By guest columnist Noel Holston

So, the same God that sent us Jesus also sent us Donald Trump?

I guess that’s possible seeing as how the same God gifted us with sex and STDs, but I doubt it.

Saying Donald Trump isn’t a “perfect” man is a huge understatement, like saying DDT isn’t the best of condiments.

I, Noel Holston, am not a perfect man. I sometimes talk when I should be listening. I’m bad about leaving the toilet seat up.  I’ve been known to tithe less than 10%.  I once stole a pair of sunglasses from a surf shop in Daytona Beach. 

I regret it all.

But unlike Donald Trump, who regrets nothing, I’ve never sexually assaulted a woman in a department store dressing room, mocked a disabled man’s tremors, lied on loan applications, stiffed a contractor, or paid hush money to a porn actress. I’ve also never been sued or charged with any crime, let alone 90. 

No, Trump is not a perfect man. He’s more like a perfect storm, a monsoon of malfeasance.

But that’s not the truly disturbing thing about the meme reproduced above. We know who Trump is.

The meme was shared on Facebook by a woman from my Mississippi hometown, someone who also posts pictures of angels and kittens, and it quickly amassed a long trail of supportive comments, from anti-Liberal slurs to “Some time we need a Joab.”

(For those of you who aren’t ready to compete on Bible Baffle, Joab was a Jewish military commander under King David known for his ruthlessness.) 

The scary thing is that there are people living among us who actually believe Donald Trump was chosen by the Almighty Himself to clean up the sinful mess that liberals, progressives and free-thinkers supposedly have wrought in the U.S. of A. 

Here again, the logic is strange.

God loved and blessed America when European conquerors, also known as settlers, drove indigenous peoples off their lands and killed them by the thousands.

God continued to love and bless America when some of its enterprising newcomers used abducted Africans to build great fortunes and, later, after a bloody war incidentally freed those slaves, disenfranchised, harassed and lynched their descendants for another century.

Only now, when some men and women want to love someone of their same gender, when some men and women want to change their gender, and when poor brown people from Central and South America are trying to cross our border Southern to pursue life, liberty and happiness is God so infuriated with us that He has dispatched a snide, vulgar, narcissistic real-estate hustler to lead us back to the straight and narrow.

There’s a word for this: insanity.

There’s a second word as well: blasphemy. 

Forgive them for they know not what they do? Sure. It’s the Christian thing. 

But not until after you’ve voted them and their orange idol out.

Author’s note: I had hoped to work Matthew 9: 26 (“There are none so blind. . .”) into this, but it broke the flow. Another time.

—

Noel Holston is a freelance writer who lives in Athens, Georgia. He serves as Georgia Correspondent for Wry Wing Politics. He’s also a contributing essayist to Medium.com, TVWorthWatching.com, and other websites. He previously wrote about television and radio at Newsday (2000-2005) and, as a crosstown counterpart to the Pioneer Press’s Brian Lambert, at the Star Tribune  (1986-2000).  He’s the author of “Life After Deaf: My Misadventures in Hearing Loss and Recovery,” by Skyhorse.