Collin Willis

Trump won. It has been an emotionally taxing two weeks since that became not a dreaded fantasy but a reality. I’ve felt a lot of anger. I’ve felt sad and bitter, but mostly I have felt disheartened and a little broken. I have outlined and rewritten this blog post about twenty-five times just trying to make sense of it all and figure out what the message laid upon my heart really was. I think that posting gut reactions are unwise and the heat of passion is likely to rouse ones anger and put forth words that are neither constructive nor honorable. So, I’ve taken the space of a couple weeks to sift through my strong reactionary responses, to cool off, and hopefully to find something more genuine, honest, and true. I posted to Facebook before the election about how the best we can do is to be honest with ourselves and to try and share that honesty with others. I hope this post will be a reflection of that.

Trump Won

While I’m not jazzed about Conservatism and current Republican policies as a whole, I don’t think a Red Wave is some world ending evil or that Conservatives are blindly bigoted as a whole. I do think that trickle down economic policies and reduced funding on education will wreak immense havoc on future generations of lower and middle class citizens, but the overall anti-institutional bent I can understand and partially fathom. What I am struggling to understand is how the character and action of Donald Trump in particular were not deal breakers for not just an electoral victory’s worth of people, but for the first time, the popular majority of voters.

Donald Trump won his first popular vote despite being found liable for sexual assault in at least one case, with many still pending. He won the popular vote despite lying about his 2020 loss for the past four years. He won after inciting a riot as a sitting president, one that threatened a Vice President he was trying to coerce into un-Constitutional electoral action. He lost after lying about Covid, vaccines, and horse tranquilizers. He won despite 34 felony convictions, despite paying off a porn-star to keep quiet about an affair he had with her. He won despite personifying all of these things Conservatives and Evangelicals have spent their lives preaching as demonic and demonstrably sinful.

I am anti-Trump. I’m not anti-Trump because he is a Republican. I am not anti-Trump because he is conservative. Donald Trump isn’t Mitt Romney, George Bush, or even Richard Milhouse Nixon; whom I have mere political disagreements with. (Say what you will about Nixon, he at least owned up after a certain point.) I am against Donald Trump because he is immoral, irresponsible, and violently un-repentant.

Gut Responses

As I pivot from that last paragraph, I want to note the tendencies I’ve seen from Left-gut reactions and Right-gut reactions. In the wake of the election, tensions were just as high as they had been leading up to it. People have based their entire identity on the outcome of either a Trump or Harris victory. Pride is wounded, existence is questioned, and emotions are running very hot. It is in these times that we are rewarded for acting as our worst and most toxic selves. I think we need to take stock of how we funnel our anger and resentment towards other people, because that acid corrodes irreparably regardless of what side of the political aisle you sit on.

On the Left

On the Left, I have seen just as much fundamentalist outlash and other-ism as leftists are crying comes solely from the Right. If your biggest takeaway from the election is that your neighbor is a racist/sexist/misogynistic/hateful/POS, you are drinking just as much of the fundamentalist Kool-Aid as you’ve descried MAGA Republicans sipping. I’ve seen friends and family on the Left ready to isolate themselves and immolate every relationship they have with anyone who voted Trump. While I understand the disappointment, the lack of empathy and understanding I’ve seen on the Left is just as disheartening as what I’ve seen on the Right.

I’ll touch on this in greater detail later in the article, but I want that point to be made before I dive fully into my own feelings on the second election of Donald Trump.

On the Right

On the Right, I’ve seen a very haughty positivity and an exaggerated extending of deaf ears. Republicans want to pretend that the concerns against Trump and MAGA aren’t real while at the same time bending over backwards to excuse the blatant sinfulness of Donald Trump. I have seen countless “Jesus is still King” posts and posts talking in great detail about how God uses imperfect people. God does use imperfect people, but there is a firm line between what God simply does not stop and what God explicitly condones. There is also a strong contrast between imperfect people and unrepentant people. The Bible draws clear distinctions between Godly and un-Godly leadership in the wake of sinfulness.

