Donald Trump -- Ordained and Chosen?

“ Mr. President … you said you were the chosen one. You were … You are here in this time because God ordained you.’”

– Rick Perry

People like Former Secretary of Energy Rick Perry and conservative commentator Wayne Allyn Root believe Donald Trump is the “Chosen One,” relating his presidency to the second coming of God.

"The King of Israel? The second coming of God? He thinks he's Jesus. That's where we are," tweeted Diana Butler Bass, a scholar specializing in American religion and culture.

Trump has actually referred to himself as the “Chosen One,” and though many doubt he has a Messiah complex, (Trump later tweeted he was "kidding" and "being sarcastic" when he called himself the "chosen one.”), the belief that Trump was specifically chosen by God to occupy the office is prevalent among evangelicals.

Perry puts it like this:

 "God's used imperfect people all through history. King David wasn't perfect. Saul wasn't perfect. Solomon wasn't perfect … If you're a believing Christian, you understand God's plan for the people who rule and judge over us on this planet in our government.”

John Fea, professor of American history at Messiah College, explains that the phrase “Chosen One” is probably part Christianity, part science fiction, part myth, part fantasy, part Harry Potter." Fea said. "But at the same time, there is embedded within that phrase this idea that God chooses certain people — and evangelicals will believe this — that God chooses certain people for particular moments in time to serve his purposes."

In this interpretation of Trump as “God’s Chosen One” people view him as a King Cyrus-like figure, anointed by God to save America from cultural collapse. That claim about Trump has been made in books and even a feature film called The Trump Prophecy (2018).

According to Anthea Butler of Religion News Service, Christian followers of Trump even created a coin with images of Trump and Cyrus on it to use during their prayers. Also there have been a series of paintings of Trump as a kind of redeemer figure by John McNaughton. Others depict Trump being hugged by Jesus, or signing bills at the resolute desk with Jesus standing behind him. Butler says, “These images, for some evangelicals, are fan images of the hopes and the realities they believe President Trump’s election has wrought.”

In interviews with 50 Trump supporting evangelicals, Julie Zauzmer, religion reporter for The Washington Post, found evangelicals find Trump appealing because he “sees America like they do, a menacing place where white Christians feel mocked and threatened for their beliefs.” He is also, “against abortion and gay rights and…has the economy humming to boot.” These are all reasons for Trump's popularity with evangelicals.

Similarly, in a personal essay, Elizabeth Bruenig, opinion columnist for the Post and a Catholic convert from evangelicalism, wrote that “Trump’s less-than-Christian behavior seemed, paradoxically, to make him a more appealing candidate to beleaguered, aggravated Christians.”

Bruenig believes evangelicals feel oppressed by a culture that forces them to sell wedding cakes to gay people and watch television programs where single women occasionally have sex. Christians are supposed to turn the other cheek; they need an agnostic bully to stand up for them.

Indeed, for many white evangelicals, Trump proclaiming himself the divine agent of racist retribution is a restatement of the basic tenets of their faith. However, some very disturbing sects have been emboldened with Trump's election.

Most notable of those religious frightening ideologies are those who profess Christian Identity (also known as Identity Christianity). They include racist, anti-semitic, white supremacists who hold that only Germanic, Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Nordic, Aryan people, and those of kindred blood are the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and hence the descendants of the ancient Israelites.

Christian Identity beliefs were primarily developed and promoted by authors who regarded Europeans as the "chosen people" and Jews as the cursed offspring of Cain, the "serpent hybrid" or serpent seed. White supremacist sects and gangs later adopted many of these teachings.

Christian Identity holds that all non-whites (people not of wholly European descent) will either be exterminated or enslaved in order to serve the white race in the new Heavenly Kingdom on Earth under the reign of Jesus Christ. Its doctrine states that only "Adamic" (white) people can achieve salvation and paradise.

Of course, few evangelicals are self-professed racists or those with a Christian identity who deify Trump as the savior of the white race. Many of these Christians are true believers in Christ who have worked for equality and justice in the U.S. and they still do so today. Even if they don't necessarily idolize Trump as the Chosen One, these same evangelicals don’t want to criticize Trump. They see him as one of their own. Indeed, they view Trump as a politically anointed Christian leader who will get back their governmental clout.

