We Deserve It All

Is Trump a form of divine retribution? And if so, for what?

Horace Vernet: Jeremiah on the ruins of Jerusalem (1844)

Last week I was cracking wise on Twitter about how rumors about tariff policy — reports of assurances given to investors by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent behind closed doors — temporarily helped stabilize markets. “Hopium” I called it.

Ben, a WoC listener, asked me, “When you look back at your first few podcasts after the re-election, how much can you recognize the stink of the same hopium?” It’s an echo of something Shadi asked me on (and off) the pod at least twice: “Surely you’ve soured on Trump by now?”

The answer is not so straightforward. I don’t think I’ve soured, because I never voted for the man. I had no hopes, and in my capacity as a citizen of a democracy, I did not will him upon us.

That said, now that Trump is upon us, I can’t help but feel like it’s somehow right that he is in power. Not that Trump necessarily had to have won — I can certainly imagine a world where Kamala Harris pulled off a narrow victory. But I don’t think a Harris presidency would have spared us a similar reckoning to the one we’re living through now.

Hers would have likely been a fraught and failed presidency, with our social compact continuing to fray, polarization deepening, and trust in elite gatekeepers taking even more of a beating. Maybe Trump would have died in the intervening four years, maybe he would have finally been jailed, maybe he would have died in jail. But it feels unlikely that any of the underlying tensions, both internal to the society and coming from outside, would have been resolved.

I think what we are facing with the presidency of Donald Trump was in the mail. Indeed, as I wrote in 2018, it feels like it’s been in the mail for quite a long time.

But what’s that actually mean — to say that something is in the mail? Does it mean we deserve it?

Well… yes, kind of.

A friend said to me a few weeks ago that he was reading the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah for Lent because it resonates with our current moment. Not having gotten that far in my Old Testament reading (I’m stuck somewhere in Kings) I jumped ahead and dove in.

For those as unlettered as I am, a little background: Jeremiah was prophesying around the time of the Babylonian captivity, and the early part of the book contains his searing indictments of Israel’s faithlessness that caused a furious God to ultimately will Jerusalem’s destruction.

If a man divorces his wife and she goes from him and becomes another man’s wife, will he return to her? Would not that land be greatly polluted? You have played the whore with many lovers; and would you return to me, declares the Lord.

Lift up your eyes to the bare heights and see! Where have you not been ravished? By the waysides you have sat awaiting lovers like an Arab in the wilderness. You have polluted the land with your vile whoredom.

Therefore the showers have been withheld and the spring rain has not come; yet you have the forehead of a whore; you refuse to be ashamed.

(Jeremiah 3:1-3, English Standard Version)

“Is Trump the ‘lion from the north’ — the lion sent by the Lord to compel us to repent from wandering?” I asked my friend.

“Well he ain’t the good witch Glenda come to take us back to Kansas,” my friend replied.

I didn’t bother asking what our sins were that would merit the punishment of Trump. My friend, after all, was not claiming to prophesy, but rather looking to scripture for insight. Jeremiads like Jeremiah’s gesture at a general mechanism — unrepentant sin leading to necessary comeuppance. They’re not meant to provide a map out of the wilderness.

A few days later, I found myself reading Joseph de Maistre’s Considerations on France, an arch-conservative Catholic’s rumination on the French Revolution. (I think I was inspired to do so by our recent conversation with Ivan Krastev, who didn’t flinch from describing Trumpism as a revolutionary force.)

Maistre’s theory of the Revolution is that it is divinely ordained, a kind of inevitable reaction to rationalist Enlightenment hubris. But unlike in Jeremiah, retribution has a different mechanism. The paradox at the very beginning of Maistre’s account is his insistence that human beings are not free agents in any meaningful way.