David and Saul

David, at best, had an affair with a woman and then had her husband killed so he wouldn’t get caught when it became clear she was pregnant. At worst, David raped one of his subjects and then had her husband killed so he wouldn’t get caught when it became clear she was pregnant. Yes, David eventually repented of this sin, but it had disastrous consequences for himself and the soon to be severed kingdoms of Israel and Judah. David also repented because he humbled himself and listened to Nathan, who called him to repentance. The point of the story isn’t that David did a bad thing; but that David listened, repented, and that those bad things have consequences even if not in our own lifetimes.

Donald Trump isn’t a repentant David, he is a self-serving Saul. David chose not to harm his enemies even when he had right and opportunity. David praised the Lord even when it meant he lost everything in his political power. David’s ears were not lent solely to those whose loyalty to him came first, but to those loyal firstly to the Lord. David heard the call of those around him and came to repent of his wickedness, and he faced the consequences when they came due.

Donald Trump is a Saul, a King risen to power on the shoulders of populism who flaunted the name of God, embraced his sin and his need for retribution, and refused the calls to repentance. Saul lost his entire family and kingdom because he was jealous, scared, and unrepentant. Both of these men were imperfect people, but only one of them idolized themselves and their kingdom above the call to return to the Lord and repent of their wickedness. Donald Trump doesn’t follow the God of the Bible, he sells the Lord’s book emblazoned with his own name on it.

Disappointment

In 2020, I wrote about the hope I had in the election of Joe Biden. I didn’t expect him to make the all time list of American Presidents but I expected him to be an agent of peace and stability. He was by no means a perfect President, but he was a steady hand on the wheel and a stable agent in both national and international waters. At the same time, his mental decline cannot be ignored and the hand that seemed strong enough in that election certainly was not in this one. His presidency came with its own blunders, Afghanistan being a key one among them, but overall he embodied a return to normalcy and class in the Oval Office.

In 2021, I reflected on Trump’s failure to acknowledge defeat, the ransacking of the Capital building, and both the hope that Trump would be publicly refuted and the fear that another Trump would rise to take his place.

In 2021, I could not fathom that Trump would retain his grip on both the Republican Party and the American Public. I am still struggling to understand how he not only retained that support but even managed to grow it. I do not understand how a man who respects our nation’s institutions and laws so little and who belittles its occupants so brazenly is such an icon for so many of them.

I am not going to hide my dissatisfaction. If you voted for Donald Trump in 2024, I am disappointed in you. I write that knowing it means that close family members, friends, co-workers, and neighbors are who it applies to. I am disappointed that you made the conscious decision to ignore the personal character of Donald Trump and to endorse him despite of, or because of, it. I am disappointed that you saw his character, his slander, his lies, his deceit, his flaunting of justice, his bigotry, his hatred, his violence, his instability, his blasphemy; and that you decided to circle his name on the ballot anyways. I disagreed with your support of him in 2016 and 2020, but the disappointment I feel for you now is astronomical compared to what I felt for you then.

Separate Spheres

At the same time that I harbor this disappointment, I am also offset by bewilderment. I think the greatest threat to the American public isn’t just Donald Trump but the spaces that give rise to his rhetoric and power. Social Media and modern digital platforms are the great boogeymen of this election and I think voters on both sides of the aisle fail to realize just how isolated the spheres they inhabit are and how insular the world they live in is from the world the people next door to them live in as well. The terrible victory of social media is that it creates our own little world for us to inhabit. We do not have to engage with or even see the content put out by those who disagree with is. We don’t have to see the news from the perspective of anyone to the right or left of us. We don’t have to face different opinions or entertain different points of view. Social Media is catered to outraging us about what we want to be outraged by and affirming the views we want affirmed. I believe that social media is an almost demonic force, one that gorges itself on the profits generated by keeping us divided and angry. It is this division that primes the nation for disruptive figures like Donald Trump.

