Energy Secretary Rick Perry is the latest Trump official or acolyte to prostrate himself, using cult-like terms, before the president. Trump is, in Perry’s worldview, a man tagged by God to occupy his leadership role. In this, the energy secretary is echoing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – who has averred Trump may have been chosen by God to defend Israel against Iran – and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s erstwhile press secretary, who also argued that God had played a role in Trump’s election. Perry is also mimicking ex-Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who has argued that Trump is the most “godly, Biblical president” in her lifetime. He is following in the footsteps of Jerry Falwell Jr.’s Liberty University, which produced a movie in 2018 titled The Trump Prophecy that likewise argued President Trump had been chosen by God.
And, of course, Perry is also echoing Trump himself, who earlier this year embraced the notion that he was indeed The Chosen One, and subsequently tweeted about his own “great and unmatched wisdom.”
There is something utterly baffling about this notion, that, in the year 2019, in a country that prides itself on its democratic culture and its intellectual institutions, and that has a constitutionally mandated separation of church and state, medieval visions of governance are being touted by much of the U.S. leadership. The country has had its fair share of fundamentalist and fanatic political leaders, but at no previous point in its history has the divine right to rule been seriously proposed as a governing principle by those in positions of power. After all, presidents are supposed to be elected; the divine right to rule of kings is something that was (or so we thought) put to bed centuries ago.
And yet, opinion polls of evangelicals show that by massive margins they support Trump. A large number of them truly believe that the hand of God is at work in his ascendancy; and they aren’t about to withdraw their support for such a vehicle of God’s will just because he is covered head to toe in the stench of scandal and is on the verge of becoming only the third president in American history to be impeached by the House of Representatives. Polling conducted in late October, a month into the impeachment hearings, showed Trump’s evangelical base remained rock-solid in its support for him.
Some evangelists aver that Donald J. Trump is a modern-day version of the ancient Persian king Cyrus, the autocratic nonbeliever who is used by God to fulfill his design – conquering Babylon and freeing the Jews from bondage. Cyrus, as king, is a man who exists outside of, above, ordinary moral law; a daring emperor constrained by nothing and no one. In many ways, Cyrus is a Nietzschean figure 2,500 years before Friedrich Nietzsche. Secretary of State Pompeo, an evangelical Christian with a taste for “End Times” philosophy, frequently references Cyrus’s story.
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Those who thrive financially — in this rendition of the gospel, regardless of the methods by which they attain wealth — deserve praise and adulation. Perry saying that Trump has been chosen by God is really no more or less sycophantic than the parade of cabinet members early in Trump’s presidency who lavished the sorts of praise on him that one might expect to hear in a fully ripe dictatorship.
In an article on the Christian Broadcasting Network’s site about whether Trump is a modern-day Cyrus, I find this comment: “I love this president as he navigates through the anti-christ DEMONcrats. As Christian’s [sic], we better stand by this man placed by our GOD.THINK ABOUT IT, WE’RE ON THE VERGE OF KILLING ROE VS WADE AND THE SLAUGHTER OF BABY HUMAN BEINGS!!!!!”
