Ben Curtis/AP Photo
The front cover of Donald Trump’s “God Bless the USA” Bible
Scurrying past the xenophobic and racist fabrications in Donald Trump’s recent speeches, which have begun to resemble Fidel Castro’s in length and have long resembled Joseph Goebbels’s in veracity, we come to my favorite Trump story of the week. As the Associated Press first reported yesterday, the “God Bless the USA” Bibles that Trump is selling to his supporters for the low low price of $59.99 (or $1,000 if you want one personally inscribed by Trump himself) were actually printed and bound in China. Checking the customs data on the value of all imports into the USA, the AP discovered that the actual value of each Bible—the cost of production—was $3.
These aren’t just ordinary Bibles, of course. They also include the texts of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Pledge of Allegiance. Some versions come complete with Trump’s name on the cover, along with the words “The Day God Intervened,” referring, presumably, to the day Trump narrowly eluded assassination.
The Bibles were printed in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou by the New Ade printing company, one of whose sales representatives acknowledged to the AP that they had done the printing. They are marketed on a website featuring a photo of Trump and one-not-quite-hit wonder Lee Greenwood, with the proceeds going to CIC Ventures, a company Trump owns.
Seldom has the AP run a story quite so delicious as this one. To begin, we have to wonder if Trump would put a 60 percent tariff on these Bibles if he’s elected and persists in hawking them. (He has vowed to place a 60 percent tariff on Chinese-made goods if elected.) As to the gap that has opened between his professed nationalistic convictions and his existential concern to maximize his wealth by reducing labor costs to sub-subsistence levels and selling high to his legions of saps—that gap, it’s clear, can only be measured in light-years. Then again, I hasten to point out, Trump has only shifted production to China, despite the fact that there are plenty of Bible-printing companies here in Greenwood’s USA, for the same reason that Apple, Tesla, and countless other corporations shifted their production to China: It’s dirt cheap.
Besides, Chinese Communists and American Republicans both hate unions, and have battled for years to see which could suppress them more effectively.
Trump’s deal also calls into question the reasons behind his ridicule of Kamala Harris’s proposal to crack down on price-gouging. Rather than a belief in the ostensible ineffectualness and outrageousness of such attempts to regulate markets, it suggests that price-gouging, not to mention fraud (see: valuation of New York real estate, the existence of Trump University, etc.), has been essential to Trump’s wealth accumulation.
By putting both his own personal stamp and the Bill of Rights into his Bible, Trump calls to mind (well, to my mind) Franklin Roosevelt’s own stamp on that Bill of Rights, when he suggested in his 1941 State of the Union address that the nation recognize as fundamental rights two freedoms already encased in that document—freedom of speech and freedom of worship—and add two more, freedom from fear and freedom from want. Trump doubtless venerates freedom no less than Roosevelt did, and he might want to provide a list of the freedoms dearest to his own heart in subsequent printings of his Bible, whether in China or (if it’s cheaper) Vietnam. There’s freedom from fact. Freedom from decency. Freedom from consequences for presidential illegality (wait—he’s already got that one from the Supreme Court). Freedom from taxation of ill-gotten income. Freedom from having to pay American workers when you can get Chinese workers to do it cheaper. It could be a long list.