You are not seeing the same news stories that the person next to you is. You’re not watching the same YouTube videos, or listening to the same podcasts. You are not hearing the same spins and in many cases you are both being bombarded with wildly different misinformation. There are no checks and balances in the internet space and the more unique your content, the more the algorithms reward you; regardless of content quality or validity. So while it is really easy to pin the blame on your neighbor for being uneducated or brainwashed or godless or idolatrous, I firmly believe that the greatest blame lies in the profit seekers abusing a technological system that isolates us and escalates our opinions in echo chambers of its own design.

Isolation and Immolation

Social Media is supposed to be a tool to connect us, and at its best it does. It lets me see pictures of my niece and nephew, graduations, new jobs, and all sorts of life changes from friends and family. At the same time, social media doesn’t generate its money from my grandma commenting on my new profile picture. Social Media generates its profits by drawing my grandma and I further into its communities and keeping us there with content that strikes us emotionally, more often than not playing on our fears and angers, prompting us to buy, click, and follow advertisers further down the sales funnel. Social Media is designed to bring us together, but it subsists itself on our pulling ourselves apart.

Social Media creates a false sense of isolation as we compete to keep up with the Joneses and are bombarded with content that reinforces our pre-existing opinions and radicalizes them beyond what we would be capable of in a healthily communicative and diverse society. When I spend my entire life surrounded only by Red or Blue takes, I lose my ability to even fathom why someone would think differently because I am so used to my worldview being tailored and curated for me. Healthy political dialogue takes intention, and honest discussion requires us to breach our comfortable bubbles and enter into spaces where the things we believe and want to believe might not be the status quo.

Awareness

There are seedy figures on the Left and the Right who are very aware of the potential for division and escalation via social media. Figures like Tucker Carlson, like Andrew Tate, like Joe Rogan, who know how to pray on the fears of vulnerable people and rile them up into something they are not. This pursuit of the innate fears we have of our enemies at the gates has been tapped into by Trumpian politicians to create a great political and physical violence across the country.

What I think is most interesting on this front isn’t that the effort doesn’t exist on both sides, but that on one side this division and immolation is a concerted effort by key figures and on the other it is more of a collective, and both the concerted and the collective use each other’s existence to validate the escalation of their own rhetoric and fuel the fire even further. At the same time, neither side wants to admit that their extremes exist, let alone shape any portion of the backlash coming from their opposite flank. When you only spend your time with people who are shouting over each other, you lose all ability to separate the noise from the heart of the matter. It is a constant escalation that produces only the most vituperative dialogue.

Admit Your Identity

I think one of the hardest things we each have to do when we engage in politics, over social media, and with our neighbors is to admit to ourselves who we are and what we want. This means examining our own biases and admitting that they are such. Liberals want a plain reading of the political landscape as much as Conservatives want a plain reading of the Bible and neither of those things can truly be examined without passing through our own biases and interpretation.

I am a Christian

First and foremost, I am a Christian. I believe in the power and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Because of this I also believe in the destructive properties of sin and its ability to corrupt and influence this world. While I believe that Christ will return and restore the world, I don’t believe that eventual reformation gives me an excuse to abandon this world in the interim. The first task that God gave mankind in the garden was to have dominion over the Earth and to order it and keep it. God entrusted mankind with his creation, to steward it and do well with it. Sin corrupted that task and made it more difficult for mankind to be fruitful and to multiply, but I don’t believe that task has ever truly changed. How we exercise dominion over the earth and how we act fruitfully looks different, but at the end of the day we are still called to steward creation until God returns to set it in order.

