Last Sunday, a group of roughly 10,000 believers in Donald Trump and Jesus Christ assembled on the National Mall to affirm those beliefs. Trump and sundry officials in his orbit spoke to the gathering, most of them through prerecorded spiels, a smattering of others in person. A smog of Christian nationalism hung over the proceedings, affirmed by some of the interviewed attendees, though disavowed by others. The clearest point of consensus was their belief that Trump himself was aligned with divine purposes (except, some allowed, when he wasn’t). This alignment was testified to by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and House Speaker Mike Johnson, whose theological acumen is matched, respectively, by their achievements in military strategy (see Hegseth, Iran) and congressional oversight (see Johnson, none).
If there is a God, he’d sue for defamation of character, though he wouldn’t have a prayer if the case went to the Fifth Circuit.
The actual faith that unites Trump supporters and Christian evangelicals is idolatry, the worship and fetishization of a false god. This isn’t merely conceptual; thanks to Trump’s zeal in building monuments to himself, it’s also physical. A 20-foot-tall golden statue of Trump now greets golfers at his Doral country club; his face adorns both sides of this year’s commemorative coin, even as his signature will be printed on dollars; giant Trump portraits now hang from the rooftops of the Department of Justice and other important federal buildings; his ballroom and his Arc de Trump have both moved well beyond the blueprint stage—all designed to reflect, if not quite the grandeur that was Caesar’s Rome, then the gold-plating of Caesars Palace. (You can take the boy out of the casino but not the casino out of the boy, particularly inasmuch as the only rule in casinos is that the house wins.)
Such idolatry is expressly, specifically, sternly, and divinely forbidden by the Ten Commandments. I quote from the King James Bible, Book of Exodus, Chapter 20:
2 I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. 3 Thou shalt have no other gods before me. 4 Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. 5 Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me …
(The full text of verses 4 and 5 do not appear in the truncated version of the Ten Commandments; they may have been too long to fit on the tablets. But the evangelical Christians who swear by King James scripture and who are Trump’s most faithful idolators should know that they’re there.)
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As I noted last November, the Bible tells the story of Moses unveiling the Ten Commandments at the very moment when, descending from a long sojourn on Mount Sinai, he returns to find that the people, having given up on him and his God, have melted down their jewelry and reshaped it into a golden calf, which they worship and (at least in the Cecil B. DeMille/Charlton Heston epic) dance around semi-lasciviously. Furious, Moses hurls down the tablets and, at least in the movie, the idol worshippers are plunged into a pit where, we must conclude, nothing good happens to them.
For this reason, I suggested that the only Trump monument that truly reflected what’s been happening in our country would be a golden calf with Trump’s head on it. I urged whatever artists chanced upon my article to build such a calf, and in lieu of Moses, have the founders of our profound and secular national faith—Hamilton and Madison, Jefferson and Lincoln, all suitably outraged—brandish the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence to shame the Trumpian idolators, whose heresy reveals a complete misunderstanding of what America and democracy are, or should be, about.
That still would be the most trenchant and patriotic display that could be unveiled on July 4th, but I’m happy to report that some skilled artists produced a less elaborate version of a Trumpified Golden Calf on the sidelines of Sunday’s rally. Clearly, they were the only devout Bible readers on the Mall that day.
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