Collin Willis

Monsieur Bob, we’re not supposed to sing The Bunny Song.

All my life I’ve been told we’re supposed to act a certain way, to love a certain way, and to care a certain way as Christians. In the wake of Donald Trump’s reign, I have seen Christian after Christian who taught me these values bend the knee and sing the Bunny song to a false idol, a vitriolic and blasphemous leader who exemplifies and pursues the very behaviors I was told we stood against. I thought for a time that this would ebb and go away after President Trump first left office, yet I find myself feeling as if it is worse than it has ever been and it’s only been a week into his second term.

More than anything I am heartbroken as I watch people who I know believe in Jesus seek first the Kingdom of the Earth, with knees bent and heads bowed to the very thing I grew up being taught to resist.

A Plate,

The first week of Donald Trump’s return to the Presidency has been a heartbreaking one. As promised, his primary goal has been to richly reward his allies and punish his enemies with extirpative vengeance. We’ve seen a slew of Executive Orders aimed at ramping up ICE activity, refusing funding and aid to refugees, stripping departmental budgets, removing “DEI Hires” from office, and mandating identity politics and MAGA loyalty within certain governmental offices and programs. Not to mention the Gulf of Mexico has been officially renamed (within this country alone it seems) to the Gulf of America.

The last one reminds me of a situation a few years back regarding my alma matter. For the majority of its history, Wichita High School North students and sports teams were known as the Redskins. After decades of pushback, the school finally opted to change the mascot in the wake of the George Floyd protests and the Great A-woke-ening of the US. I was talking about it with a family member who just didn’t understand why it needed to be a priority at the time. “There’s just bigger things to focus on”, she said. I don’t think she was wrong. I’d argue that keeping students fed, out of judicial trouble, and prepared for either adulthood or college are bigger issues; but that doesn’t mean that the name change wasn’t important. Branding says a lot about our values, and in the case of North High, a slur as a mascot wasn’t exactly projecting the inclusivity that the school aimed to stand for.

Renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America accomplishes nothing, but it says a lot. I find this order to be a perfect example of Trump’s chauvinistic version of Patriotism. It’s also a big lightning rod, and it distracts from some of the more nefarious things being done by his administration. It steals headlines that won’t go to Elon Musk’s stealthy entrance into seemingly unfettered access to whichever governmental organizations, information, and clearances he chooses. It bombards your timeline with headlines that don’t talk about ICE targeting American citizens or the government infringing on religious liberty by allowing ICE to detain people in church auditoriums and in between pews. Trump has a lot on the plate that he’s thrown at the American people this week, don’t let yourself get so distracted by the appetizers that you neglect the entrees.

And A Fork,

At the same time, there exists a discomforting mirror between Biden’s last actions and Trump’s first. Both issued a series of pardons within the same 24hr cycle of the Presidency, overstepping their duties of the Oval Office and acting in shameful self-interest.

President Biden chose to leave the Oval Office by issuing a series of pardons to government officials and his family. The conflict of interest here is just as clear as it was with Hunter Biden a little further back. Regardless of circumstance, the sitting President should not abuse the pardon privilege to alleviate a relative. I say this believing full well that Hunter Biden was targeted by the GOP specifically to get to his father, but that doesn’t excuse the fact that he still broke the law in his substance abuse. While I understand President Biden’s fear that Trump will come vindictively after other relatives, it sets a dangerous precedent to disperse pardons so liberally to those close to you.

At the same time, Trump doesn’t have any room to criticize. He’s been very clear in all of his stop the steal lies about how he views the insurrectionists on January 6th. These are criminals who stormed federal property and killed public servants in a desperate plight to kill members of Congress and reverse the results of an election. These are violent offenders that Trump released unconditionally back onto the streets, resulting in several recurring acts of violence and even death within the first week of their release. Trump has spent over a decade crying wolf about rapists, murders, and criminal illegals being freely released onto the streets but proudly did exactly that on his first day in office.

And A Bunny

Unquestioning loyalty is the key ingredient in Trump’s second administration. We saw this with his cabinet nominations even before his inauguration, but it has never been more apparent than it is right now. There is no better example for this than Elon Musk. The world’s wealthiest man, and one born to a foreign country at that, has achieved intimate and seemingly unrestricted access to our government solely because he spent $250million+ on Trump’s re-election campaign. And rather than going through congress and properly establishing the post-election promise of the “Department of Government Regulation”, Trump has sidestepped the checks and balances by hijacking the United States Digital Service and flooding it and other regulatory agencies with Musk myrmidons.

Musk, like Trump, primarily seeks to reward himself and punish his enemies. He has already begun to go after those who have challenged his SpaceX program, leading to the dismissal of key FAA officials less than a week before the first domestic aviation disaster in nearly twenty years. Musk has been given a blank check with the American peoples’ names on it, with access to this nation’s wealth without security clearance and despite protest. Those who stand up or stand in the way are steadily threatened and dismissed. American interests are currently under the thumb of a man with no more motivation than the Hamburglar, and he was allowed to walk passed security and into the vault without a single vote on the matter.