We can read this plainly and say, “okay so everybody farms and fishes and keeps doing that till Jesus returns.”. We can read it that way and completely miss the point, because that call to action doesn’t end in Genesis 1 and 2. The story goes on and we see from other biblical figures what it means to steward resources, and armies, and governments, and worship practices, and finances; and the list goes on and on. Yet I see so many of my Christian friends flock to the idea that stewardship in the interim doesn’t matter, that this is all some game that’ll be reset tomorrow when Christ returns anyways. They treat this Earth like a prison they’re destined to one day escape and they miss the most basic revelation of Genesis 1, that this Earth and everything on it is God’s creation. He cared for it, He labored for it, and He entrusted us to do the same. The game doesn’t just matter in the first and fourth quarters, how we play in quarters two and three matters just as much. Even further than that, He loves the opposing team no less even when its colors don’t match.

Free Will

The beauty and the tragedy of the Gospel is that we have the freedom to reject it just as much as we have to accept it. God loved us enough not to make us all little group-think wind-up monkeys, but independent actors with the opportunity to choose to love Him or choose to reject Him. There are deeper debates you can get into dissecting pre-destination and self-determination; but if you truly believe that God created all things good, I think you have to accept a certain degree of human free will in order to account for sin and the role it plays in the existence of things that are not good.

One subsection of a single article cannot sift out all of the nuances and meanings of what it means to be a Christian. So I will end this tangent not with my own words but with the words found in Matthew 22:

³⁶ “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” ³⁷ And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. ³⁸ This is the great and first commandment. ³⁹ And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. ⁴⁰ On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

This is four verses from Matthew, it is by no means even a fraction of the entirety of the story, but I do believe it is an essential framework for how Christians maintain a Christian identity above their political one. You can be a Christian and still be a Democrat, the same way you can be a Christian and still be a Republican. However, if at any point your party affiliation, candidate support, or personal choice supersedes the commandments to love your neighbor or love the Lord, it becomes inappropriate at best and sinful at worst.

I am a Democrat

I feel nervous typing those words out. I’ve given all share of hints in that direction on this blog, but I’ve never outright said it. I am weary of that term around my Christian friends and family because I know it will cause some of them to think of me differently and perhaps even to question my faith. And there’s the problem, we have let the Republican Party in this country claim the faith rather than accepting the more complicated view that neither party will ever truly represent Christian value or aims, because that’s not what political parties are for.

I grew up under the firmly held belief that Christians could not be Democrats. I remember in 2015 talking to one of my most outspoken Christian friends and having my mind shatter when I found out she’d been to a Bernie rally. I remember how dark a day in our household it was in 2008 when Obama won for the first time. I remember the fear of his “Muslim influence” hanging over our “Christian nation”. I voted in 2016 for Libertarian Gary Johnson because my conscience wouldn’t let me vote for Trump but my upbringing wouldn’t even fathom voting for Hillary (and honestly it’d still take a heck of a lot of convincing for me to vote for her).

The Great Schism

My political life has been marked by a great schism where I knew what I believed but I knew who I was and those two things disagreed. The Christian idolatry of the Republican party was a foundational piece of my life and it took a lot for me to see what an idol the movement that Reagan began had become. It was an idol that caused me to be not just insensitive, but frankly belligerent regarding matters of racial justice and punitive violence on behalf of law enforcement and the courts. It was an idol that made me disregard the plight of my neighbor because it would reflect poorly on my sense of self to accept their perspective of the world in disagreement with my own. It was an idol that even made me think less of my neighbor and less of my God because I couldn’t disassociate the Lamb from the Elephant.

Why I am a Democrat

I am not a Democrat because I think the Donkey is anymore Lamb-like than the Elephant. I am not a Democrat because I believe it will preserve Christian virtue or somehow enlighten God in this country. To pass that responsibility onto a party is to lay down the call to go forth and make disciples, it is to ignore the first instruction to steward the Lord’s creation.