In the late 1970s and 1980s white conservative evangelicalism became fused with the GOP. This merger is known as the “Christian” or “Religious” Right today. John Fea posits this political movement was born out of fear that the removal of prayer and Bible reading in schools, the growing diversity following the Immigration Act of 1965 (Hart-Celler Act), the intrusion of government (“big government”) into segregated Christian academies in the South, and the legalization of abortion were undermining America’s uniquely Christian identity.

John Fea explains …

“The leaders of the Christian Right believed the best way to 'reclaim' or 'restore' this identity was by gaining control of all three branches of government. Jimmy Carter, a self-proclaimed “born-again Christian,” was not championing these issues to the degree that many evangelical conservatives wished. As a result, white evangelicals gravitated to Ronald Reagan, a man who seemed to understand evangelical concerns, or was, at the very least, willing to placate evangelicals.”

Now, the political evangelical support for Trump's “Make America Great Again” rule is firmly rooted in antipathy to abortion and marriage equality. It gains traction through Trump's fear mongering with vicious immigration policies such as building a border wall and enacting Muslim bans. Most evangelicals view the entire existential struggle as a necessity to protect the country’s religious foundation from incursions by the secular left.

The transformation of “evangelical” from a theological position to a “racial and political” one is a prime driver of the increasing hostility of liberals to religion.

According to surveys by the Pew Research Center, the percentage of liberals who believe that churches and religious organizations positively contribute to society dropped from nearly half (49 percent) in 2010 to only one-third (33 percent) in 2019. And according to 2016 data from the Voter Study Group, only 11 percent of people who are very liberal say that being Christian is at least fairly important to what it means to be American – compared to 69 percent of people who identify as very conservative.

With the Trump presidency, it is evident that left-leaning people with weaker religious ties are opting out of religion because they dislike Christian conservatives’ social agenda. Politics is now a driving factor behind the rise of the religiously unaffiliated.

This shift is reducing churches’ ability to bring a diverse array of people together and break down partisan barriers. That threatens to further undermine trust in religious groups and make our politics more and more divisive.

David Campbell, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame, says …

“We have very few institutions left in the country where people who have different political views come together. Worship was one of those — and without it, the list is smaller and smaller.” 

One very interesting division surely comes from the many millions of non-white evangelicals in America – of course, not very many of them voted for Donald Trump. So, division within the ranks of the faithful makes a political evangelical stand a fractured ideology.

Nonetheless, as ridiculous as it may be, millions of evangelical Christians believe that in Donald Trump, who perceived during his candidacy he could murder someone in Times Square and not lose his base, they have precisely the person “chosen” by God to lead this country back to God and to protect it against the attempts of atheists and liberals to turn it in the other direction.

The cult of true believers cannot be talked out of their Chosen One doctrine by reasoned arguments. They cling to End Time prophecies and conspiracy theories to support their political beliefs – beliefs being spread by politicians like Rick Perry and Nikki Haley.

I wonder how many remember that Rick Perry, who ran unsuccessfully for president in both 2012 and 2016, called Trump's candidacy “a cancer on conservatism” that “must be clearly diagnosed, excised and discarded.”

“My fellow Republicans, beware of false prophets,” Perry said of his then-rival while addressing a conservative group in mid-2015. “Do not let itching ears be tickled by messengers who appeal to anger, division and resentment.”

Perhaps Perry's own “itching ears” have caused his recent conversion to the Trump Chosen One belief. Superstition has it that itching or buzzing in the left ear is said to mean you are being badmouthed, or will face bad luck. It appears he, like so many other Republicans who once discredited Trump, has caved to political pressures … and much of that pressure has come from the voting block of the evangelical right seeking their own religious influence.

Here is what the Bible actually says of prickling feelings in the auditory structure:

“For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead,

to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers

to say what their itching ears want to hear.”

