As I write this blog article, many Americans are still reeling from the near-fatal assassination attempt on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Trump, and other people, are calling this millimeter-close brush with death miraculous. Since I don’t believe in mere coincidences I can believe it was certainly an act of tremendous divine grace. But what Trump does with that act of grace will determine his actions from here on out. As he himself said a day after the assassination attempt, “I should be dead”, so, then, I can only hope that this near death experience gives him, and all Americans, pause to consider that there’s more to life than just this life and to prepare for where one may be for all eternity after death based upon our earthly choices. For the person who is an atheist or doesn’t believe in hell, there is wisdom found in Blaise Pascal’s Wager — that he’d rather believe in an afterlife with fair and just rewards and punishments and have nothing to lose if he’s wrong than to not believe in those things yet end up finding out after dying that he was wrong.
I’m not writing this blog article as a die-hard, unquestioning, devoted Trump fan, because I’m not. I do support a lot of what Trump accomplished as president and promises to accomplish if he’s in the White House again. But I know too much about history and human nature to paint Trump or anyone else as the messiah that so many people in lockstep fashion do with their leaders, on both the right and the left. Trump is just a mere man with human frailties, peccadillos, and really big faults which include his crass hot mike boasts about grabbing women’s crotches, his juvenile name-calling (okay, referring to Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas” was funny), his 3:00 AM obsessive tweets, his actual and rumored affairs, and his overall unpresidential brash demeanor. Much of my father’s family was from NYC so I’m familiar with that demeanor, but I expect a president to be a bit more dignified, and, well, presidential. I hope that if Trump wins the presidency that he takes stock of what he can choose to do better in both his personal life and as a public servant in our government’s highest office. As for Biden, his own arrogance, faults, failures, and crimes as a person and as a career politician are well documented and therefore undeniable, and he — or whatever behind-the-scenes team is making the decisions — has significantly, perhaps permanently, jeopardized our country. In any event, Trump and Biden are the best we can do at present. Our leaders are a reflection of who we are as a people. I’m not expecting perfection, but I think if we as a people were to have higher behavior standards for ourselves then we could demand our political candidates mirror those same standards.
This one act of grace evident in Trump literally dodging a bullet is no guarantee that he will survive any other assassination attempts in the days going forward and every day thereafter if he wins the presidential election. This shot heard and seen ‘round the world has heated up our American Cold Civil War, as demonstrated by how many people took to social media with utterly disgusting and shameless comments about how they wish the bullet had taken out Trump. I have to wonder how many more people thought the same without saying so. And as assassination attempts go, no political figure, either Republican or Democrat, is at this point immune from being shot at or blown up in our ever-increasingly divided and violence-prone environment. Any additional acts of violence could very easily be the Franz Ferdinand tipping point that turns our present cold civil war into a full blown actual civil war. And don’t think certain foreign powers won’t take full advantage of that.
Years ago I contacted a civil rights attorney to discuss with her all the crimes my cult leader brother was committing against me, our mother, and many other people, and how both state and federal authorities admitted that he was breaking the law but that they wouldn’t “put out the money” to investigate or arrest him. This civil rights attorney told me of similar and worse cases of corruption, and she encouraged me to write a book about all the injustice that I had experienced because so many other crime victims were also being denied justice and the public needed to know that this systemic corruption endangers everyone. Her prompting resulted in me publishing over a decade later my book Fighting for Justice: Religious Fraud, Mental Illness, and the Collapse of Law & Order. As I tried for years to pursue simple basic law enforcement to ensure justice for myself and others, my experience with my criminal brother the cult leader exposed me to witnessing firsthand the insidious leftist ideology pervasive in too many of our state and federal authorities’ offices that directly resulted in their arrogant refusal to enforce laws. During Trump’s first presidential bid in which he promised to “drain the swamp”, my immediate response was that it was no mere swamp but rather a vast, deep ocean of corruption that needed to be drained. During Trump’s 2016 campaign and then throughout his presidency he demonstrated that he had no concept of just how entrenched and ubiquitous the corruption really was. He now seems to have a clearer picture of just how radically left too many judges, career politicians, and unelected alphabet department authoritarians are. But how will that translate into action if he wins the presidency? Does he realize how many federal prosecutors and judges and state/district attorneys and judges need to be removed from their offices for the obvious reason that their social Darwinian radical leftist ideology is the driving force for why they will not prosecute, never mind convict, dangerous criminals, thus putting all of us at risk of being victimized with no hope of justice? What will Trump and a Republican-dominated legislative branch do against the many civil rights violations committed by the Department of (In)Justice? Will he and Republicans in Congress (our representatives and senators) admonish their respective state legislators to stop failing in their Constitutional duties to remove by their impeachment powers the law-breaking judges who violate the civil rights of every law-abiding citizen by their refusal to uphold written laws against criminals who break those written laws?
