The Bible as Mirror: David and Trump

A wag said one time—and though I know not the wag, I have used the words time and again—“It is often said that the Bible teaches that we should be like Abraham or Joseph or David; I to the contrary say that the Bible teaches you are like Abraham or Joseph or David. Now, what do you plan with the help of God to do about it?” The fact is that any reading of our Bible, even a cursory one, suggests that its chief characters are deeply flawed in any one of a myriad ways. And since we now have a president of the US who is, one must say, deeply flawed in many of those ways, it seems that the Bible may offer a helpful mirror for this new president that may further help us to evaluate and to confront just what we are dealing with in the person of Donald J. Trump, the 45th president of the USA. (I continue to recoil in horror whenever I connect the name Trump with the office of president!)

This is our third look into the Bible’s mirror to assess who we see when we seek an ancient portrait of Mr. Trump in the pages of the Bible. We first spied Elisha, the thin- skinned prophet who allowed some young boys to taunt him into curses and murder, being unable to avoid attack when being attacked. So it has been with Donald Trump before and after assuming the presidency. Then we witnessed Noah blaming his innocent son, Ham, for his own naked and drunken debauchery after the drying up of the great flood. The result was the dissolution of his family, and the need for God to act again to attempt to reconstitute the harmony of creation in the person of Abraham.Today, as we continue to witness a withering blast of lies great and small from the president, the name and portrait of David float inexorably into our mirror. There can be little doubt that David is the consummate liar of the Bible. Though we have no evidence of his very early prevarications, there are multiple examples of his deviousness early in his story. He escapes from Saul by allowing his wife to pretend he is still asleep while he slips away disguised through the city gate. And when he approaches the holy site of Nob, he lies to the priest that he is on a mission from Saul and thus must be given food from the table of consecrated bread. He then runs to the Philistine city of Gath and pretends to be insane when he realizes that they recognize him as the slayer of Goliath and threaten to kill him. Later, in that same Philistine place, he convinces Achish, king of Gath, that he is plundering Judean cities and providing parts of the plunder to Achish, allowing Achish to think that he is making himself anathema to his own people and thus tied more closely to him. In fact, he is raiding among the Amalekites and killing all of them so that no one is left alive to tell Achish the truth of David’s actions while he is giving the best of the booty to his Judean friends.

And, of course, there are the colossal lies in connection with the affair with Bathsheba. Knowing she is wife of one of his own generals, David sleeps with her anyway, and when she becomes pregnant, invites her husband, Uriah, back to Jerusalem in the attempt to get Uriah to lie with his wife and thus be thought to be the child’s father. When that plot, devised by David in two different ways, fails, David determines to murder Uriah by means of a sordid plan, sending him into the fiercest place in the battle against the Ammonites, thus allowing the enemy to perform the murder for him. That plan works, and David’s response to the death is to claim that, alas, war is like that: some die and some do not!

And if all that lying were not enough, David on his deathbed, speaking the very last words of his life to his son and successor, Solomon, demands still one more murder, this time against a helpless old man, Shemei, whom David vowed years before he would not kill, but now decides for no apparent reason to command his son to kill. And with those words of murder on his cold lips, the great King David dies. David is often presented more as Mafioso than sacred king, but so the Bible tells us with unblemished candor.

That Donald Trump is a liar cannot be denied. This very day, Feb. 14, a study of his lies by an independent auditor determined that he had lied publically in nearly 67% of his statements! All presidents tend to stretch the truth for their advantage, but in this same study Barak Obama was said to have lied fewer than 25% of the time while he was president. It cannot be denied that Trump is a world-class liar. And his lies often seem so trivial as to be hardly worth the effort. Finally, who cares how many persons showed up for his inauguration in comparison with those leaders who preceded him? Obviously, he does, because he continues to lie about the enormous size of his crowds. He even lied about the weather on the day of his inauguration, claiming that the sun broke through the rain just as he began to speak, when the pictures clearly show that his own wife was holding an umbrella during that same speech. And then there is the ongoing matter of his handy defeat in the popular vote by some 2.8 million. He persists in saying that that fact was only made possible by “millions” of illegal votes, evidence of which remains non- existent. This is far more than a simple stretch of the truth; this is pathology and must be questioned at every turn. A reporter assigned to cover Trump was quoted last week as saying, “The difficulty of reporting on Donald Trump begins with his words.” Indeed!

There is a peculiar, and I would say quite dangerous, group in Washington D.C. known as the family (see Jeff Sharlet’s book of the same name for a chilling report on this group). This club consists of various high-level government officials, including a few members or former members of the House and Senate, who look to King David as inspiration for their disgraced lives. They have fallen due to poor choices of a sexual or monetary nature, but like David they imagine that they have been completely forgiven by God and can still offer their services to the government. In fact, some of them go so far as to suggest that because of their “mistakes,” they are better able to serve than they were before their disgrace.

Far be it from me to deny the vast mercy and forgiveness of God that I believe with my whole heart. But lies and mendacity and prevarication do not make one a better servant; it makes one a lying one, less able to be trusted than before. Donald Trump is without doubt a terrible and so far unredeemed liar. He must be held accountable and be confronted with the truths that he continues to mock. Else, like David before him, he will die old, cold and alone in his sprawling bed, spewing lies and curses on perceived old enemies. I do not wish such an end on our president, but he needs reformation and access to the truth in the very worst way. And he needs every day persons around him who will speak that truth in the face of his attempts to skew reality. Be vigilant, I say, and confront his lies whenever you can. For the way of the liar is the way of death.