MONDAY: Bruni cites the theocracy hook!

 MONDAY, JANUARY 20, 2025

"With God On Our Side" Again: As a general matter, we heard the same thing Frank Bruni heard—and we haven't even heard the whole speech yet. This was Bruni's instant take at the New York Times:

The Line in Trump’s Speech That Will Echo in Time

“American carnage” was gone. No phrase in Donald Trump’s second Inaugural Address distilled his distemper quite like those chilling words from his first.

But the recriminations that gave rise to them? The portrayal of the United States as a dystopia in desperate need of immediate rescue? Those were as vivid on Monday, in the remarks that he delivered in the Capitol Rotunda, as they were in the speech he made after taking the oath of office eight years ago.

And they were joined by a newly pronounced messianic streak. America’s 47th president—who was also our 45th president—told us that he is not merely on a quest to bring this country into line with his and the MAGA movement’s vision for it. He is on a divinely directed mission.

Recalling the day in Butler, Pa., in July when “an assassin’s bullet ripped through my ear,” Trump said that “I felt then, and believe even more so now, that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.”

That’s the keeper this time around—Trump’s trademark narcissism and usual grandiosity, along with an unsettling measure of theocracy, in one profoundly disturbing sentence...

Bruni continued briefly from there.

For a reason we may even discuss at some point, we haven't heard the full address yet. But in the brief chunk we have heard, we too were stuck by that "messianic streak"—by that return to the ancient realm of "theocracy."

Will that one line "echo in time?" Should it be viewed as "profoundly disturbing?" 

We won't necessarily go that far ourselves. But it's a markedly striking hook from a commander who plainly isn't religious. And in a nation which is being split into separate warring nations—American Babel, here we come!—the clam that the monarch's very existence was willed by God returns us to a part of human culture which is deeply bred in the bone.

Full disclosure! It's an antique part of human nature to line up behind a monarch—perhaps behind a "commander in chief." 

The belief that the monarch was empowered by God, or by the gods, is also deeply bred in the bone. It stretches back quite a few years.

We ourselves aren't inclined to endorse such views. We ourselves aren't religious at all although, at least as far as we know, most good decent people are.

That said, we've been struck, within the past year, by the way religious advocacy became more overt on the Fox News Channel show, Fox & Friends Weekend:

On the morning after the Butler assassination attempt, three of the four friends on the scene were explicitly attributing the Republican candidate's survival to the active intercession of "our lord and savior, Jesus Christ." (Pete Hegseth, come on down!)

That type of explicit sectarian religiosity seems to be spreading a bit into the weekday edition of this "cable news" program.  It's much harder to avoid the centrifugal power of tribal belief when a tribe is being encouraged to believe, once again, that it is moving into the future "With God On [Their] Side."

The early Dylan wrote the song; in truth, the song was perhaps a bit too dogmatic. But like certain kinds of gender beliefs and politics, the impulse it challenged is bred in the bone. Even when sold by a non-believer, it's an impulse which stretches way back. 

Is the American project coming undone? We Blues have our own ways of sowing disunion. This particular ancient instinct is more common over there, among the newly ascendant Reds.

Either way, disunion hurts. Also, it's hard to turn back.