Donald Trump, Ukraine, and Impeachment: Should We Reject Chemotherapy?

If there is one thing everyone should realize about the Trump presidency, it is this: There never is any down time. Everything is at fever pitch, all the time, constantly…every second of every day. In fact, part of me wonders if anyone has even breathed in the past three years. Just in the past three weeks we’ve had the House hearings under Adam Schiff, the House hearing under Jerry Nadler, the House impeachment vote, and the sudden news that Pelosi and the Democrats are contemplating not even sending the impeachment articles over to the Senate after all.

Then to top it off, just the other day, Christianity Today put out an opinion piece in which it said that Trump was so immoral and corrupt that he should be thrown out of office. In a heartbeat, all the typical “left-leaning” news organizations and “ex-evangelicals” began to praise the magazine for reclaiming the moral high ground, while many conservatives and Evangelicals, spurred on by yet another infamous tweet from Donald Trump himself, began to demonize Christianity Today as a progressive, leftist publication that supports secularism and….evolution!

Americans have lost their collective minds.

Now, in full disclosure, let me say that I did not vote for Donald Trump. I’m not a “Trump supporter” who thinks he is God’s anointed Messiah, and I’m not a “Never-Trumper” who thinks he is a Hitleresque threat to life as we know it. Personally, I think it is the people in both those camps who have lost their minds—if you are either one, I’m sorry, you might not like this post.

Ever since he announced he was running for president, I found Trump’s behavior and rhetoric to be offensive and vulgar. At the same time, he won the election fair and square, and I think it is vitally important to honor the results of the election and respect the will of the people. On top of that, policy-wise, he has actually done a number of things that I think are good. As for the two-year long Russia collusion investigation, I said throughout the whole thing that I just had a hard time believing that Trump actually colluded with Russia and that the whole thing seemed fishy to me. As it turned out, the Mueller Report definitively said that there was no evidence of “criminal conspiracy” (i.e. collusion), and the recent Horowitz Report has found that there were indeed, some major problems in regard to the origin of the entire Russia probe. We will wait and see what the Durham Report finds out.

What I Find Wrong with the Entire Impeachment Push
As for the recent Ukraine impeachment scandal, I’m simply not convinced that what Trump did rises to the level of an impeachable offense. Impeachment is a Constitutional mechanism that should only be used when the president’s conduct is so egregious that it constitutes of treason, bribery, or high crimes/misdemeanors and has put the country in such peril that the country simply cannot wait until the next election to remove him. The Democrats have not adequately made the case that Trump’s phone call and temporary withholding of the aid merit him being removed from office. A brief look at recent history bears this out.

In the Reagan years, the Iran-Contra Scandal was something much worse than Trump’s Ukrainian phone call, and yet there were no calls for Reagan’s impeachment. George W. Bush’s misleading argument that took us into the Iraq War in which the entire Middle East was upended and thousands of soldiers died didn’t bring about impeachment. In 2012, after the Benghazi attack, the Obama administration lied to the nation and said the attack was a spontaneous reaction to some internet trailer about Muhammad. They even had that guy arrested, and later we found out all along they had a heads up that there was a serious threat brewing in Benghazi that had nothing to do with the internet trailer. Why did they do that? It was election year and they were trying to sell the narrative that things in the Middle East were getting better, so they had to blame someone else for the attack to deflect from the fact that they simply dropped the ball and didn’t provide the extra security that the Benghazi embassy had been begging for. Was that a dishonest and sleazy action to help him win re-election? Of course. Was it impeachable? No.

These examples were all purposeful deceptions, resulting in the death of Americans, and yet there were no attempts to impeach. The thinking was to let the voters decide whether or not to vote the president out. Trump’s Ukrainian call pales in comparison to those things—indeed, it doesn’t even compare at all. And so, the Democrat attempt to paint the Trump’s temporary withholding of aid as some sort of national, if not international crisis, is just plain laughable in my opinion. I’m not against impeachment because I think Trump is a great guy. I’m against impeachment because it strikes me as a positively ludicrous “trumped up” charge designed to oust a president, not because he did anything that was truly impeachable, but because people find him offensive and vulgar. And let’s be honest—that is the real reason.

Yes, he is offensive and vulgar. No, that’s not impeachable. To use impeachment in this way strikes me as a much greater threat to our republic than any action or tweet Trump has done. We impeach a president because his actions are so heinous that they constitute a clear and present threat to the country. We don’t impeach because we don’t like the guy or we find him to be immoral and vulgar.

The Christianity Today Article
Now the other day, Mark Galli of Christianity Today wrote an article in which he said that Trump was so immoral and that his actions with Ukraine were so over the line that he deserved to be removed from office. I obviously disagree with that assessment, but I completely respect Mr. Galli’s opinion. I fully acknowledge that some people think Trump deserves to be impeached over this, I just think they’re wrong. What is more telling, however, has been the reaction to Galli’s article.

