When Thomas Dewey went to sleep on election night, November 2, 1948, he was the president-elect. The Chicago Tribune had already sealed the deal with the headline, “Dewey Defeats Truman.”
Early in the morning as the elections results were tabulated, Truman defeated Dewey. A reporter went to the hotel where Dewey was staying and told one of Dewey’s security men, “I need to talk to Dewey.” The security guard replied, “The president-elect is asleep and can’t be disturbed.” The reported allegedly retorted, “Well, when the president-elect wakes up tell him he ain’t the president-elect anymore.”
The story comes to mind in contemplating the long decade of evangelical preachers going on and on till doom’s day about Donald Trump being God’s anointed. Someone has to tell President Trump, “You ain’t God’s anointed.”
You can have the anointing and you can have it taken away from you. I am not saying Trump is God’s anointed, I’m saying at least 84% of evangelicals believe Trump was anointed by God to be president. They have believed it since the night Lance Wallnu dreamed up the idea.
The signs of Republican leaders and maga frustration grow daily. More voters are saying, “This is not what I voted for.” These hesitant cries have not reached a crescendo so far. Nothing sticks to Trump; he’s the Teflon president. As leaders around the world – royal (England and Norway), corporate billionaires (USA and Saudi Arabia) face disgrace, removal, and perhaps prison for involvement with Epstein, Trump remains above the fray.
A major factor of Trump’s staying power is the original claim of anointing. Evangelicals have voted for Trump three times. The myth has become Trump dogma. The claim of evangelicals anointing Trump as “God’s strong man” has now colored everything about the Trump administration.
The administration is locked into a testosterone-fueled epidemic of hegemonic masculinity. A NYT article, Bench Presses, Pull Ups … Kid Rock? The White House Had a Very Manly Week,” shows how deeply traditional masculinity is deeply woven into the Trump administration.
We are treated to media performances of reverence for physical force, military power, familial patriarchy, frontiersmanship and heterosexuality. Whether Hegseth is more dangerous than Kennedy is at this point a toss-up. We are either one invasion short of nuclear war or one measles outbreak short of another pandemic.
(A frame grab of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and musician Kid Rock exercising in a sauna, from a video posted this week on an official government social media account.Credit…U.S. Dept. of HHS via X)
The story of King Saul makes clear God’s anointing can be rescinded. There’s a verse in the Bible where God says, “I regret that I made Saul king” (I Samuel 15:11).
From Saul’s anger at the women of Israel singing, “Saul has killed his thousands and David his ten thousands,” (I Samuel 18:7) to Saul’s desperate gambit to recover the anointing in the cave of the witch of Endor, the tragedy unfolds.
Trump doesn’t give up power; he doesn’t share power. This is not about anointing – it is about winning. He doesn’t play well with others; he doesn’t share the spotlight. He has an insatiable desire for every award as in his embarrassing campaign for the Nobel Peace Prize, his acceptance of the prize from the actual recipient and his announcement he “will test the law” to present himself the Congressional Medal of Honor.
What’s next? President Trump presents himself the Presidential Medal of Freedom? With a narcissism on steroids, Trump sounds like the man described by my graduate school professor, Andrew King as “kissing his own lips to keep all the pleasure to himself.”
Evangelical understanding of anointing
Trump embraced this authority and claimed it as his own personal authority. He toys with the notion of being the Messiah. Israel’s Netanyahu has encouraged this delusion. After the assassination attempt, Trump pushed the idea of God saving him so he could save America.
In attacking the Supreme Court decision striking down his tariff authority, Trump responded, “I can do anything I want to do.” He denigrated the justices: “I’m ashamed of certain members of the court, absolutely ashamed for not having the courage to do what’s right for our country.” He accused opponents of his tariffs of being “obnoxious, ignorant and loud,” and accused the justices of acting out of fear of critics. He called the plaintiffs in the lawsuit “sleazebags.”
Our emotionally driven president, for example, admitted that he raised tariffs on Switzerland to 39 percent, from 31 percent, because the Swiss president “rubbed me the wrong way.”
Anointing is not permanent. The person anointed can fail to keep covenant with God and lose the anointing. Look at Trump. The man with all this wealth and power acts in the most anxious, insecure and irrational ways.
At a rally in Rome, Georgia, you hear the anointing slipping away.
“A month ago, two months ago, I said, ‘I don’t think I’m going to make it to heaven,’” Trump said in Rome, calling back to his previous comments about the subject.
Moments later, he added, “I don’t think I’m going to make it to heaven. I’m doing a great job for a lot of people, but I don’t think so. I’m just not worthy of heaven. I’m not going to make it.”
Trump’s anxiety and fear often lead to self-destructive decisions that go against Trump and America’s own needs. Rhetorical scholar Patricia Robert-Miller says, “Trump has already shown he will enact policies that harm his base, and they have shown they don’t care.”
For examples, the indiscriminate bombing of small boats by the U.S. military, the murder of unarmed American citizens in Minneapolis, Trump’s threats to Greenland and Canada, his insults of NATO, especially his denigration of England’s contribution to the war in Afghanistan are all signs of an anointing unraveling. The specter of Trump ordering military strikes on Iran without Congressional approval may be the culminating event.
A nation of evangelical Christians insist Trump is the anointed one. In 2016, they declared a vulgar, thrice-married, self-proclaimed philanderer and serial liar as God’s anointed. A decade later, Trump has accumulated a moral rap sheet that includes using offensive rhetoric against women, immigrants and Democrats; engaging in personal misconduct; using dehumanizing rhetoric against his opponents; spouting conspiracy theories (2020 election and Epstein files); accumulating felony convictions and losing cases in federal court. Judges have ruled 4,400 times that ICE jailed people illegally.
Evangelicals can’t grasp how badly wrong the person they thought was God’s anointed has become a garden variety political cipher of authoritarian delusions.
Who among the evangelicals will tell Trump the anointing has been revoked? I suggest Robert Jeffress, Trump’s apostle, be the chosen one.
