John Whitehead's Commentary

For a man supposedly intent on winning a Nobel Peace Prize, Donald Trump spends an extraordinary amount of time waging war, threatening to wage war, and fantasizing about waging war.

Notwithstanding his dubious claims about having ended “seven un-endable wars,” Trump has continued to squander the American people’s resources and moral standing by feeding the military-industrial complex’s insatiable appetite for war—preemptively bombing nuclear facilities in Iran, blowing up fishing boats in the Caribbean, and flexing military muscle at every opportunity.

Even the Trump administration’s version of “peace through strength” is filtered through a prism of violence, intimidation and strongman tactics.

It is the gospel of power, not peace—a perversion of both Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and the U.S. Constitution.

Thus we find ourselves at this peculiar crossroads: a president hailed by his followers as an “imperfect vessel” chosen by God to save the church and restore Christianity—while they turn a blind eye to his record of adultery, deceit, greed, cruelty, and an almost religious devotion to vengeance and violence.

If anything captures Trump’s worldview, it is the AI-generated video he shared on social media: a grotesque fantasy of himself wearing a golden crown, flying a military fighter jet, and bombing a crowd of protesters with brown liquid feces.

This is the man who claims to be “saving God”?

Dismissed by his devoted base as harmless humor—a cheeky response to the millions nationwide who took part in the “No Kings” protests on Oct. 18—Trump’s crude fantasy of assaulting critics with fecal bombs nevertheless begs the question: Who would Jesus bomb?

That question, of course, is meant less literally than morally.

To answer it, we must first understand who Jesus Christ was—the revered preacher, teacher, radical, prophet and son of God—born into a police state not unlike the growing menace of America’s own police state.

When he came of age, Jesus had powerful, profound things to say, about justice, power and how we are to relate to one another. “Blessed are the merciful,” “Blessed are the peacemakers,” “Love your enemies.”

A revolutionary in both spirit and action, Jesus not only died challenging the police state of his day—the Roman Empire—but left behind a blueprint for resisting tyranny that has guided countless reformers and freedom fighters ever since.

Jesus—the “Prince of Peace”—came not to destroy life but to restore it.

Which brings us to Donald Trump, the latest political “savior” anointed by Christian nationalists for whom the pursuit of a Christian theocracy now appears to outweigh allegiance to our constitutional democracy.

Seduced by political power to such an extent that the true message of Jesus has been taken hostage by partisan agendas, much of today’s evangelical movement has become indistinguishable from right-wing politics.

Meanwhile, the wall of separation—between church and state, between moral authority and political coercion—is being torn down from both sides.

The result is a marriage of convenience that corrupts them both.

This is what happens when you wrap your faith in the national flag.

What is worse—far worse—than the Christian right selling its spiritual birthright for a political seat at Trump’s table is the blasphemy that has followed: the Gospel of Jesus replaced by the Gospel of the Military-Industrial Complex.

Within the White House, faith leaders gather to lay hands on Trump as he sits at the Resolute Desk, praising him for defending “religious freedom” for Christians—seemingly unconcerned that from that same desk he has signed death warrants for nearly every other freedom.

In the Pentagon, Trump’s Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, presides over prayer services where the name of Christ is invoked almost in the same breath as he boasts of preemptive strikes, righteous killings, and “peace through strength.”

Kristi Noem, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, prays in front of the cameras all the while boosting spending on military weapons for ICE by 700%, with significant purchases of chemical weapons and “guided missile warheads and explosive components.”

This is not Jesus’ Christianity—it is Christianity draped in the flag and wielding the weapons of war.

What was once the Gospel of Peace has been replaced by a national creed that equates killing with courage, dominance with divine favor, and obedience with faith.

It is a blasphemous marriage of church and state—one that desecrates both Christ’s command to love one’s enemies and the Constitution’s mandate to keep religion free from the corruption of power.

Both Jesus and the framers of the Constitution understood the same truth: faith and freedom cannot be imposed by force.

That is why the First Amendment forbids the government from establishing religion. The moment religion aligns itself with political power, it ceases to be faith and becomes ideology. The moment a president claims divine sanction for war, the republic ceases to be a democracy and becomes a theocracy of fear.

Driven by those concerns, the framers built a system designed to restrain ambition, limit vengeance, and guard against tyranny.

That constitutional system is being bulldozed before our eyes—just as surely as Trump is bulldozing his way through the White House, leaving wreckage in his wake.

And so we return to the question that started it all: Who would Jesus bomb?

The answer, of course, is no one.

Jesus would not rain destruction from the skies or bless the machinery of death. He would heal the sick, welcome the stranger, and lift up the poor. He would drive the money changers from the temple, not sanctify the merchants of war.

Yet here we are.

Under Trump’s broadened definitions of “rebellion” and “domestic terrorism,” Jesus would be labeled a subversive, his name placed on a watchlist, his followers rounded up for “reeducation.”

Were Jesus——a Palestinian refugee, a radical, and a revolutionary—to show his face in Trump’s American police state, he would fare no better than any of the undocumented immigrants being snatched up in the dead of night, stripped of any real due process, made to disappear into inhumane detention centers, and left to be tortured or die.

This is what happens when nations lose their moral compass: due process becomes a slogan, justice a privilege, and compassion a crime.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, “we the people” must step up, speak up and speak out.

When we fail to do so—when we remain silent in the face of tyranny, we lose more than our freedoms. We lose our moral and spiritual birthright.

WC: 1098

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

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