This is the second part in a multi-part series, reflecting on America’s drift toward right-wing populist authoritarianism. Click here to read the first part. Subscribe at the bottom of the page to have the latest sent directly to your inbox.
It’s hard to believe that twenty years have come and gone since Barack Obama burst onto the national scene. It’s been twenty-one years, actually, since Obama’s speech at the 2004 DNC.
This was the rousing speech that effectively introduced Barack Obama, “a skinny kid with a funny name,” and his audacious hope. Here’s the most famous bit of the speech, an early taste of the Obama brand that would sweep him into the White House four years later:
“Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America—there’s the United States of America. There’s not a Black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.”
His rise coincided with my own political awakening, as I began questioning the wisdom of the conservative politics I had grown up with, and how much these beliefs actually aligned with Jesus’ core teachings.
I didn’t find anything in the Gospels about the free market. Nothing about trickle-down economics. Jesus never predicated his generosity on the recipients proving they were looking for work or their willingness to take a drug test. There was nothing about protecting borders or building walls. Jesus never said “love the sinner, hate the sin,” and when it comes to lifestyles, he really only took issue with religious zealots and the wealthy.
My reading suggested a message of neighborly mercy, exemplified by the tale of the Good Samaritan. A message that subverts the established order—that insists it’s better to be compassionate than right. Jesus drives out the profiteering entrepreneurs from the temple, chastises the wealthy for their attachment to material goods, and praises a poor widow’s two-coin offering.
Finally, in a haunting act of mercy for the ages, Jesus asks God the Father to forgive the people who are executing him.
From this uneasy perch halfway through 2025, it strikes me that all this compassion and reconciliation in the Gospels is some woke, libtard bullshit. We have become a nation obsessed with strength, clapping back, and winning at any cost. No regrets, no remorse. How many of us, if any, are willing to turn the other cheek? Not just MAGA trolls, either. Any of us. In our culture, there’s no greater humiliation, nothing more demeaning.
And that’s why Jesus’ message is still radical. It’s no wonder that he irked the authorities. If Jesus were around today, he would probably end up on the FBI watchlist.
I don’t care for Donald Trump, but I don’t hate him the way so many people do. When I look at Donald Trump, I see a wounded person plagued by insecurities that he tries to paper over with gold. Literally.
I think if I hated Donald Trump, I would have to hate so many more people, because I see much of the people around me in him. When it comes down to it, he’s a gossipy old man who watches Fox News, plays golf, eats McDonald’s, wears funny hats, and dances to the YMCA. That’s some Midwestern dad energy. And there he is, living out his fantasies of a twenty-first century Round Table on television for the world to see, shaking hands with world leaders, desperate for deals, desperate to feel powerful, important—a child who felt he wasn’t good enough playing pretend, going to the dress-up bin each morning to pull out too-big shoes and a garish red tie because he thinks that’s the armor that makes a modern man.
And I think that’s part of why he hates Barack Obama so much. Trump was in that most American of pursuits: selling himself. And he was doing pretty well, wasn’t he? Better than most of us can aspire to. He’d broken into the Manhattan real estate market, and become enough of a celebrity that he could flog everything from books and boardgames to steaks and ties, make cameos in all sorts of movies, and even land an award-winning reality TV program.
Then all of a sudden, here comes this “skinny kid with a funny name.” Good looking. A powerful orator. And all of a sudden the nation’s in love with him just out of the blue. Or that’s the way it must have seemed.
Want proof of how much Obama got under Trump’s skin? Between 2010 and 2020, Trump tweeted about Obama 2,933 times. That’s nearly once a day. For a decade.
Yet, I wonder how many of us have posted a similar amount of times about Trump in the ten years since he emerged as a serious political player?
Of course, things didn’t have to be this way. We had a choice, and we still have one. And I think that there is a road back from this, but it’s a road that starts within—in our own hearts.
But change isn’t magic. It’s not a feeling, it’s a practice. It’s labor-intensive, sometimes exhausting—painful, even. You need more than a brand or a slogan. You need more than a powerful speech from a generational leader. You need fertile soil, and open hearts.
And you need accountability.
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