Jesus and Don Jr.

Donald Trump Jr. is both intensely unappealing and uninteresting. He combines in his person corruption, ineptitude, and banality. He is perpetually aggrieved; obsessed with trolling the left; a crude, one-dimensional figure who has done a remarkably good job of keeping from public view any redeeming qualities he might have.

Thus begins Peter Wehner's article, "The Gospel of Donald Trump," in the Atlantic, a typical lib attack, I suppose, the kind of criticism you can't help but expect from those commie elites on the left.

Trump, Jr. needs his father, but he also has his own schtick. He runs around the country with a fully developed sense of grievance because he (like his classy father) has never been given the awed reverence they deserve getting for what they've done--you know, casinos, towers, golf courses. Poor kid--he's been so rejected by liberals that he says that now he'll have no more of it. Nobody knows the trouble he's seen, even though, as Wehner says, that sickening grievance stuff originates in a man who is himself, "an elitist, extravagantly rich son of a former president." Poor guy.

In a speaking gig last week, a few days before Christmas, Donald, Jr., told an cheering audience that RINO Republicans took on a New Testament ethic of turning the other cheek and thereby became nothing but a bunch of losers. He said it was time for the political forces he not only represents but leads to reject the pathetic silliness of a Christian ethic and just start swinging. "We’ve been playing T-ball for half a century while they’re playing hardball and cheating. Right? We’ve turned the other cheek," he said, "and I understand, sort of, the biblical reference—I understand the mentality—but it’s gotten us nothing. Okay? It’s gotten us nothing while we’ve ceded ground in every major institution in our country.”

It's time to drop the Jesus-thing like a bad habit. Give it up, Trumpsters, he says. Come out swinging. Come out punching. It's time to bloody those damned communists on the left.

No single voting block has been more faithful in its allegiance to the man and the myth of Donald E. Trump than American evangelicals, a majority of whom still believe a vast conspiracy wrested the Presidency out of their man's little hands. Most of them refuse vaccinations out of some misguided loyalty to something about the man which the man himself is now rejecting.

"He believes, as his father does," Wehner says of Don Jr., "that politics should be practiced ruthlessly, mercilessly, and vengefully. The ends justify the means. Norms and guardrails need to be smashed. Morality and lawfulness must always be subordinated to the pursuit of power and self-interest. That is the Trumpian ethic."

And hundreds of thousands, no millions who call themselves Christians march along behind him in a vast religious processional.

Amazing.

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You can read Wehner's Atlantic article here.