Welcome to the Trumpocalypse
Donald Trump had such high hopes for Easter. So high, in fact, that when he burst forth on Fox News a couple of weeks ago with his idea of “re-opening” the country wide this coming Sunday, he gave it an exemplary rating of three “beautifuls”: “I just thought that it was a beautiful time … a beautiful timeline. It’s a beautiful day.”
You could close your eyes and easily imagine what the president was envisioning: At a time of his appointing, on Easter Sunday, shop doors would be flung open simultaneously across America to great cheers. The people singing hymns in “packed churches” would turn their minds and hearts toward Trump and the miracle he’d wrought. Next morning, the stock market would rise like Jesus. And so it would come to pass that this Easter — Trump’s Easter — would be even bigger than the original.
The whole doomed idea apparently had a divine origin of sorts. Reportedly, the president had begun to view the Christian holiday as his best chance at resurrecting his reelection hopes, with one grand spectacle, while watching one of his “faith advisers,” the Rev. Franklin Jentezen of Gainesville, Ga., preach online to a vast, near-empty sanctuary in mid-March, on the Sunday Trump had designated as a National Day of Prayer for “healing” COVID-19.
Franklin, to his credit, wasn’t among the leading Trump-vangelicals who waved off social-distancing recommendations and urged their parishioners to show up, shake hands and demonstrate, in the words of South Florida’s Rodney Howard-Browne, that they weren’t “pansies.” But Franklin’s message was right in tune with that of the president he’d declared born again in 2016, along with the rhetoric of the whole coterie of religious grifters and hangers-on that Trump has embraced as some of his closest allies. In his sermon, titled “Choose Faith Over Fear,” Franklin urged his viewers, “Don’t let worry make you go into a panic.” After reminding them that the virus was no match for “the healing, miraculous, powerful God that we serve,” Franklin promised: “No weapon formed against us will prosper.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-evangelicals-apocalypse-coronavirus-981995/
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