On one hand, various news outlets, progressives, and “ex-evangelicals” who have spent the past three years trashing not only Trump, but Evangelicals as a whole, suddenly rushed to shower Christianity Today with praise. The reason is obvious: the magazine echoed their political agenda. But we all know that as soon as Christianity Today puts out an article that challenges one of the progressive sacred cows, they will turn on the magazine as quickly as they turned on Eugene Peterson when he clarified his position on gay marriage. Bottom line, their recent effusive praise is politically motivated and fleeting.

On the other hand, the magazine has been viciously bombarded and attacked by scores of Evangelical Christians for daring to criticize President Trump. After all, as soon as the article came out, Trump himself took to Twitter to denounce Christianity Today as a “far left” and “progressive” magazine and declared he wouldn’t be reading the magazine again. This strikes me as both comical and sad. First of all, who in their right mind thinks for a second that Donald Trump has ever even picked up Christianity Today, let alone read it? Second of all, calling Christianity Today “far left” and “progressive” is like calling Media Matters a pro-Trump organization.

And that is what makes this sad. Apparently, scores of Evangelicals are marching in lockstep to Trump’s tweets. They can’t just disagree with Galli’s opinion—they have to eviscerate the magazine. Why? It should be obvious: Their true god really is Donald Trump. I have a message for anyone who has done that: Go and read what Paul says in Galatians 5:19-21 about the “works of the flesh”—he’s describing you.

Like I said earlier, I think Galli is simply wrong. I think he is failing to consider a number of things and he is letting himself get swept up a bit in the frenzy. Still, the proper Christian response to when you disagree with a fellow Christian is to try to reason together and talk it out in a loving and respectful way. It isn’t to mindlessly rip the other guy to shreds because you just can’t help but bear the hostile and divisive image of your own political idol.

Political Idolatry and Moral Grandstanding
This brings me to what I see as the deeper, more fundamental, and most sinister problem underlying this entire Trump presidency for the past three years. Back in the first century, when the Gospel first went out into the world, the early Christians found themselves attacked by both Torah observant Jews and pagan Gentiles. The old line of demarcation was just that: between Jews and Gentiles. But the Christians were different. They were comprised of both Jews and Gentiles who put their faith in Christ, and therefore, they didn’t fit within either Judaism or paganism. They didn’t identify themselves by Torah observance or pagan idolatry. In fact, the Apostle Paul lines both of those things up on the same side of the ledger, as being fundamentally idolatrous, displaying “works of the flesh,” and being enslaved to the “elemental spirits” of the world.

Here in 21^st century America, no one worships literal idols of wood and stone anymore, but we do have our idols. Let’s be clear: our politicians have become our idols and each party’s platform has become our particular cultic creeds. And just like anyone who has ever taken a mythology course knows, in the stories of all those false gods and goddesses, they are always warring with each other. And since idol-worshippers become like the thing they worship, they inevitably go to war with the worshippers of any other god that they see a threat to their own.

It has been slowly building in American politics. Little by little, each party’s national convention becomes a little flashier and more grandiose to the point of being just a giant religious-political propaganda event, where the candidate is hailed as some sort of Messiah, wholly good and moral and patriotic. Of course, if your candidate is the Messiah, we all know what that makes the other candidate. Your side is moral and good, and their side is immoral and bad—and it is rather easy to convince yourself of that when you turn a blind eye to the obvious immoral actions done by your own political gods.

Your side claims to be the “moral majority,” whereas their side claims they want “to make America moral again.” You say your candidate is God’s anointed who has been treated worse than Jesus, whereas they say your candidate is a dictator who is the equivalent of Hitler. And, in typical idolatrous fashion, all eyes are glued to the TV screens that display, right there in the “sacred halls” of Congress, the little images of our country’s pantheon of political gods engaging in moral grandstanding in an attempt to demonize the other side and convince us that their side is the abode of the angel of light.

Satan then snickers and says, “You’re both right.”

So, What Does This Make Trump?
What I am trying to get at is this: Trump is neither Messiah nor Hitler. He is an offensive and vulgar iconoclast who was voted in because a large chunk of the country were sick and tired of the same old political games both parties have been playing for decades, in which they said all the right things to get elected and then, once in power, just got richer while kicking the scores of urgent challenges and problems facing the country down the road. He is a giant middle-finger disrupter, and that makes people uneasy.

Trump’s personal moral failings really aren’t that much different than many other politicians of both the past and present. Yes, it is hypocritical for Evangelicals who railed against Bill Clinton’s moral squalor to now try to excuse the moral squalor of Trump. At the same time, it is equally hypocritical for progressives who embraced Clinton and excused his immoral actions to now turn into progressive Church ladies. Wake up—if you really cared about a candidate’s personal morality as much as you claim, you wouldn’t have voted for either one in the first place. As it stands, I’m sure every president has done something at one point or another that is morally problematic. For that matter, the very job of president is bound to present moral conundrums that are problematic either way. If you don’t approve of what any president does, if you find his choices to be immoral, then vote him out of office in the next election. Impeachment is for treason, bribery, or high crimes and misdemeanors that are so egregious that the country can’t afford to wait for the next election. It isn’t to be used because your own sense of morality is offended.