2 Timothy 4:3 New International Version (NIV)

Claudia D. Hernandez and Today's Revolutionary Women of Color

The River Never Happened to Us (ii.)
By Claudia D. Hernandez

We walked more than a thousand miles to get to the other side of
the Rio Bravo, guided by the Coyote’s howl. We didn’t bathe in the
                                                                                                                     river.

Instead, we floated like thin paper boats, tanned by the sun.
I don’t remember caressing the surface of any pumice
                                                                                                                    rock.

I stuck my fingers between cottonwood crevices, their
trunks rooted on opposite sides of the river. We were
                                                                                                                   bound

to eat desert wind; I was ten. When we reached the other
side, we hid behind bushes; quietly, we sank slowly in the
                                                                                                                   mud.

When the Coyotes signaled, we walked, no, we ran and our knees
shed broken pieces of mud. No one drowned in the river; no one had

                                                                                                                   to be

resuscitated from the mud. Yet we continued to trickle

shards of mud, as if the river had never happened to us.

The Author

Claudia D. Hernandez was born and raised in Guatemala. There, she learned to appreciate her own energy, “when she realized her hands couldn’t keep still. Tactic’s rich environment nurtured a creative soul, with its colorful landscape and the cadence of her people’s song.

“I come from a small town in Guatemala where it rains almost every day; we call this constant rain el chipi chipi. Tactic, with its emerald mountains emanating the fresh aroma of pine trees, is my hometown. As the sun goes down, a dense fog envelops the town. At the break of dawn, mi gente walk the streets ready to sell or to buy produce in the mercado.”

(Claudia D. Hernandez. “A Latina/Chapina Artist Speaks Through Poetry and Photograph.” Chicana/Latina Studies. Fall 2013.)

Seven-year-old Claudia woke up one day to find her mother gone, having left for the United States to flee domestic abuse and pursue economic prosperity. Claudia and her two older sisters – Consuelo and Sindy – were taken in by their great aunt and their grandmother, their father no longer in the picture.

Claudia describes those three years as “a difficult adjustment – and one where she experienced sexual abuse by a family member.”

Hernandez explains her predicament …

“Mothers aren’t always the ones who give birth to us. In my mother’s case, Tía Soila raised her when my grandmother abandoned her at the age of 6. My mother suffers from abandonment issues and how she has trouble forgiving her mother. 

"My grandmother, herself, had her own issues with her own mother, [who made] her babysit her baby brother at a young age. 

"Me, feeling abandoned when my mother had to flee to the U.S. from my abusive father. All these emotions bottled up making us break our mother-daughter bond. But at the end we all search for forgiveness, for closure, for love.”

Three years later, Claudia's mother returned for her daughters, and the family began the month-long journey to El Norte. She employed a series of “coyotes” to ferry the family from place to place until they reached their destination. Claudia crossed the Rio Bravo/Rio Grande with her mother and two older sisters when she was ten years old. They finally settled in Los Angeles where their tremendous struggle to assimilate into a new life and culture began.

Claudia encountered incredible problems assimilating: she didn't speak English, and her Spanish stuck out as “weird” in their primarily Mexican neighborhood. When her family returned to Guatemala years later, she was startled to find she no longer belonged there either.

The complication of her life itself left Hernandez searching for answers ...

“I admire my mother’s valor for leaving my abusive father behind. She had to sacrifice her three daughters by leaving us behind, but like Tía Soila says, 'Your mother has a backbone like no other woman.' She came back for the three of us three years later to set off on a journey that would forever change our lives …

“Motherhood is difficult and no one teaches you how to be a mother especially when you’re seventeen years old. This was exactly the case with both my mother and grandma – young mothers at the age of seventeen. This is part of knitting the fog. It’s complicated.”

Hernandez's Knitting the Fog is the complex self-portrait of a young Chapina girl. Her writing depicts the plight of immigrants who contend with such obstacles as assimilation, racism, and self-hate. She also emphasizes the beauty of America Latina’s heritage, language, and customs.

Claudia Hernandez holds an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. She is now a photographer, a poet, and a bilingual educator in the Los Angeles area. She writes short stories, children’s stories, and poetry in Spanish, English, and sometimes she weaves in Poqomchiʼ, an indigenous language of her Mayan heritage. Her writing subtlety focuses on social issues that deal with poverty, immigration, gender issues, language, and race.

