TRUMP LOST, NOT YOU!

By A. John Ukpe

Long before I knew that Trump Corporation, which is 666 feet tall, is located on 666 Fifth Avenue, New York; long before I knew that Donald Trump won the Republican Primary Election in 2015 with the votes of 666 delegates; long before I knew that Donald Trump separated 666 children from their parents on the Mexican border; long before I knew that Donald Trump took over the real estate business of his grandmother, Elizabeth Christ Trump, on June 6, 1966; I had my concerns about Donald Trump. Yeah, 666 is just a number, but it is a number Christians are advised in the Bible to be wary of. But even if the multiple occurrences of this number in Trump’s life are a coincidence, Trump still carried too much moral complexity to occupy the high office of the President of the United States and be considered the moral leader of the free world. Having occupied that office, he needed help - not adoration.

The poor souls, who tried to convince me to “support” Donald Trump, whined that he was like Cyrus in the Bible (a pagan king God used to liberate the Jews). Seriously? Our awesome God simply used Cyrus to deliver the Jews from Babylon, after they had served their divine punishment, and send them back to their ancestral home. Just like God used a reluctant Pharaoh to free the Jews from Egypt, and return them to the land of promise. The morale of the story is that to move his people, God can surmount or use any human or material barrier. However, God would not use a “Cyrus” (Pagan King) to clean up His temple or church or build His church in God’s own country. A pagan king in the temple of God will defile the temple, to begin with. Jesus said “I will build my church…” Jesus, our messiah and savior, is still on the job.

After all that Billy Graham, Oral Roberts and other great revivalists did in America, would America still lack righteous men and women so much that God would have to borrow a Cyrus from the “other side” to do His work? No! God does not need a man with multiple failed marriages, with little respect for women, with multiple rape and sexual harassment cases hanging on his neck, with a record of racism, with pride and arrogance, with no idea of repentance, with no commitment to paying his taxes…the list goes on, to clean up His church. God cannot certainly be too pleased with a man who when he was asked if he had ever asked God for forgiveness, responded “Why do I have to repent, why do I have to ask for forgiveness if (I am) not making mistakes.” After a backlash over this remark, Trump came again, “I fully think apologizing is a great thing. But you have to be wrong… I will absolutely apologize sometime in the hopeful distant future if I am ever wrong.” Yet some evangelicals touted this living oxymoron as a poster boy for the Church and Christianity - instead of counseling him, praying for him and leading him to Christ.

A pastor who engaged me in an argument before the US presidential election pointed to multiple prophecies by evangelicals that Donald Trump would win the election. That simply reminded me of the 400 false prophets in the Bible who spurred the King of Israel to go to war and said he would win. The king lost the war and died in the war. In Trump’s case God proved Himself omnipotent. God still calls the shots - the prophets do not. God works according to His will, not according to the will of the so-called prophets. You cannot pray God into doing something that is not in His will. It was not in His will for Donald Trump to win this election; that is why he lost it. God is still in control of this world and everything works according to His will. Let the Church hear what the Lord is saying and not try to tell the Lord what He should do. God is not a respecter of persons. He is the Lord God Almighty and He created the heavens and the earth and all the galaxies. When Peter blabbed at the Mountain of Transfiguration, God thundered from Heaven, “This is my beloved son, hear Him.” Let the prophets hear the Lord Jesus Christ, and not blab like Peter did when he should have been listening to the Holy Ghost. If they had heard from God, they would have warned Trump to turn to God in absolute repentance and not encourage him to develop a messianic complex. They would have given him simple salvation messages - not prophecies.

Trump has too many flaws, as John Kelly, his former Chief of Staff, pointed out. His response to the murder of George Floyd and his response to the resultant BLM protests cost him some votes. In spite of the facts, he played the race card and denied that there is institutional racism in the police. He thought that putting blacks down would increase his standing with racist whites (his base). He failed to know that African Americans have white relatives and friends and the barriers of racism are tumbling down in USA, like Humpty Dumpty. More so, most whites are not racists. In the Charlotte race riots, he also stoked the embers of racism as he sided with white supremacists. He encouraged and supported abominable white supremacist groups like the KKK (Ku Klux Klan) and the Proud Boys. His pastors ignored all these and to Trump’s detriment.

If the foregoing were not enough reasons to drift away from Trump, then his cluelessness would still have been enough justification. How could I support a man who, in an address to kidney doctors, said that “The kidney has a very special place in the heart - it is an incredible thing?” How could I support a man who would refer to 2 Corinthians 2:17 as “Two Corinthians two, seventeen”? How could I support a president who would, in a his Independence Day speech July 4, 2019, claim that the “Continental Army suffered a bitter winter at Valley Forge, found glory across the waters of the Delaware and seized victory from Cornwallis of Yorktown. Our army manned the air, it ran the ramparts, it took over the airport, it did everything it had to do in 1775.” (The Wright brothers invented the airplane on December 17, 1903; so there were no airports in 1775.) How could I support a man who would enjoin people to revenge every wrong: “When people wrong you, go after those people, because it is a good feeling and because other people will see you doing it. I always get even”? How could I support a boastful man like Trump who would say, “Sorry losers and haters, but my I.Q. is one of the highest – and you all know it”? Everything Trump represents is the antithesis of scripture and yet the evangelicals never sought to set him right, and change him.

