Vote for Trump! Or not

I had a little bit of fun yesterday at the expense of Mrs. Clinton, and even though she is still very much in the news this morning, I thought I’d make a similar case for Mr. Trump.

It’s short and sweet. Vote for Trump, he can quote the bible!

I tried to think of some other reasons but I couldn’t really grasp any of them. Really, this weekend has made me love politics more than ever, which is amazing, because I have long been a deep lover of politics and I didn’t know there was room for me to love it More.

Politics, I have always thought, is the delightful point where one’s perception of oneself meets one’s perception of reality. In a political system where you get, in some small way, to engage with a modicum of self agency, the politician that you elect ought to be the ideal person. When you wander in and try to fill out your complicated voting card, you wish you were electing someone who would stand up and do the brief and consequential list of things you really believe in. You know they won’t do Everything, but you hope they’ll do enough.

You trundle back home and prepare to judge their performance. And that judgment will be made on a serendipitous subjective melange of fact and feeling. It won’t be just what he does, while in office, it will be how you perceive what he does. And some of the time you won’t pay attention.

But then one day you’ll wake up and take stock, and you’ll be shocked Shocked that None of the things you hoped for were accomplished. Or, very rarely, Almost All of them were. How you know what your elected person did, well, that might be a little bit fuzzy. Do you have proof of votes? Do you Know? Is it because you read something on Facebook? Or the politician sent you a card in the mail telling you? When you finally go to vote again, you attempt to martial facts, but really, you’re gathering your overall impression, and going with that. As long as the person you’re voting for can project some kind of competent, appealing aura in your direction, he or she will probably be fine.

Which is why I love this whole cycle. The two candidates have been able to do literally nothing to make me want to vote for either of them. In all other elections, all the candidates for president communicated some kind of appeal–even the ones I would assuredly never vote for. Al Gore, John Kerry, John McCain…who else? Each was shrouded in some mantle of basic human decency. And that played nicely into my sense of my own self. These candidates, I could say to myself, whoever they are, kind of, for the most part, reflect my perception of myself. I am not a weirdo, and the people debating each other on stage seem not to be too weird as well.

But this time, well, it’s a reality check isn’t it? There is none righteous no not one. Lest I doubt my own depravity, I have only to look at our presidential candidates to understand what kind of core person I am. And not just me, but humanity in general. The great sweep of bombastic orange hair, the stooping coughing gate of one of the most financially corrupt people in the country–no matter which way you look, you can’t delude yourself. There isn’t anyone good to vote for.

Matt likes, when talking about original sin, to ask if you think God would be able to pick a perfect representative. If you believe in God, and you believe that such a being would necessarily be perfect, can you then allow that this perfect being would be able to pick a representative that perfectly reflects you? Adam was this representative. He did what each of us would have done. And then we go along behind and do what he did over and over and over again. We might try to lie to ourselves. We might be able to brush ourselves up for a bit, but as long as we stick with the essence of who we are, we are more and more going to be voting for Trump and Hillary.

The other option, of flinging your representation onto the perfection of Jesus, while perhaps initially humiliating, because you’re admitting that you deserve Trump but oh dear heavens, please can I not have to go there, is the perfect act of desperation. When you come to the bottom, you finally get to see the facts, and you can strip away some of the subjectivity, and then you go with reality–that God is good and there is no human solution to human badness.

I’m glad Jesus isn’t on the ballot this season. Because I don’t think we’re desperate enough for him yet. Trump and Hillary still have their defenders, so I think there’s time for the circus to go on. I intend to enjoy it as long as I can.