Trump is chemotherapy. There has been a deeper cancer within our government bureaucratic system that has been slowly eating away at the heart of our country. As the rich and powerful get richer and more powerful, countless urgent crises go unresolved and ignored because those we have elected to address them prove themselves to be too spineless to do so. Now, chemotherapy is no fun—it kills both the cancer as well as a lot of good cells in the process. If you stop the chemo, the cancer will spread and kill you.

To use a biblical analogy, Trump isn’t King David—Trump is more like Jehu. If you are unfamiliar with the story in II Kings 9-10, here it is in a nutshell. Jehu is a horrible, violent man whom God uses to take down the more horrible, more corrupt regime of King Ahab. Once he is anointed by Elisha, he proceeds to kill King Joram of Israel, along with King Ahaziah of Judah, Joram’s mother Jezebel, as well as Ahab’s 70 other sons—he wipes out the entire family line of Ahab. He then invites all the worshippers of Baal in Israel to come to Samaria for a giant sacrifice to Baal, only once they were inside the temple of Baal, he ordered his men to go in and kill them all. God chose Jehu to be the one who exacted God’s judgment on the corrupt and evil House of Ahab and who ended Baal worship in the kingdom of Israel. That doesn’t mean Jehu was a good or moral person—he was clearly a horrible human being. In fact, Jehu still was an idol worshipper himself! He never got rid of the golden calf shrines of Israel that had been there ever since the time of King Jeroboam. He was a horrible person—and God used him to deal with a deeper, more systematic evil that had taken control of Israel in the form of Ahab’s regime.

To use another biblical analogy, Trump is Nebuchadnezzar. As we see in the book of Daniel, Nebuchadnezzar was an idolatrous, egotistical man. Still, he was God’s chosen instrument to punish and discipline Judah. In fact, in Habakkuk, you’ll find that after Habakkuk asks God what he’s going to do about all the corruption in Judah, God basically tells him, “I’m going to use Nebuchadnezzar and Babylon to punish Judah.” To that, Habakkuk asks, “How can you use Babylon? They are horribly immoral!” God tells Habakkuk, “Oh, I’ll deal with Babylon in my good time, but for now, I’m using them to discipline Judah.”

And while we are doing biblical analogies, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the prophet Jeremiah. In Jeremiah 27, Judah had become a vassal state to Babylon and Nebuchadnezzar, and there were a number of false prophets who were trying to convince King Zedekiah to rebel against Nebuchadnezzar. Jeremiah came into court wearing a wooden yoke and he told them all that God had placed Nebuchadnezzar on their necks like a yoke in order to discipline them, and that if they attempted to throw off that yoke, he would replace it with a yoke of iron—the country would be destroyed and they would be taken into exile in Babylon.

Now, analogies only go so far. Trump isn’t a literal monarch. But the fact is he was voted in as president because people had enough of the corruption and ineffectiveness in Washington, and so they chose one of the most offensive, egotistical people do try to break things up. Trump truly is an awful person, but sometimes God uses a truly awful person who is so egotistical that he will bull through and dismantle what has become an extremely corrupt, idolatrous, dehumanizing, and ineffective bureaucracy. He is what we get for constantly electing establishment politicians for decades who say all the right things but who refuse to address the really hard challenges facing the nation.

Therefore, to try to throw off that yoke by means of a highly partisan, highly questionable, and corrupt impeachment is to bow down to that very idolatrous, dehumanizing, and ineffective government bureaucracy that is crushing us into the dust of debt, addiction, hyper-partisanship…the list can go on.

Anyone who thinks Trump is a Messiah and a paragon of virtue is an idiot. Anyone who thinks he is an immoral monster who is threatening our moral and good government is a fool.

Trump is our chemo, our Jehu, and our Nebuchadnezzar. He is what we deserve for our political idolatry and our ineffective and corrupt government bureaucracy. If you try to reject the chemo, you are just in denial that there is a deeper cancer in our government and society. God will eventually deal with the Trump-worshippers within Evangelicalism. He’ll eventually deal with corrupt egomaniacs in our government who feed of moral grandstanding. Maybe the way He’ll deal with them is through you and your vote, if you stop just bleating “two legs bad, four legs good,” and decide to actually vote out the politicians who have brought us to this point.

Quite frankly, I don’t think we’ve learned our lesson yet. That’s why I think Trump will win in 2020. I hope we’ll have two respectable, honest, and honorable candidates in 2024 who also have the courage to work across the aisle to tackle the tough issues we face. But that really will depend on us.

Until then, all I want is for the egotistical moral grandstanders in each party to shut up and work together for the common good…if for no other reason to get the troll-in-chief to stop tweeting incendiary insults.