them to the spectacle – what we’re up against. Conservatives and pragmatists – and Trump is somewhere in the middle of them – often underestimate what we’re up against. So did Trump in his first term, nominating cabinet secretaries, such as Jeff Sessions, who assumed our ideological adversaries had good intentions; that they were making accusations of “Russian collusion” in good faith, as patriots. They don’t see that these adversaries are zealots, so convinced of their superiority that they managed to persuade Elon Musk, who, while rightly decrying the “woke mind virus,” staked his wealth to transform Twitter into a free speech platform, to allow them be the chief censors. Then, at the first chance they get, slap down a conservative documentary (What Is a Woman?). As I described in a previous article, What We’re Up Against, William Butler Yeats warned us that the best would “lack all conviction” and the worst would be “full of a passionate intensity.” What he did not foresee was that the worst would be unquestionably convinced that they are the best and that we are the worst. We’re “garbage,” so Biden declared. Thus, when questioned, like Kamala Harris by Bret Baier, they furiously stab the air with their index finger, in their narcissistic rage (expounded upon here), showing, again, what we’re up against. Trump was forced to gaze at it, for six weeks, during a Soviet-style show trial. It radicalized him.
We’re seeing, I believe, that is both useful and good.
John B. Carpenter, Ph.D., is pastor of Covenant Reformed Baptist Church, in Danville, VA. and the author of Seven Pillars of a Biblical Church (Wipf and Stock, 2022) and the Covenant Caswell substack.
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