The Bible as Mirror: Trump and the Snake

No! I do not mean by this title that I think Donald Trump is in fact the snake of the Garden of Eden, though I have heard more than a few of my liberal friends make such a comparison. By that hyperbolic and nasty connection, my friends, less than familiar with the actual biblical story of the famous garden, assume, I suppose, that Trump is the living manifestation of the devil himself, replete with horns and tail and cape, or in his supposed biblical guise, festooned with scales and a hissing, forked tongue. Since I do not at all subscribe to the idea that that garden snake is in fact the devil, but is finally a garden snake, albeit a talking one, I do not wish today to make The Donald out to be Mephistopheles come to the White House, or more likely to Mar-el-Lago, given his weekly jaunts to his Florida pleasure palace by the sea. I have another perhaps more subtle mirror in mind as I attempt in this installment of our ongoing series to find our new president portrayed in the pages of the ancient scripture. He is very like the snake I want to say, but more in the way he speaks than in some overtly evil activity, though I grant that something like evil does seem at the heart of more than a few of his actions.

My article this time was triggered by Trump’s quite outrageous claims that President Obama, his immediate predecessor in the Oval Office, had had his phone wiretapped. This absurd notion appeared, as his absurdities invariably seem to do, in a series of late-night, early-morning tweets, issuing from his red-hot twitter feed. There may be many things that a 140-character social media tool may do, but perhaps an accusation so inane as this one may not be one of them. He, of course in his usual manner, offered no proof of the accusation at all. Its origins appeared to be found in a repulsive article that appeared in that supposed news outlet, Breitbart News, whose former editor, as we all know to our horror, now is Trump’s chief White House advisor. Breitbart News may be many things, but a reliable source of factual news it is not. Its pages have hosted any number of conspiracy theories and hateful assaults against its “enemies,” like LGTBQ persons, along with a veritable nest of liberal baddies. Nonetheless, our current commander-in-chief (how it frightens me to write that!) appears to get much of his limited information from this source, refusing consistently to ask anyone who actually knows something to inform him about anything whatever.

Though Trump, through his public mouthpiece, Sean Spicer, has demanded a full investigation of this scurrilous charge, the fact that every reputable leader and former leader of the FBI and CIA, including those currently in charge of both agencies, have rebutted Trump publically, and no doubt in saltier terms privately, has in no way deterred these clowns from their demands. There is quite simply no proof possible, because any call for a wiretap on any American citizen from me to the president must first present proof of a crime by that person to the requisite government organizations, namely those afore named FBI and CIA. But since there is no indication that either organization in fact received any such proof or any such request, there is no there there. Story’s end!

But not so fast. Why float such nonsense in the first place? Right there is where things get interesting, and where the Bible’s mirror becomes valuable. Later this month, March, 2017, both House and Senate committees begin the investigation of the possible connections between members of the Trump team and the Russians, and how the latter may or may not have influenced the 2016 election in favor of the eventual winner. Could it be that Trump’s accusations against President Obama, a president detested so deeply and ardently by numerous members of the new administration, not least the leader himself, are precisely a smoke screen to cloud and diffuse the investigations yet to come? If Obama could wiretap the new president, well, does that not make any supposed contacts between Putin and his gang and Trump and his gang far less interesting and far less dangerous? Is not American wiretapping of current president by former president infinitely more vile? Welcome to the circus, boys and girls! Do not look over there at Putin, but keep your eyes on Obama, a “sad and sick man,” according to one of the Trump tweets.

And now we come to the Garden of Eden. In Gen. 2:16-17, YHWH had made the rules of the garden quite clear: “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of everything (the larger implication of the more traditional “good and evil”) you will not eat, for on the day that you eat of it, you will die.” The tree of universal knowledge is declared off-limits, but of course that prohibition is precisely what makes the darn thing so desirable!

The snake walks up (he does not crawl until later) to the woman and first asks her a question, couched perhaps in the form of a kind of insinuation. “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’” (Gen. 3:1)? The woman, of course, as we also, know this is not true; God said every tree may be eaten, as all just heard, save the one tree of knowledge. The woman responds accordingly, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘you shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you even touch it, or you shall die’” (Gen. 3:2-3). Note that the woman has added to the command of God the harsher demand that the tree cannot even be touched. By so saying we might conclude that the woman is in fact interested only in that forbidden tree and adds to God’s command in the hope that she will not in fact succumb to the tree’s allure by stating aloud to the snake that she will not even draw near to it to risk even a touch.

And now the snake twists the argument in order to deflect the central concern of the story. In short, he becomes Trump-like in this moment. “You will not die,” he says, moving the concern away from the demand not to eat to the possibility of what will happen after she does eat. Death is not in the offing, the snake offers, rather a larger life, a life in fact like God. “You will be like God” (or perhaps “precisely God”), he says; “you will know everything!” An offer few are likely to refuse, I imagine! The snake has moved the discussion away from the demand not to eat to an entirely different concern with what will happen after she eats. The woman is deflected from the command, and in short order she eats and hands some to the hapless man with her, who says nothing at all to her or to the snake, but readily eats the fruit. He is, one could say, belly-oriented at best! The result is knowledge, all right, but knowledge of nakedness, which is now a problem, solved by the absurd sewing of fig-leaf aprons to cover the vital parts of the human anatomy. Since fig leaves feel like number two grade sandpaper, one can imagine the uncomfortable itchings of the first couple as they rush into the trees, hiding from a visit from YHWH God. They are hardly God-like, as the snake promised, but rather all too human. This fabulous story recreates our story as we grasp at knowledge, leaving God behind, and sew our own fig leaves to solve our multiple problems, making ourselves both vulnerable and foolish at the same time.

The snake deflected the attention of the woman away from the basic issue; the demand of YHWH to avoid the one tree. Trump has attempted to do the same thing. He has created a phony problem about a so-called wiretap of his phone by his presidential predecessor in order to deflect our interest away from the issue of the day; the hugely dangerous and murky connections between Putin’s Russia and the new US administration. It is a feint on the part of a seasoned circus master, a clever deal-maker, using slight of hand to move the pea rapidly from under one cup to another, then another, to confuse the public and to draw attention away from his own potential culpability about a much more significant issue, the possible undermining of our democracy by a hostile foreign power with the collusion of American politicians. Hence, Trump and the snake are one; both are absolute masters of deflection who would mislead and confuse. We must not allow such actions to win the day; we must keep our eyes focused on the main thing. Like the wizard of Oz, Donald Trump tries to keep our attention on the terrible prospect of the scary idea of one president wiretapping another for some sort of political gain, while refusing to gaze behind the metaphorical curtain to discover the man within manipulating the whole enterprise. With this president, it is crucial to remain alert lest we be lead down the garden path, if you will pardon the expression.

(Images from Wikimedia Commons)