The president has become an unlikely promoter of God’s role in the American Experiment.
Growing up outside of Chicago, my brother and I had an official arrangement. He was the Cubs fan while I was the White Sox fan. In those days, it did not much matter as neither team was very good. Being the White Sox rep for the family, I saw a lot of shortstop Bucky Dent. He was a solid player, but nothing stellar. Dent is most remembered not for his White Sox days but rather for his key 1978 home run as a Yankee that propelled them to the playoffs past the Boston Red Sox.
In the lineup that day, the Yankees had some heavy hitters, none more powerful or feared than Reggie Jackson. He and Graig Nettles each had 27 home runs that season. Bucky Dent, over 12 years in the majors, had a total of 40 home runs. So if you were a betting man and you had a prophecy that someone on the Yankees side would hit a go-ahead three-run homer, you would have split your bets on Jackson or Nettles. You wouldn’t have thought about Dent for a second. Yet, it was Bucky Dent who made the key hit, and he is remembered for that home run more than for all of his years in Chicago.
Any event can be described as “natural” or an act of God. Natural would include luck, chance, training, hard work, etc. An act of God would see a leading hand directing the natural events here down below. There is no way to prove either, and that gives value to belief in God. If we saw a massive hand come out of the clouds and lift Bucky Dent’s fly ball out of the park, there would be no question that God made the outcome as recorded. That Bucky Dent and not Reggie Jackson hit the key home run can be considered dumb luck or God’s way of running the world.
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, putting Donald Trump and God into the same sentence would only be like OMG he’s building a casino in Atlantic City! There were endless pictures of Trump, but I never recall one of him entering or leaving a church. He was a wealthy New York real estate giant who had a colorful life that included friendships with many of the movers and shakers of that period, like George Steinbrenner and Richard Nixon. When Donald Trump missed being assassinated by a few centimeters last year, we returned to the Bucky Dent choice: one could see it as an act of God that the former president and Republican nominee moved his head slightly and thus had a bullet graze his ear and not enter his head or simply pure luck of the moment: Trump got lucky by moving his head around and thus not being seriously wounded. The attending physician told the once and future president that he was the first patient he had seen survive an AR-15 shot.
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The president himself has made it clear that he sees his surviving the Butler attack as an act of God’s graciousness. He believes that he was saved in order to lead America to a better future. Comatose Joe Biden and his Obama retread handlers had let in more than 10 million illegal aliens, handicapped the economy with high inflation, ceded much of the far east to China and presided over two hot wars where Biden’s entire foreign policy involved saying, “Don’t!” Donald Trump seemed to change after the shooting, becoming more serious and focused. Gone were most of the mean tweets and in were serious cabinet members and fast action immediately after his second inauguration.
Belief in God can only have meaning if there is a non-divine explanation of events. As our society becomes more secular, we attribute more of the events in our lives to random forces, luck, chance and personal actions. Donald Trump often mentions God in his formal remarks. He always asks for God’s blessing of the United States. We take it as a foregone conclusion that the B-2 raid in Iran would go off perfectly. Nobody thought that it could have been another Jimmy Carter’s Eagle Claw disaster. It just came out that one of Israel’s fighters had a fuel issue and almost made an emergency landing in Tehran. An Israeli plane and pilot being captured would have nullified whatever successes the air force and Mossad had during the 12-day war. A daring tanker crew actually flew into Iran and hooked up with the plane until the problem was solved and both exited the active shooting theater.
It is hard and unpleasant to imagine what would have happened to the United States if Donald Trump had been assassinated in Butler. We still know nothing about the shooter and how someone with a rangefinder managed to get on a nearby roof with a rifle and fly a drone over the venue for an extended period of time. Since Donald Trump’s return to the White House, inflation is down, the markets are up, over a million illegal aliens have left the country, girls can have their own sports and American deterrence has been reborn. There are those on the right who claim to believe in God yet poo-poo the Trump administration’s lightning successes in a mere six months. Just as patriotism shows a large left/right divide, religion in America follows the same pattern. Whereas civil rights protesters of the 1960s included many members of the clergy, the current anti-U.S. protests, whether it be “intifada revolution” or “stop ICE,” are mostly secular events that have neither the American flag nor any mention of God. If one goes back to the 1970s, religiosity was evenly spread over Democrats and Republicans. Today, belief in God is almost exclusively associated with traditional, conservative Americans. In the Jewish world, over 90 percent of Orthodox Jews support Donald Trump, while non-Orthodox groups are pro-Democrat at over 70 percent.
God saved Donald Trump in a field in Pennsylvania. That is the opinion of this author. Was the Secret Service showing its traditional incompetence, or were they in on the plan with no effort to prevent the president from taking the stage or shooting the assassin prior to his getting off multiple shots? Hard to know. Their anti-drone technology did not work, they were short people, they had short people, and the local police could not communicate with them directly. They knew of a threat, yet let the president line himself up in the shooter’s sight. I find it pathetic to watch the video and see an agent hold his hand over Donald Trump’s exposed head, as if that would stop an incoming bullet. The diminutive female agent could possibly protect Trump’s kneecaps. I still don’t understand how they could get the president back up without absolute knowledge that there was no other shooter present. Donald Trump came out of Butler a new man, and for him and the country, there is no looking back.
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