Friends of Padre Steve’s World,
Raymond Reddington once said: “We become who we are. We can’t judge a book by its cover… But you can by its first few chapters, and most certainly by its last.”
Yesterday I posted an article about President Trump’s pathological need for revenge and how it is poisoning him. In the article I quoted Reddington, the character played by James Spader in the television series The Blacklist about how how revenge is not a passion but a disease that is killing him as a person regardless of whether as some speculate that he is suffering from a mental illness or neurological condition. I also discussed how his supporters don’t seem to give a damn about him as a person, including his supporters in the clergy. If I am angry about anything it is how his supporters enable, make excuses, and never are honest with him. Maybe that wouldn’t make any difference with Trump, but they are culpable for their deeds in regard to him. They are ideologues and cowards, and I will write about them another time.
The problem with trying to place the blame for the President’s behavior on mental illness or some kind of degenerative neurological condition is that this presumes that his behavior now somehow deviates from his past. The fact is that it doesn’t. He has been this way for decades and while it is possible that the stresses of the office have made his personal defects more noticeable and that because of them he may be coming to a breaking point where he cracks up, he has always been this way as an adult.
Regardless of what revelations about the President are included in Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury, it is the daily damning comments that he makes on Twitter every day that reveal who he is and what he always has been: a petulant, emotionally stunted, childish bully.
He is like every bully I have ever known and if you look at his life, especially after graduating from college and going to work for his father as a real estate developer; enriching himself, bankrupting his companies, and leaving carnage behind him in the lives of his partners, his contractors, his employees, and his marriages. I don’t like bullies, never had, never will. I was always the new kid in town and I was not a big kid. As a result I got bullied, but I always fought back, even when the odds were against me, so even when I lost those fights, I gained a manner of grudging respect from my tormenters. I didn’t like bullies when I was a kid, and I like them even less now. Likewise, I got in fights to defend smaller and weaker friends against bullies. I have grown up but I still try to defend the weak against the powerful in whatever way I can. This has led me to become, since my tour in Iraq, a civil rights advocate for minorities, women, and LGBTQ people.
As such I have no problem dealing with bullies, but now I have to fight them from the point of love and not hate, and for me to do that with the President is a daily challenge because I am not so Christlike that I cannot hate. That being said when I struggle I have to fall back to the words spoken by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
Like Reddington said, you cannot judge a book by its cover; but if you examine the first chapters of Donald Trump’s career and the chapters that he is writing for us every day on Twitter and during every interview that he grants. He simply is continuing to become who he already is, and I don’t think that he will ever change.
That being said I wake up every day that the next chapter that the President writes will be different and that maybe my prayers and hopes for the President will be realized. Unfortunately I am a skeptic when it comes to believe that people like the President can change and that the final chapter of the book will be different from the preceding chapters.
So until the next time,
Peace
Padre Steve+
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