{"id":4764,"date":"2016-03-04T08:51:06","date_gmt":"2016-03-04T13:51:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/?p=4764"},"modified":"2016-03-04T09:12:11","modified_gmt":"2016-03-04T14:12:11","slug":"has-america-ever-been-great-donald-trump-and-the-making-of-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2016\/03\/has-america-ever-been-great-donald-trump-and-the-making-of-america.html","title":{"rendered":"Has America Ever Been Great: Donald Trump and the Making of America"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

by Kenneth A. Vandergriff<\/p>\n

The rise of Donald Trump in the Presidential Race baffles me.\u00a0 He has little to no political experience, his rhetoric is demeaning and at times outright hateful, and his following continues to grow.\u00a0 What began with an off-color comment about Megyn Kelly\u2019s menstrual cycle grew to building a wall on the Mexican border.\u00a0 While I condemn both comments I understand that some Americans desire a wall on the border.\u00a0 What is troubling to me is the way in which Trump\u2019s rhetoric is continuing to escalate and that it is couched in religiosity.<\/p>\n

After the Paris attacks Trump called for bombing the sh*t out of terrorists and began to make suggestions that to make America great again the Muslims had to go.\u00a0 His comments were regarded by many as vile but at least one pastor, Dr. Robert Jeffress<\/a> of First Baptist Church of Dallas, applauded his comments.\u00a0 This has escalated to recent comments by Trump that torture is a good means of gleaning information from terrorists and that killing terrorists family members is also a solution.\u00a0 The nail in the coffin is the endorsement of David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan.\u00a0 In a recent interview with CNN, Trump was asked to disavow Duke and the Klan.\u00a0 He did not.\u00a0 He later blamed an earpiece for his guffaw.\u00a0 Trump\u2019s rhetoric of hate for those who are not white Americans further deepen the racial and ethnic divide in the country.<\/p>\n

What will make America great again?\u00a0 For Donald Trump it sounds a lot like what Hitler suggested.\u00a0 Trump\u2019s rhetoric leads one to believe that making America great again requires making America white again.\u00a0 It is not a great leap from building a wall to building camps for Muslims or black and brown citizens.\u00a0 My fear is that America didn\u2019t heed the warnings of the Holocaust.\u00a0 My bigger fear is that all of this is couched in religious rhetoric.\u00a0 Donald Trump wants to stand up for Christians and claims he is persecuted for his faith.\u00a0 He must be reading a different Bible than I read.\u00a0 Donald Trump wants to ignore the issues or build a wall rather than engage the issues surrounding immigration and pluralism in the United States.<\/p>\n

Moreover, I\u2019m not convinced America was ever really great.\u00a0 America has a history of systematically exterminating people who aren\u2019t white.\u00a0 White \u201cAmericans\u201d systematically exterminated the Native American people, using tactics as vile as blankets infected with small pox.\u00a0 Again, Americans would rather ignore that this happened than face the ramifications of biological warfare for the sake of colonialism.\u00a0 White Americans systematically targeted black people for slavery until 1865, though it should be noted that the Emancipation Proclamation was not an overnight \u201cfix\u201d to the system of slavery.\u00a0 Likewise modern day slavery exists in the United States in the form of migrant workers, many of whom live in squalor.\u00a0 My point is simply that American may have never been great.\u00a0 It is obvious that the racially charged rhetoric couched in religion is doing nothing to fix the problem.<\/p>\n

Kenneth Vandergriff is a graduate student at Campbell University Divinity School, a father of four, and a minister. He will pursue a PhD at Florida State University in the fall.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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by Kenneth A. Vandergriff The rise of Donald Trump in the Presidential Race baffles me.\u00a0 He has little to no political experience, his rhetoric is demeaning and at times outright hateful, and his following continues to grow.\u00a0 What began with an off-color comment about Megyn Kelly\u2019s menstrual cycle grew to building a wall on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[158],"tags":[306,728,29,56],"class_list":["post-4764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-guest-contributions","tag-donald-trump","tag-election-2016","tag-race","tag-rhetoric"],"yoast_head":"\nHas America Ever Been Great: Donald Trump and the Making of America<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"by Kenneth A. 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