Donald Trump’s War On Truth
Doing deliberate violence to the truth is a part of Donald Trump’s brand, and a key clue about the identity of the Antichrist.
“And he [the little horn] hurled the truth to the ground…” -Dan 8:12 NASB.
Donald Trumps War: The attitude of most con men toward truth is a careless, self-serving one—they casually evade or twist it only when necessary, when it suits their purposes. But not Donald Trump. No, he feels the need to deliberately do violence to it. The whole range of epistemology in fact—concepts, words, definitions, traditions, etc., is in his crosshairs. His aim is not just to deny reality, but invert it, as is done within Satanism.[1]
By brainwashing or gaslighting people’s sense of reality, their God-given common sense and moral common sense are in time, step by step, seared as with a hot iron (Rom 2:15; I Tim 4:2). And Trump doesn’t do this just sometimes, but constantly. He’s constantly “training” all those around him, and the country and the world, to believe in absurdities, because, as the famous saying puts it, “If they can get you to believe absurdities, they can get you to commit atrocities.”[2]
Where this hostility comes from may be wrapped up in the larger mystery of Trumpian psychology, issues with his father, etc. But we do know Donald Trump is driven by the conviction that everyone is his rival, that toxic alpha-male ego syndrome. And we also know that, like all people, he is guided by his personal philosophy which includes devotion to Ayn Rand libertarianism, his admiration for dictators, and motivational science teachings about “creating your own reality.”
Teachers of the latter use the term in a figurative way of course, as in self-initiative, a can-do attitude, positive thinking, etc. Trump however seems to take it almost literally in the sense that by repeating big lies[3] over and over again, some people at least, will eventually believe it (II Tim 3:13). In this way, by sheer stubbornness and willpower, he wears people out into submission, fulfilling yet another clue about the Antichrist, that he will “wear out the saints” (Dan 7:25).
Appropriately, there is another clue about the Antichrist that speaks exactly to this hostility to truth. It is said of this “little horn” that emerges out of a last-days beast empire (Dan 7:19,20), that he “cast down the truth to the ground,” and prospered in doing so (Dan 8:12). In fact, the NASB (New American Standard Bible) and NET (New English Translation) put it even more vividly with, he “hurled truth to the ground,” the picture being of someone who reaches up into heaven to throw truth down with great violence and contempt.
In a relatively tiny but typical example, Donald Trump recently went on his Orwellian-named “Truth Social” platform to whine about his prosecutors—I’m sorry, his persecutors, “terrible people all”—keeping him from flying off to Scotland to play in a golf tournament:
“I have the Staysure Senior PGA Championship in Aberdeen, Scotland, on my great course, and I can’t go. I have to stay around and fight off the Crazed Radical Left Lunatics, Communists, Marxists, and Fascists.”
I assume we’re supposed to believe he can better “fight off” these Gangsters of Gotham while golfing overseas. But I digress from my point.
This news blurb is just a small example of how Trump hurls truth (the truth as Jesus said, that would make you free—Jn8:32) to the ground. By lumping together “fascists” with leftists and Marxists, he does violence to words that have actual definitions within the discipline of political science. Its purpose is to confuse and disorient his followers’ sense of reality.
Trump is not of course, the inventor of this epistemological shift; he’s way too bored by intellectual discussions. You could say he may have become enamored[4] of this by Vladimir Putin’s tactic[5] of deliberately confusing the Russian public about their perception of reality, to keep them constantly off balance.
But such is mostly a psychological warfare tactic of “Deep State” (i.e., spy world) strategy, which Putin is highly trained in. The actual intellectual source of this redefinition of the political spectrum may be traceable back to the mendacity and chaos Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Libertarianism introduced into the political world.
A Deeper Dive
“They speak our language, but they don’t use our dictionary.” – Anonymous
Donald Trumps War: There’s a history to political doctrine, just like there’s a history of the evolution/devolution of Christian doctrine over the millennia. It’s a history that must be respected if we want to be able to effectively communicate with one another and avoid political, social and epistemological chaos.
Our understanding of the political spectrum has evolved over the last couple of centuries largely due to the political struggles nations have had to deal with. This understanding effectively began with the French Revolution of 1787 when the revolutionary Jacobins sat on the left side of Parliament, and so picked up the name “leftists.”[6] But it was left to Karl Marx’s theory of Communism and its supposed “inexorable economic forces that drive history,” to really own the term as the ultimate extreme of collectivism. His theory got its first real large-scale opportunity with the nightmare Bolshevik Revolution that captured Russia in 1917.
Stalin’s covert efforts to export this leftist extremism into Western democracies in the 1920s and 30s produced of course, an opposite but equal extremism in the development of fascist ideology. Fascism’s purest philosophy may have began in Mussolini’s Italy and Franco’s Spain. The even more bizarre Nazism of Germany was another.
This is why in political science circles, fascism is defined as an extreme right-wing ideology, even though both ideologies have “socialism” in their names—international vs. national socialism. It’s actually a form of corporatism and the privatization of all things, until the only government left is a dictator and “security services.” Anything of a “welfare state” where some of the collective wealth goes to the workers or social welfare is eliminated.
It’s important to understand that modern democracies are located smack dab in the middle of these two extremes. They thrive on a moderate middle comprised of liberals leaning left and conservatives leaning right. This is why the democratic Allies sought to defeat fascism in World War II, then took on Communism in the Cold War.
