How Trump Perverts the Holy Week Message of Hope and Renewal
This week, we lift our eyes to see what humans can be. We examine our great religious inheritance and find liberation, peace, and human dignity. It is sacred time. But there's nothing sacred to Trump.
Edwin Eisendrath hosts It’s the Democracy, Stupid on Lincoln Square and WCPT820 AM/Heartland Signal. He’s the former CEO of the Chicago Sun-Times, a long-time management consultant, a former Chicago Alderman, HUD Regional Administrator and teacher in Chicago’s public schools. Subscribe to his Substack.
It is a holy week for many in this world. Easter and Passover remind us that freedom and redemption can triumph over slavery and embitterment.
Around the world, Jews gather at seder dinners to tell the story of the Exodus from Egypt and to pray for peace and freedom. In Hebrew, the word for Egypt is Mitzraim, which means a narrow place. The holiday teaches that to be free, in every generation we must liberate ourselves not just from Pharaoh of old, but from our own selfish narrowmindedness.
Around the world, Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus. In the ancient Roman world, a world of unchecked power and cruelty, the resurrection was the triumph of love over hate, and a reminder that in each human there is a spark of the divine that cannot be crushed. It remains so in our time.
It is a holy week, a week of hope and renewal.
But we do not live in a holy world. Ours is a cruel time. A time that perverts eternal truths, a time that produces leaders who market faith rather than practice it.
In Israel today, right-wing leaders claim a divine right to expand that nation’s borders and, in the name of security, to destroy tens of thousands of homes and to displace millions of human beings.
In the United States today, right-wing leaders claim divine providence is behind everything they do, from their destruction of the environment to their ever-expanding militarism.
At the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth held a Good Friday prayer service. The invite read, “Just a friendly reminder: There will be a Protestant Service (No Catholic Mass) for Good Friday today at the Pentagon Chapel.” Hegseth did not explain why he thought it was appropriate to host a Good Friday service at the Pentagon, or why he thought it was appropriate to do so in a manner that excluded Catholics.
Hegseth also fired the Army’s chief of chaplains without explanation.
But there is an explanation for both: Hegseth’s faith extends only to white men who share his particular brand of zealotry. A faith that looks not to heaven but to Donald Trump for guidance. The Army Chaplain is Black. Catholics don’t look to White House for theological instruction.
In Rome this week, Pope Leo, the Chicago Pope, said simply:
We tend to consider ourselves powerful when we dominate, victorious when we destroy our equals, great when we are feared. God has given us an example- not of how to dominate, but of how to liberate; not of how to destroy life, but of how to give it.
America’s new warrior ethos, ripped more from video games than from real life, was on full display this week.
Donald Trump commandeered the air waves to make a national address. He promised an important announcement about the war. Instead, he spoke for 19 dull minutes and rehashed his social media posts. While he failed to tell us why we were at war or when it might end, he was very clear about two things:
First, Iran’s air defenses were gone. Our planes now had absolute freedom in Iranian skies. He lied. Within days two American planes went down. An A-10 warthog crashed after being struck by Iranian defenses. Then an F-15 fighter jet was shot out of the sky over Iran. One pilot was rescued. Another is still missing.
Second, if Iran did not end the war and re-open the Strait of Hormuz, the United States would commit massive war crimes and send 92 million people back to the Stone Age “where they belong.”
At the start of the neolithic era there may have been 10 million humans on the whole planet. Stone age technology does not support 90 million lives. So what is Trump really promising in our name? Mass murder. War crimes, to quote the President, “like you’ve never seen before.”
And on Easter Sunday, Trump dropped the f-bomb on social media, calling Iranians “crazy bastards,” threatening them war crimes (“you’ll be living in Hell”), and ending with “Praise be to Allah.”
This week, we lift our eyes to see what humans can be. We examine our great religious inheritance and find liberation, peace, and human dignity. It is sacred time.
But there is nothing sacred in Washington.
On her watch, Pam Bondi oversaw the destruction of one of the greatest forces for good ever created in America. The Justice Department was formed to handle the litigation that arose from the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. President Grant ordered that the new Department’s initial mandate was to counter and subdue groups in the South that used violence to keep the newly enfranchised formerly enslaved Americans from voting. In the century since then, the Department has protected civil rights, constitutional freedoms, and the rule of law. In one year, Pam Bondi turned that Department into a political weapon designed to protect Donald Trump and to punish his adversaries.
In her hands, the department shunned the rule of law, failed to deliver the Epstein documents, treated Congress and the judiciary with contempt, and refused to investigate the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. But that is not why she was fired.
In America, the rule of law still held. Grand juries would not indict sitting Congressmen for telling the truth. Judges would not roll over because the executive branch told them to. So Donald Trump fired her.
We lift up our eyes this week. And far away we see a capsule flying to moon. That’s something we haven’t seen in generations. And the crew? There are four astronauts. One is Black. One is a woman. Two are white men, one of whom is Canadian.
That’s what excellence looks like. Maybe Hegseth and Trump can learn something. But even in this week of faith, I doubt that miracle is possible.
On the other hand, I see Americans keeping faith with faith traditions that teach us to love our neighbors, to seek peace, to lift each other up, and with political traditions that tell us all are created equal and have rights no leaders can alienate. That is something to celebrate.
TRUTH all the way, the war in IRAN isn't going well (and shouldn't have happened). I don't think his future will have much luck either. NOBODY wants this war and many will die!
That picture of 47 with his hand on the little boy is downright creepy. What, as the Iranians have called Hegseth the "infidel clown", has been done at the Pentagon is abominable. People forget that Catholics are Christians. What Hegseth is performing isn't Christianity. They have left out the core teachings of Christ. And firing the Chief Chaplain? How Christian is that? Happy Easter to the believers.