We are all attached to the throne of the Supreme Being by a supple chain that restrains us without enslaving us. Nothing is more admirable in the universal order of things than the action of free beings under the divine hand. Freely slaves, they act voluntarily and necessarily at the same time; they really do what they will, but without being able to disturb the general plans. Each of these beings occupies the centre of a sphere of activity whose diameter varies according to the will of the Eternal Geometer, who can extend, restrict, check, or direct the will without altering its nature.

In the works of man, everything is as wretched as their author; views are restricted, means rigid, motives inflexible, movements painful, and results monotonous. In divine works, the riches of infinity are openly displayed in the least part. Its power is exercised effortlessly; everything is supple in its hands, nothing resists it, and for it everything, even obstacles, are means; and the irregularities introduced by the operation of free agents fit into the general order.

God’s general plan — the general order — encompasses any and all actions by supposedly free individuals. The French Revolution, which claimed to want to overthrow a divinely ordained social order, was not exactly a product of human agency.

It has been correctly pointed out that the French Revolution leads men more than men lead it. This observation is completely justified, and although it can be applied to all great revolutions more or less, it has never been more striking than it is in the present period.

The very rascals who appear to lead the Revolution are involved only as simple instruments, and as soon as they aspire to dominate it they fall ignobly. Those who established the Republic did it without wanting to and without knowing what they were doing. They were led to it by events; a prior design would not have succeeded.

[…]

These extremely mediocre men exercised over a guilty nation the most frightful despotism in history, and surely they were more surprised at their power than anyone else in the kingdom.

But the very moment these detestable tyrants completed the measure of crime necessary to that phase of the Revolution, a breath overthrew them. Their gigantic power, which had made France and Europe tremble, could not withstand the first attack; and as there could be nothing great, nothing august, in a completely criminal revolution, Providence willed that the first blow be struck by the Septembrists, in order that justice itself would be debased.

There’s something rhetorical in Maistre that edges up to the angry God of Jeremiah. But the mechanism he is describing is more Deist than Old Testament. The violence and suffering of the French Revolution are a natural byproduct of things being out of order. Yes, there is a sense that France itself has strayed and is being punished. But it’s not being punished in order to teach any kind of lesson to a humanity that freely chooses evil. It’s more that humanity, in its circumscribed capacity to choose sometimes chooses wrong, which automatically triggers chaos and bloodshed. And that chaos and bloodshed persist until order restores itself.

Unlike Maistre (and again unlike Jeremiah), I have no real sense of exactly what our sins are. But perhaps following Maistre, I do tend to intuitively see Trump and Trumpism as a correction on a social order that has lost its way and is somehow badly out of tune. Something is broken and unsustainable, and has been so for a while. There’s no easy going back to a more innocent time.

It’s perhaps best to turn to Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural for the most well rounded and beautiful formulation of this kind of thought.

The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

For all his destructiveness and corrosiveness to our institutions, Trump is fortunately nowhere near the scourge of our Civil War. And by extension, whatever our sins are, they are not as grievous as that of American slavery.

Still, it’s worth ruminating on just how Lincoln sets up the horrific quandary the country found itself in during his time — and just how humble his rendering is.

Reflecting a passage from Matthew (18:7), Lincoln says American slavery is an offense God first willed into existence, and then by His sovereign design willed to remove. Critically, he suggests God imparts the woe of war on both the North and the South as their due — for participating in what is by his own admission an unavoidable evil. He does not claim the North is fighting a righteous war against a Satanic monstrosity, but rather that both sides are being punished. Both sides fervently pray that the horrors will soon cease. But given that God’s designs are fundamentally not knowable, all the faithful can do is be assured that despite the suffering and the carnage, whatever ultimately comes to pass is “true and righteous altogether” (Psalm 18:9).

I suppose what it all amounts to for me is a counsel of humility. Not passivity or quietism, of course. We don’t have the luxury of mere observation when a calamity such as this overtakes us. But certainly we ought to try to understand how we all share culpability for where we find ourselves. None of us should feel proud of how we got here.

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