Donald Trump will reclaim the presidency in November.
How is that possible?
Because God wants him back.
How do we know?
It comes from the men and women who claim they have a direct line to God.
Several evangelical preachers – you know, the mega church guys who live in mansions and move around in private jets while justifying opulent lifestyles with something called the Prosperity Gospel – are telling anyone and everyone that Trump is God’s man.
And it’s not just the preachers. A lot of evangelical – mostly Protestant, some Catholic – followers are on the same page. One poll pegged the number of American evangelicals who believe Trump is the anointed one at 56%. In other words, millions of Americans believe it.
At Trump rallies they wear T-shirts that proclaim – “God, Guns and Trump” and “MakeAmerica Godly Again” with an image of an luminous Jesus putting his supportive hands on Trump’s shoulders.
This despite the fact that Trump is a person of undisguised moral degeneracy. And when challenged in a TV interview, couldn’t come up with a single Bible verse.
One pastor claims that God had a hand in Trump losing to Joe Biden. Said God fixed the election in favour of Biden – who goes to church on Sundays – to teach Donald – who has a sideline hawking Bibles – a lesson in humility and to put him on the straight and narrow. (And all this time the Russians and Chinese are blamed for election interference).
(Note to God. Re: election fix, lesson in humility and D. Trump throwing himself upon the altar of repentance. Nice try, but it didn’t work).
Mike Johnson believes God backs Trump. Johnson isn’t a preacher. He just happens to be third in line in the presidential pecking order. He’s the House Speaker. If the unthinkable happened (the president and vice-president are called up yonder at the same time) he’s running the show, until Trump takes over in January.
LIFE AND TIMES Perhaps I should have listened to a former editor, well-known for his weak-kneed, passive avoid-criticism-at-all-cost approach to opinion writing. His advice was, “Just write what you can live with.”
Translated: Don’t make life hard for your boss.
As Milton Ellis, one of the two best S-F publishers (the other Don Brander), liked to joke (I think he was joking), “Mac taught me that publishers get served (with litigation paper) first.”
As the much disliked publisher John A. Farrington (aka Capt. William Bligh) cautioned , “You know, it’s a lot harder to write hard-hitting columns in a small town. Unlike the big cities, they know where to find you.”
No kidding.
In the years of writing opinion columns for the S-F, I received at least three worrisome threats to my physical being and a lot of nasty (mostly anonymous) telephone calls, e-mails and letters, but the latter three go with the business. (I’ve mellowed with age).
There would be cancel-your-paper campaigns; one saw 300 subscribers cancel their paper (at the time circulation had hit 20,000) over columns on how terrible the Aces hockey deal was for taxpayers. I was labelled a naysayer. Later learned that the guy who organized the campaign was still getting his paper, at his store.
The same guy once tried to get his Knights of Columbus church council to launch an all-out stop-your-paper campaign because I dared mention the anti-Catholic Project Truth website.
Somebody demanded that I be fired because I nicknamed Bernadette Clement (she was a councillor at the time) Bernie. Her reaction was, “Gee, how did you that was my nickname in university?”
In one case, an OPP detective involved in an undercover anti-smuggling operation in the city and area told my wife that based on information his team had uncovered, he was “concerned for my safety.”
At the time, I didn’t really trust some members of the Cornwall Police Service and one in particular who didn’t like me. On two occasions he parked his cruiser outside my house late at night, turned on his flashing lights and then drove off. A cheap intimidation tactic. A member of his family who was on the police board went to the station one night and “ordered” the person in dispatch to print out a background check on myself and four other citizens whom he didn’t like … and he got away with it.
Dan O’Reilly, a splendid police officer with a high degree of integrity, alerted me to the unauthorized background check. My complaint was buried, no doubt in the “Too-hot-to-handle” file.
One day when I came back to the newsroom after lunch, a university intern named Katie excitedly announced, “You should have been here at noon hour. A guy came in here looking for you, saying he was going to kill you over something you wrote.”
I asked my boss about it. “Oh ya, some wacko. Don’t worry about it. We asked him to leave.”
I called city police who followed up. Turned out the guy had a history of mental illness and had just been released from doing three years in the slammer.
Yup, don’t worry about.
HERE AND THERE: Alex Ovechkin, president of the North American chapter of the V. Putin fan club, removed the photo of his hero that adorned his locker room stall. … Rev. Al Sharpton raised a good point the other day on MSNBC. He wondered what Trump would have been saying if several hundred Blacks had stormed the Capitol on Jan. 7, 2021? For sure he wouldn’t have called them patriots.
TRIVIA: Long before he got into politics, former Stormont, Dundas and South Glengarry MP Guy Lauzon was a part-time door-to-door salesman selling two of these products: 1) Dominion Auto insurance, 2) Electrolux vacuums, 3) Fuller Brush, 4) Magazine subscriptions, 5) Pots and pans.
TRIVIA ANSWER :The Boston Pizza chain was born in Edmonton when the four Agiortis brothers, Greek immigrants, opened the Boston Pizza and Spaghetti House in 1964.
QUOTED: “Don’t let yesterday take up too much of today.” – Will Rogers