Non-Roman tribal groups knew all too well how the Roman Empire was collapsing from within. It wasn’t just the corrupt, inept politicians, judges, and Rome’s “diverse” military that brought down that great empire. It was also a fractious, savage, and morally bankrupt Roman citizenry that led to the empire’s demise. How similar the United States is to the final days of the Roman Empire. Far too many of today’s young people don’t even want to work, never mind defend their country. Far too many people in general have no personal or work ethics, and far too many people young and old alike have been so easily seduced by the destructive leftist America-hating cult propaganda that has for decades overtaken our entire education system. China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are keenly aware of our fatal weaknesses, and they are the modern-day Goths and Vandals at our borders (and inside our borders) ready to take down our American Empire by any means possible. What can Trump, a Republican-dominated Congress, and our military — numerically decimated and morally deficient — really do against these marauding techno-savvy hordes? Biden’s puppet masters’ treasonous and seditious open borders policy has resulted in multiple 9/11-level fentanyl deaths (China’s revenge for the Opium Wars) and God knows how many terrorist got-aways. How long before we experience terrorist attacks within our country the likes of which we’ve never seen before, and how long before our power grid gets knocked out for months (years?) on end by enemies within or outside our country, leading to more actual cold war anarchy and outright cannibalism (yeah, don’t think that wouldn’t happen)? What could even the best president do in such a dire and all too plausible scenario?
Conservative Rod Dreher, an American expat living in Hungary, has published an extensive thought provoking article not only about recent events but which is also an encapsulation of many things that have gone so terribly wrong in our culture and in government policies wrought by both Republicans and Democrats. I read his article after I had already formulated in my mind what I was going to write about in my blog, so I found the timing of his article serendipitous. Agree with him or not, Dreher nonetheless makes salient points that anyone concerned about the state of our society and our politics must take into consideration (https://www.theblaze.com/columns/opinion/american-hero-or-american-nero).
Most people I talk to, even some who lean politically center or left of center, have an ominous feeling that some cataclysmically destructive and life-altering event or events will most likely happen to our country in the near future. Is there anything Trump or any other mere human or collection of humans-in-charge can do at this point to stop our decline and save our country from domestic and foreign threats? In my book that I published near the end of 2021 I pondered about whether enough people can pull our country out of this death spiral. Sadly, I’m even more pessimistic about that happening than I was nearly three years ago, especially after the events of the last few years. Even if a presidential administration exerts herculean efforts to ensure law and order, cleans out the corruption and incompetency in the vast alphabet departments, and tries to build up our military and beefs up our vital infrastructure, the people who fill up those positions of power are only as good as our current culture’s population is. I’d like to hope and pray for the best, and there’s a better chance of nation-saving policies being implemented under Trump than could ever happen under Biden (or the next radical leftist who may take his place), but I think it’s wise to prepare for the worst.
We can all hope and pray that as a nation we’ll be gifted with the same divine grace that Trump got and dodge a deadly bullet coming our way, giving us a little more time to get our personal and collective acts together. Time will tell.