Hernandez's poems have appeared recently in Texas Poetry Calendar, Third Woman Press, The Acentos Review, Mom Egg Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She is the founder of the ongoing project Today's Revolutionary Women of Color.

Claudia says ...

“I wanted to be the one who told the story about the thousands of Central Americans who migrate north searching for a better life, looking for a better opportunity for their families and children. I wanted to give a voice to those who don’t have a platform to share their stories of resilience. I think it’s important to have a female Central American voice that can share her story – a critical story that captures the hardships of immigrants when they arrive to the U.S.”

The FACTS About DACA Dreamers

To love somebody who resembles you.
If you want an ode then join the endless queue

Of people who are good to their next of kin –
Who somehow love people with the same chin

And skin and religion and accent and eyes.
So you love your sibling? Big fucking surprise.

But how much do you love the strange and stranger?
Hey, Caveman, do you see only danger

When you peer into the night? Are you afraid
Of the country that exists outside of your cave?

Hey, Caveman, when are you going to evolve?
Are you still baffled by the way the earth revolves

Around the sun and not the other way around?
Are you terrified by the ever-shifting ground?

From “Hymn” by Sherman Alexie

(Author Sherman Alexie is the winner of the 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award, the 2007 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the 2001 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, and a Special Citation for the 1994 PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Fiction.)

Who Are the Dreamers?

Those protected under DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood arrivals, are known as “Dreamers” (often spelled “DREAMers”).

DACA is an American immigration policy that allows some individuals with unlawful presence in the United States after being brought to the country as children to receive a renewable two-year period of deferred action from deportation and become eligible for a work permit in the U.S. To be eligible for the program, recipients cannot have felonies or serious misdemeanors on their records.

The policy, an executive branch memorandum, was announced by President Barack Obama on June 15, 2012. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) began accepting applications for the program on August 15, 2012.

To apply, a Dreamer must have been younger than 31 on June 15, 2012, when the program began, and “undocumented,” lacking legal immigration status. They must have arrived in the U.S. before turning 16 and lived there continuously since June 2007.

These young immigrants were required to to be strictly vetted. This included undergoing criminal and security screenings and additional checks every 24 months. Some 700,000 young people in the U.S. are shielded from deportation by the DACA program.

Most Dreamers are from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras and the largest numbers live in California, Texas, Florida and New York. They range in age from 15 to 36, according to the White House.

While the majority of Dreamers are Latino, they are a diverse group and come from a multitude of countries and cultures. Seven of the top 24 countries for Dreamers are in Asia, Europe, or the Caribbean. Tens of thousands of young Dreamers come from South Korea, the Philippines, India, Jamaica, Tobago, Poland, Nigeria, Pakistan, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and Guyana.

Education and Work

DACA recipients grew up in the United States and have established their lives and futures in the country. Beyond that, they are contributing to the economy in ways that benefit the entire nation. Center for American Progress DACA recipient arrived in the United States in 1999, when they were just 7 years old. More than one-third of DACA recipients, 37 percent, arrived before age 5.

Immigration advocates say that even though DACA recipients can’t receive federal aid, the program has made it much easier to get a college education. Sixteen states allow DACA students to pay in-state tuition at state universities; major scholarship funds like TheDream.us help Dreamers foot the tab for tuition (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos recently donated $33 million), and DACA allows students to work jobs and earn money.

According to a University of California study in collaboration with the immigrant-advocacy group United We Dream and the left-leaning Center for American Progress, 45% of DACA recipients are in school, and nearly three-quarters of those are pursuing a bachelor’s degree or higher. Of the group that isn’t currently in school, many have already graduated.

(Charlotte Alter/Lorain. “A Dreamer’s Life.” Time. March 6m 2018.)

Over the past five years, 91% of DACA recipients have found gainful employment, and are currently working for companies across the country. The largest occupation groups for DACA recipients are food preparation and office and administrative support at 66,000 workers each, as well as sales at 61,000 workers. Other notable fields include management and business occupations, in which 28,000 DACA recipients are employed; education and training occupations, with 16,000 DACA recipients employed; and health care practitioner and support occupations, with 27,000 DACA recipients employed.

