Dennis Prager, Donald Trump, and repentance

I've admired Dennis Prager for years. An intelligent, insightful man of customary integrity, until Donald Trump came along Prager was a rigorously honest and thoughtful man. While I don't necessarily agree with all of his Prager University videos, he's conspicuous on the Right for his customary avoidance of nonsense cliches like pretending that Southern secession was anything but exactly what the Declaration of Causes issued by the various Confederate states openly declared it to be: an effort to preserve slavery based on the fundamental principle of white supremacy.

But like many conservatives of habitual integrity I've admired over the years, Rabbi Prager has been somehow seduced by President Trump. Now, I can understand someone voting for Trump in 2016, even though I couldn't do it myself; the alternative, after all, was Hillary Clinton, and the replacement of the great Antonin Scalia with Neil Gorsuch and the mediocre Anthony Kennedy with Brett Kavanaugh may well have saved the Constitution from being further savaged by judicial amendment. That's a big deal, and all credit to Mr. Trump for it.

Bur my opinion, it's as important as it is, the saving of the Court is the only good thing to come out of Mr. Trump's election, It has caused a firestorm of damage to the nation. The cutting of the last fraying threads of civility and the mainstreaming of some of the ugliest, most irresponsible, most marginal,  and most un-American elements of our body politic into the new face of the party of Lincoln and Ford and Reagan and the Bushes is a high price to pay even for the Court. The Republican party  has exchanged the noble heritage of those men for the agenda of the alt-right, the conspiracy theorists, the racists, and the rest of Mr. Trump's core constituency. Rabbi Prager is better than that. So is Mollie Hemingway. So are most conservatives I know. Defeating the destructive agenda of the Left is important, but the question has to be asked of the conservative movement and the Republican party that Jesus asks in Matthew 16:26 and parallel passages: "For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?"

If a political movement or party can be said to have done precisely that, it's the American conservative movement and the Republican party in the era of Donald Trump.

What gets me is that Rabbi Prager and the rest of them continue even now to lie to themselves about what they've embraced for the sake of a temporary victory over the Left. Incredibly, Prager even tried to "spin" the president's infamous Billy Bush conversation into a regretful reflection on the ease with which famous men can use their fame to abuse women, emphatically denying that Mr. Trump openly admitted to being a serial abuser of women himself.  Somehow he- like an incredible number of intelligent and normally thoughtful Trump supporters.  manages to simply ignore the actual text of the conversation:

Trump: Yeah, that’s her. With the gold. I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.

Bush: Whatever you want.

Trump: Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.

Now let's pause there. I wish that I could say that I've never said or done anything that I'm ashamed of. And in fact, Mr. Trump offered not one, but two "apologies" for his remarks. Only the second was an actual apology.

Here is the first "apology:"

This was locker room banter, a private conversation that took place many years ago. Bill Clinton has said far worse to me on the golf course - not even close. I apologize if anyone was offended.

That was no real apology at all. Or rather, it was an "apology" only because people were offended by what he said. It was as if the problem were with their reaction to his words rather than the words themselves. Not only that, but Mr. Trump sought to justify his own behavior by saying that somebody else was worse!

It was a characteristic Trump moment. It provides a glimpse into the man's character. Far from expressing contrition for what he'd said, he doubled down on it, just as he characteristically does when he faces criticism, especially when that criticism is clearly justified. It's what he did, for example, when he took a statement by London's mayor following a terrorist incident out of context and attacked him for minimizing the danger posed by terrorists when in fact the mayor had told the people of his city not to be alarmed by the additional- and obvious- steps he was taking to protect them!

When confronted with Mayor Khan's actual words, Mr. Trump called objective reality an attempt by the media to "spin" the incident against him!

Donald Trump seems to have a repentance problem. It's not simply his conversation with Billy Bush. It's a pattern. He is never wrong. Oh, he'll admit to "mistakes" in the abstract. But even when he's caught dead to rights, either reality is wrong, or it's somebody else's fault.

The Billy Bush incident was a rare exception in that a few hours after issuing his first "apology-" when it was clear that nobody was buying it- he issued another one, which actually qualifies as an apology of sorts. Or would- if he'd only stopped talking a little sooner:

"I've never said I'm a perfect person, nor pretended to be someone that I'm not. I've said and done things I regret, and the words released today on this more-than-a-decade-old video are one of them.

Anyone who knows me knows these words don't reflect who I am. I said it, I was wrong and I apologize. I’ve traveled the country talking about change for America, but my travels have also changed me. I've spent time with grieving mothers who have lost their children, laid-off workers whose jobs have gone to other countries, and people from all walks of life who just want a better future.

I have gotten to know the great people of our country, and I've been humbled by the faith they've placed in me. I pledge to be a better man tomorrow and will never, ever let you down.

Fair enough. Except he couldn't let it go at that:

Let's be honest: We're living in the real world. This is nothing more than a distraction from the important issues we're facing today. We are losing our jobs, we're less safe than we were eight years ago, and Washington is totally broken.

Hillary Clinton and her kind have run our country into the ground. I've said some foolish things, but there's a big difference between the words and actions of other people. Bill Clinton has actually abused women, and Hillary has bullied, attacked, shamed and intimidated his victims. We will discuss this more in the coming days.

So it wasn't really all that bad, and it's not important anyway, and other people have done worse things. Well, guess what, Mr. Trump? You have built a career- and a presidency- out of "bullying, attacking, shaming, and intimidating" people on a scale unprecedented in the history of our national politics. And by your own admission, in the very statement which you're actually declining to apologize for while pretending to do so, you admitted in so many words that you, too, have "actually abused women," and continued to do so habitually!

Jesus warns us against judging others, and nobody but God can see Donald Trump's heart. I dare not pass judgment on Donald Trump, or on whether or not he is a sincere Christian. But he's a public figure in a democracy, and it seems reasonable- in fact, indisputable- that he does not model either contrition or humility very well for us.  However sincere his heart may be, he isn't much of an example.

But then, who is? I'm not such a hot example either, and I won't take refuge in my willingness to admit to being wrong on occasion, because that's a copout. I, too, get defensive and am sometimes unwilling to admit to being wrong even when I clearly am. No, the point here is not to bring the condition of Mr. Trump's soul into question.; It's that it's a necessary context for the discussion of what Rabbi Prager rightly calls the Left's "war on repentance."

It's an excellent piece. But it needs to be clear that it's not only the Left that is waging that war. It's the Right, too. It's ironic that a supporter of Mr. Trump should have written it, though if one was going to do so, I'm not surprised that it was Dennis Prager.

Especially as a former clergyman myself, but also as an American who is alarmed by the crisis which Rabbi Prager describes, I regard this as an extremely important topic. I plan over the next couple of days to write at least one and possibly two more posts on the article, and also on what I see as the mostly disingenuous attempts at rebuttal, that it has attracted.

The rabbi talks among other things about the role of forgiveness in Jesus's preaching. There's a parable of Jesus that comes to mind, one which I am mindful of giving what I've written about the president and his supporters in this post. Anyone who presumes to criticize another should be mindful of it. It goes like this:

He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt: “Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”

It's in the light of that parable, and of the question which Jesus is quoted as asking above, that I intend to discuss Rabbi Prager's article. More tomorrow.