The most nauseating thing about arguing with a Trump supporter is that they invariably end up bemoaning how Trump has been the victim of the conspiracy of mainstream media. The pastor in question shamelessly told me that he does not listen to the mainstream media (BBC, CNN, MBNC etc); he listens to and watches Newsmax and a host of other conservative media outlets you could charitably describe as the “gutter press.” A more logical mind would have asked, “Why were the mainstream media not against former Republican presidents like George Bush Snr, George Bush Jr, Ronald Reagan, etc.?” Sure, just as God asked Cain, “If you do what is right will you not be accepted?” The problem was never with the mainstream media, but with a man who hated the truth and could not bear it. With this election, the “Trumpites” should now realize that the most dependable source of information is the mainstream media. Every report of the mainstream media checked out; while the propaganda of Newsmax and others ended up as fiction – like poorly scripted sensational chapters in Onitsha market literature.

Do not be fooled, Donald Trump was the architect of the tempestuous nature of his presidency. Nobody was after him – he did more to damage his brand than any enemy could have conceived. The Russian probe was not the handiwork of the mainstream media; it was spurred by security concerns over pro-Trump Russian interferences in the 2016 presidential elections. The mainstream media did not ask Trump to make the Ukrainian call for interference to assist him in the 2020 election. The call led to his first impeachment. The mainstream media did not ask him to dispute the election result with frivolous and unfounded claims and, thereby, rubbish American democracy. No one asked him to call the Secretary of State of Georgia and ask him to “find” votes for him to use and overturn the election. The mainstream media did not ask him to call his supporters to come for a protest which he claimed, “will be wild.” Was it the mainstream media that wrote the speech for him in which he asked his supporters to march down to the Capitol in order to be heard? How were the protesters supposed to be heard when the legislators were in the chambers? The only way to be heard was for them to do what they did - breach security and vandalize the building. Was it the mainstream media that told him not to pay his taxes to the New York State Government for over fifteen years? This is like the case of the man who killed the market tortoise and blamed the town crier for telling the village who killed the tortoise.

They have also been this idle talk about Trump’s courage. Though I do not know what yardstick to use in measuring courage, it would appear to me that a man who dodged national summons (draft) to fight for his country on three occasions cannot lay any claim to courage. Even more annoying is that the same man, as a president, would deride war heroes like the late John McCain for being captured. Yet Trump has never experienced the agony and anguish of dying friends and mangled bodies in the battlefield. He has never borne the chilling pain of hearing, all around you, the booms of gunshots and explosion; the shrill sound of bullets and mortars zinging through the air and life hanging on a thin thread in the balance of life. He has never felt the pall of death casting its shadows over these ominous howling sounds, yelps of pain and death, and the horror of silence in the killing zone. A man went through this hell for his country and was captured, and you, who were in your expansive mansion, would deride and mock a man like that for being captured. What hubris? This same hubris led Trump to say “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” This same hubris led Trump to tell his supporters, “I don't care how sick you are. I don't care if you just came back from the doctor and he gave you the worst possible prognosis, meaning it's over. Doesn't matter. Hang out till November 8. Get out and vote (for me).“ This same hubris led to Trump calling African countries, “shithole countries.” God resists the proud and someone ought to have preached to him because salvation is more important than the presidency of any country.

Everything one has said here was paraphrased in the words of Donald Trump’s ally, Marc Sumerlin, founder of Evenflow Marco. Sumerlin, who recently turned down Donald Trump’s offer to serve on the Federal Reserve’s Board, said, “A small man, unloved as a child and filled with raging self-hate, secured his place as the worst president in the United States history yesterday by inciting insurrection against the U.S. constitutional government.” Donald Trump needs help - not appreciation or condemnation. Someone needs to give him a heart-to-heart talk about salvation, because only Jesus can save and heal him.

If you doubt Sumerlin, then hear Dr. Mark Benecke, one of the best psychiatrists in the world who has analyzed some of the world’s worst killers and even examined the skull of Adolf Hitler. He says that Donald Trump is “a crystalline narcissist” who would rather die than admit that he lost the US election.” Let him and his supporters not accept that he lost; Congress knows he lost, the Judiciary knows he lost and the electorate know he lost. My prayer is that God will use this defeat to humble him and save his soul and that he would emerge from the ashes of this defeat a much better man and a good Christian.

So what about Joe Biden? Simply a lesser evil than the current Donald Trump. But God will have his way in America.

Trump did not loose the US election.

Wait and see.