I am a Democrat because I believe that the role of the government is to hold the line and fill in the gaps. The government should be the safety net for working class Americans, keeping monopolies and oligarchs in check while providing aid to those too old or unable to work. It should be there to pick the American people up when the bootstraps snap due to factors beyond their control. Government is there to codify and protect our civil rights, regardless of gender, race, age, or creed. Government is there to seek justice when private institutions and individuals abuse their power and harm one another. Government is there to raise the floor for all of its citizens through public education, libraries, parks, and programs. Government is there to fill the practical needs that will not be met when corporations are only seeking profits and religious institutions are only seeking souls. I believe that in order for the Government to be there when it is truly needed, it must be there even before it is needed. Currently there are two parties, one that aligns with these beliefs and one that seemingly doesn’t believe in Government at all except when to further special interest and penalize political enemies.

Putting Party in its Place

I am a Democrat, but at the end of the day that identity is both secondary and malleable. The American Political system has featured a cadre of changing parties and party leadership in its nearly 250 years. The Democratic Party today is not the same party as it was in 1960 nor as it was in 1860. It is no more the Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson than the current Republican Party is that of Abraham Lincoln. The issues change, the coalitions change, the priorities change. My identity as a Democrat isn’t more important to me than the reasons I chose to be one, and if there ever comes a day where a party better represents my beliefs I will happily switch sides; because that’s how this system is supposed to work.

What is plaguing the nation and Christians in particular is this false belief that party stands before country, before countrymen, and before God. Parties are independent organizations meant to serve themselves, created to raise money and put in-house candidates in power. It doesn’t matter if they’re a Red party or a Blue party, the party as a whole will always service its own pathways to power above all else. Parties are not here to return Christian virtue to politics, or to protect our constitutional rights; they are here to make sure that their candidates have the resources to attain political power and that their coffers grow lined because of it.

Play Stupid Games…

I have genuine fears about what a second Trump term might yield. As with his first, Donald’s main objective is to reward himself and his allies while punishing his enemies. He’s already appointed Elon Musk (who donated an estimated $200 million to his campaign) to a government agency he made up. He’s appointed Matt Gaetz, a man with little legal experience and under ethical investigation for numerous sexual crimes and activities, to the office of Attorney General. He instilled a Wrestling Executive to head the Board of Education, and a TV doctor known for pseudoscience and disowned by most of the medicinal world to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid. He’s made it clear the he intends to pardon the January 6th insurrectionists, himself included. He’s also spoken about abolishing the Department of Education and making tests of patriotism a hiring requirement for our nation’s teachers. Often overlooked, but most drastically terrifying, is his desire to force Ukrainian concessions in order to appease his friend Vladmir Putin.

Rewarding Bad Behavior

The Republican Party has had opportunity after opportunity to abandon Donald Trump and time and time again we have seen his Conservative opponents choose to suckle the teat of power rather than to stand up for the American people. Rather than leading the electorate, Republican congressmen and women have chosen to be lead by the populist wave that carries Trump to powers unchecked. They had their chance to impeach him after January 6th, they had their chance to refute his election lies, and they had their chance to stand against him in the 2023 primaries and they chose not to.

I am nervous about a second Trump term because the people who have taken a stand against him are not there to keep his power in check. JD Vance will not hold the line the way Mike Pence did on January 6th. Marco Rubio, just named Secretary of State, will not oppose the man who he’s refused to stand against in the wake of his crimes. Elon Musk, who has shattered Twitter with piranha-like efficiency, and who refuses to let anyone criticize or be viewed more than he is on the platform, will do naught but encourage the President’s most malicious attacks on the institutions that stand to keep him in check.

Education

The damage that Trump did to our schools through Betsy DeVos in his first term has already greatly crippled this nation’s students and teachers. The difference between schools when I graduated high school in 2016 to when I started working with them in 2019-2022 is astounding. Teachers are burdened with class sizes often larger than 30 kids. Art, Music, and Specials teachers are split between two or three schools if they are even on staff at all. Government funding is being pulled from public schools and siphoned into private schools that don’t have to adhere to federal standards or open themselves up to the underfunded and underprivileged.