These individuals work in different sectors of the economy too. According to the CAP analysis of ACS microdata, nearly 6,000 DACA recipients are self-employed in an incorporated business, while 25,000 work in nonprofit organizations and 22,000 work in the public sector.

( Wong, T., Rosas, G., Luna, A., Manning, H., Reyna, A., O’Shea, P., Jawetz, T. and Wolgin, P. DACA Recipients’ Economic and Educational Gains Continue to Grow. Center for American Progress. 2017.)

900 DACA recipients serve in the military. These individuals are part of the Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest (MAVNI) Pilot Program. The Department of Defense is coordinating with the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security (DHS) regarding any impact a change in policy may have for DACA recipients.

Economic Impact

DACA recipients and their households pay $5.7 billion in federal taxes and $3.1 billion in state and local taxes annually. In addition to this, DACA recipients boost Social Security and Medicare through payroll taxes. DACA recipients and their households hold a combined $24.1 billion in spending power – or income remaining after paying taxes – each year.

As community members, DACA recipients make substantial rental and mortgage payments, much of which goes directly into their local economies. DACA recipients own 59,000 homes and are directly responsible for $613.8 million in annual mortgage payments. Rental payments are even more staggering: DACA recipients pay $2.3 billion in rent to their landlords each year

(CAP analysis of 2017 1-year American Community Survey microdata,

accessed via the University of Minnesota’s IPUMS USA.)

DACA Revocation

Individuals who pose a public safety threat due to their criminal history or gang affiliation are subject to DACA revocation Only 0.2% of DACA enrollees have had their status revoked because of criminal or gang activity.

A Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesperson said nearly 90 percent of DACA revocations were the result of participants being linked to “alien smuggling, assaultive offenses, domestic violence, drug offenses, DUI, larceny and thefts, criminal trespass and burglary, sexual offenses with minors, other sex offenses and weapons offenses.” Roughly 3 percent were for alleged “gang activity,” and 7 percent were for a variety of relatively minor offenses, such as making a false claim of citizenship or collecting three or more misdemeanor convictions.

The exact nature of the crimes triggering DACA revocation and subsequent deportation remains unclear. For example, a “drug offense” could amount to nothing more than “a dime bag of marijuana possession.” Citizenship and Immigration Services declined to provide a detailed breakdown of the offenses.

Trump signed an executive order during his first week in office that makes virtually everyone who is in the country without authorization a priority for deportation, including those who have been only accused, not convicted, of crimes.

(Keegan Hamilton. “Trump told Dreamers to 'rest easy,' but here’s proof they shouldn’t.” Vice News. May 3 2017.)

Without DACA

Dreamers live under a dark cloud of fear because for years their voices have been silenced. Without DACA in place, every individual who was under the protection of the program will lose their jobs and potentially their right to live in the U.S.

Allowing DACA to end would leave hundreds of thousands of young people unable to work lawfully in this country and expose them to the threat of detention and deportation. Not only would this be heartless, but it would also jeopardize the many contributions that DACA recipients make to U.S. society and the national, state, and local economies every day.

Hey, Trump, I know you weren't loved enough
By your sandpaper father, who roughed and roughed

And roughed the world. I have some empathy
For the boy you were. But, damn, your incivility,

Your volcanic hostility, your lists
Of enemies, your moral apocalypse –

All of it makes you dumb and dangerous.
You are the Antichrist we need to antitrust.

Or maybe you're only a minor league
Dictator—temporary, small, and weak.

You've wounded our country. It might heal.
And yet, I think of what you've revealed

About the millions and millions of people
Who worship beneath your tarnished steeple.

Those folks admire your lack of compassion.
They think it's honest and wonderfully old-fashioned.

They call you traditional and Christian.
LOL! You've given them permission

To be callous. They have been rewarded
For being heavily armed and heavily guarded.

You've convinced them that their deadly sins
(Envy, wrath, greed) have transformed into wins.

From “Hymn” by Sherman Alexie