When I was young, the threat to democracy was coming from the left. The youth counter-culture of the time, exasperated by the dishonesty behind the Vietnam War and sympathetic towards the Viet Cong, flirted at the least, with Communist rhetoric (“radical chic“). We pulled back from the abyss once white radicals began blowing themselves up with homemade bombs, designed to be used on banks and other corporations.
Today the threat is coming from the right. Millions of Americans voted for a man who openly longs to be a dictator; who claims as President he can do anything he wants; who deliberately promoted The Big Lie, Goebbels-style about a rigged election; and who openly led an attempted insurrection when he couldn’t get his way. He wants to lead again a nation that for all its faults and hypocrisies, still is the lynchpin of the Western democratic freedom alliance countering autocracy around the world.
Yet unlike the left of my youth, it is also a nation awash in guns, the vast majority of which are owned by right-wingers and militia-types, a ticking time bomb that is tempting them to push for a second Civil War. It is so hard to get these people to see the bigger picture, that preserving a pluralistic liberal democracy is so much more valuable than destroying it all for the sake of culture wars. And part of the reason for this blindness may be the influence of Ayn Rands’s libertarian philosophy, especially on young people.
The Nightmare of Bad Logic
“Anyone who’s not a Marxist at age 20 has no heart, and anyone who’s still a Marxist by age 30 has no brain.”
-Paraphrased and attributed to various 20th Century thinkers
Donald Trumps War: There’s a term in academia called “sophomoric,” which is defined as being “intellectually pretentious, overconfident or conceited, but immature.” It refers to that exciting point in university life when someone is a whole 20 years old now, and cutting his or her teeth on superficially-impressive, all-encompassing ideologies that explain everything in the universe.
When I was 20, that sweeping, all-encompassing “answer” for my generation came from Marx. Today, millions of young people think it comes from his complete opposite, Ayn Rand. The fact that Rand’s philosophy was such a slap in the face to Christian morality but the Church had so little to say in response to it, testifies to just what our problem today is.
Ayn Rand, based on her experience under Soviet Communism, came to conclude that all “collectivist” activity was “the problem,” and that radical individualism was “the answer.”[7] Thus did she write a book, The Virtue of Selfishness, which must have had all philosophers before her turning in the grave, because they had assumed selfishness was the problem.[8] Charles Finney for instance, one of America’s most famous evangelists, stated in his systematic theology that sin is selfishness in a wide spectrum of manifestation.[9]
In this way, Rand in her blindness and amateurism, effectively undermined the traditional understanding of the spectrum of political concepts. Now, on “the left” are the “collectivist” philosophies—communism and fascism (national socialism and international socialism). On “the right” is individualism and the “virtue of selfishness.” So, according to this scheme, no amount of right-wing extremism is too extreme. Instead, it’s “the answer,” no matter how delusional, reckless or utopian it actually is.[10] Playing games with words and concepts is the first step to eternal destruction, as we’ve seen ever since the story of Adam and Eve.[11]
I have more on Ayn Rand in my “Economic Beast” chapter of American Babylon, American Antichrist. The book serves as something of a textbook for this site and is a small way you can help out this ministry. You can also access some great work by Thom Hartmann dissecting Ayn Rand here.
Notes:
[1] One of the famous characteristics of Satanism is the inversion of all things, especially symbolic and holy things—upside-down crosses, upside-down Bibles, optical illusions, etc. Anything to de-stabilize your sense of reality (Rom 16:18; II Pet 2:14).
[2] Commonly attributed to Voltaire.
[3] The first proponent of “The Big Lie” theory of course was Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s “Minister of Information” (propaganda), who advocated just repeating a big whopper over and over again until the masses believe it.
[4] Michael Cohen, who once was Donald Trump’s attorney/”fixer,” has stated that Trump was just “blown away” by Putin’s wealth (gained by corruption), his unlimited powers, his ability to dispatch with any critic who got in his way.
[5] Vladislav Surkov was the architect of a surreal style of governing, the purpose of which was to constantly psy op the Russian public to leave them disoriented and demoralized. “The brilliance of this new type of authoritarianism is that instead of simply oppressing opposition, as had been the case with 20th-century strains, it climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd. One moment Surkov would fund civic forums and human-rights NGOs, the next he would quietly support nationalist movements that accuse the NGOs of being tools of the West.” https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/hidden-author-putinism-russia-vladislav-surkov/382489/
[6] I once read that the reason they did this was because Jesus said when He returned, He would put the sheep by His right hand and the goats by His left (Mt 25:33). In this way they were arrogantly declaring they’d rather be the Devil’s goats than Christ’s sheep.
[7] There’s even a right-wing radio station here in Los Angeles at least, that advertises itself as “AM870, The Answer.”
[8] The Biblical philosophy is the virtue of loving your neighbor as yourself, per Jesus’ command. The idea is an equal regard for others’ rights and interests as well as your own. It’s the fulfillment of the law and the basis of all justice.
[9] From minor human faults (which God is little concerned about) to major wickedness (which He is).
[10] I’ve even heard a promo on right-wing or Christian radio for a show called “The Answer,” a “gathering of the best conservative minds” out there, as if there’s no other “minds” with anything to say.
[11] In Genesis 3, Satan through the snake confused Eve as to the meaning of “know.” The “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” was meant by God as the knowledge of bad consequences if they ate of the tree. Satan suggested it was the unlimited knowledge of a god, like a data base of facts. But he was lying to her.