Republicans have been at war with education ever since they were told that segregated schools wouldn’t receive federal funding. There has been a constant war of attrition between Radical Conservatives and Public Education that has left our teachers overworked and underfunded, with our nation’s children paying the price. A single Presidential term can do decades worth of damage to students who then grow up ill-equipped for the careers, jobs, and world they are supposed to inherit. It is damage that can take decades to reverse and I fear for a nation where the highest office in the land is at war with the most basic tool we have to lift the nation’s disparaged and disadvantaged out of poverty. Not to mention the millions of children across the nation who rely on Public Schools for meals they aren’t getting at home, or for the classrooms and extracurriculars that build their self confidence and keep them out of parasitic environments that would otherwise draw them into a life of substance abuse and crime.

Russia

Ever since Trump ran in 2016, the comparisons to Hitler have been incessant. I think they’re dumb; Trump isn’t Hitler, that title belongs to Vladmir Putin. The question is whether Trump will be, at best, a Neville Chamberlain; or at worst, a Benito Mussolini. Will Trump attempt to appease his ally by conceding the Ukraine and entreating Russian aggression upon the European content as Chamberlain did Germany’s annexation of the Sudetenland? Or will he be emboldened by his ally’s victory and seek his own rendition here in the United States? Ukraine is holding the line of war against the European continent and I fear what might happen if that line were to suddenly vanish and Russia’s expanding appetite be left militarily unchecked.

Russian intelligence has been intervening in our elections on Trump’s behalf since 2016, ask yourself why they want so badly for him to win. Why do they spend so much money using Facebook’s marketing algorithms and ad strategies in his favor?

Voting is Easy and Our Politics is Lazier for It

Political action should be more than an activity we do once every 2-4 years. A vote shields us from having to take any further action. We don’t have to really engage to feel like we’ve done a job, but our hands all pull the great chain and we need to do better at engaging ourselves in the entirety of the political process and its consequences. Healthy dialogue, healthy policies, and healthy voting requires us to realize that politics is not a me thing, it is a we thing.

In parallel, I think that American Christianity has run blind with the idea that faith and the Christian life is just a thing kept between ourselves and God. Not only is that idea running against the grain of church history, but it cuts against Biblical examples of the faith too. To treat our political identity with the same airs is to misconstrue it as well. We are not just voting for ourselves and our families, we are voting for candidates and policies that affect those beyond our bubbles too.

Healthy political life requires personal choice, yes, but it also requires us to remember the call to love our neighbors. Loving our neighbors means hearing them, understanding them even when you disagree, and considering their plight especially when it is not your own. Healthy political life means recognizing the spheres we’ve locked ourselves in and taking steps outside them even to our own discomfort. It means resisting the urge to block everyone we disagree with or vote differently than. It means that we can’t make things easier for ourselves by just shoving everyone else into a racist/sexist/godless/stupid/cultist box. It means we have to listen, get to know, and understand the people we claim to care about.

Closing Thoughts

Donald Trump is a candidate who does not speak life. He divides and conquers. He assails, he rapes, he lies, he defrauds; and he wins because he keeps us all at each other’s throats along the way. If we continue down this fundamentalist path that he’s shown us how to tread, we’ll continue to do little more than to divide ourselves farther apart. I don’t want to see the day where we discover how far this house can divide itself before it finally fails to stand. If we want the house we occupy with our neighbors to stand, we have to approach them and their politics with honesty, empathy, and a remembrance of the call to love.

I will continue to call out the once and future President for what his actions prove him continually to be. However, that gives me no right to otherize, write off, or ignore those around me who chose to support him. I do condemn that support and I do believe it takes either idolatry or ignorance to continue to support someone so malicious and immoral, but that doesn’t give me the right to stick those who cast their ballot for him with those labels too. If we truly love our neighbors, we care about them even when they do bad things, and we speak life rather than retreating to our war rooms and praying for their downfall. Nathan didn’t come to David with a club and a torch, just as David didn’t come with those to Saul. Who are any of us to approach our neighbors with anything less?