Will You or Will You Not SING THE SONG?

Donald Trump’s current administration has made it abundantly clear that you either sing the Bunny song, or you face the immolation of the firey furnace. Trump has stripped security details from former colleagues turned enemies such as Dr. Anthony Fauci and Mike Pompeo. These are government officials who are being targeted by both domestic and foreign agents because they kept to their oaths of office. I do not like Mike Pompeo, but Mike Pompeo is a target of Iranian agents due to his role in military activities against terrorists and other agents in the Middle East. His government abandoned him and tossed him to the wolves because he criticized his former boss for attempting a coup. If you can’t see how dangerous this is, to be the norm only a week into Trump’s office, you need to wake up.

Running concurrently with this is Trump’s new arch-nemesis, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. DEI is a loaded term, and in different organizations it can mean vastly different things. To Trump it means people of color and different socio-economic status in positions he wishes to spoil his allies with. While the nation reels from not one but two aviation disasters in the span of a week, Trump doesn’t offer reassurance or apology, but blames black and brown citizens for earning the jobs they were hired for. It is a dog whistle that sends the same message of George Wallace’s cry for “Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

To carry it even further, Trump’s long standing rallying cry of deportation has been renewed with sharpened teeth. Not only has ICE been given decreased restrictions on where they can and can’t go, but crisis has been declared at the border, and asylum seeking has been seemingly stifled. To tie it all up, Trump has also made executive effort to end birthright citizenship. While he can’t do this without 2/3 approval from both houses of congress, this type of blatant assault on the Constitution is alarming for many reasons.

The truth of the matter is that ICE has in fact arrested and deported violent criminals as a result of this, but they have done so only in addition to infringing on the rights of American citizens who look and speak different, at the cost of families being separated, and with the support of many willing to turn a blind eye to actions that lie somewhere between torture and war crimes. The forest is being culled and we’re lead to believe it’s okay because they got a few rotten trees in with all the good ones. Legal and Illegal immigrants do not violently offend at near the same rate as American citizens, and Trump’s “law and order” horse manure has never been more foul than in his contrast between January 6th rioters and the black and brown immigrants to this country.

Didn’t Eat My Soup Or My Bread, Just the Bunny

One of the most tragic victims in these orders are the thousands of refugees and immigrants seeking asylum in this country. There is a crisis created by this administration for thousands of people who have been vetted to the most extreme, who have paid heavy fees, and been promised freedom from persecution of violence in this nation. The Trump administration has cut off funding for these people for at least the next four months, leaving them either high and dry in a country they were told could be home or forced to return to the homelands seeking to persecute them and bring them harm. In many cases these are Christians escaping religious persecution, former allies in war seeking to evade America’s enemies whom they stood against, and people in transit who are now stranded in foreign nations with no clear path forward and no resources with which to trudge through it.

America has failed to let its yes be its yes and its no be its no. We have failed to fulfill our promises, to be the shining city on the hill, and to be a nation to lead the nations. Shame on U.S.

Sick in the Head From the Bunny

As has always been the case with Trump, there is strong Evangelical support for his administration and Biblical re-working to support it. I’ve seen lots of Christians taking the Lord’s name in vain to support their idol’s actions. When given the choice to stand in the strength of the Lord and weather the flames of the moment, they have chosen instead to bow and sing the Bunny song. Christians are desperate to see themselves as a blessed people such as the Israelites, but they don’t want to be a Biblical Israel, they want to be a mythical one. The more into that mysticism and Promised Land theology they go, the less they see the real parallels that exist between this nation and the Israel of the Old Testament. They can Where’s Waldo correlations between Donald Trump and King Cyrus all day long, but they can’t see the same idolatry, the mistreatment of the foreigner and the refugee, the greed, and the blasphemy that this nation walks in step with like Israel and its Kings. The Lord says repent and be delivered, and they run to Egypt because kneeling in the cool shadow of the bunny sounds much easier than kneeling before the Lord and being singed in the light of their sins.

I’ve been reading through Ezekiel currently and some of the other OT prophets before that, and my heart breaks watching the same cultural sins that pervaded God’s actual chosen people concurrently plague this nation that so desperately wants their claim. It is overwhelming to see these things happening so quickly and en masse. I feel powerless, as many others do. How can we course correct a ship without a mast, already so far off course? I don’t have all the answers. I don’t have the resources. There are people much smatter and much more equipped than I am that are wrestling with the same things. I have little more than my voice and prayer.

I pray daily for this nation, for the administration, and for those who have already and will continue to come to great harm due to this injustice. But this is wrong, and private prayer isn’t enough, even if all I can do is type this out and get one person to read it. Injustice thrives in the periphery and the blind spots. Lukewarm ambivalence does just as much harm as a full-bodied kneel. All I have are these 2,000 words and a VeggieTales analogy, but I’ll be damned if I’m not using those to say that what’s wrong is wrong.