Keep in mind that it has a Christian publisher. Blurbs include Eric Metaxas and Dave Ramsey that might make you lean towards buying it.....but there's a blurb by Archbishop Desmond Tutu that would do the opposite. Then there's a blurb by Glen Beck that you ignore. The book is Stephen Mansfield's Choosing Donald Trump, God, Anger, Hope and Why Christian Conservatives Supported Him. The author give us short but fairly good bios of Donald Trump in his relationship with his father and also his military school training....then speeds through Donald Trump's life. The author fills us in on who Norman Vincent Peale was and Paula White is. We read of who supported candidate Trump but little on those of us who wanted another nominee. We get a few pages on Barack Obama and a few more on Hillary...and the books just about over. Strange book. Who's gonna buy a book like that.....other than me.....and some Christian 'never Trumpers'......and maybe Donald Trump who probably reads everything about himself?
The author begins with....."They 'own' him now." 'They' being us......Christian conservatives....'him' being President Trump. We are....."wed to him, whatever he does....made to answer for the mores, the methods, and the machinations of the Trump administration"......... Barack Obama had taken us to the limit. We had a president that purposely tried to upend seemingly anything that was good about America.....along with our national security. The author failed to adequately expound on the horror of what was happening. The ship had hit an iceberg but that wasn't important enough to mention the call to man the lifeboats. Whether we were to wait for the RMS Carpathia or the SS California to wake up....we had to get off that ship. There was no choice in that general election folks! The choice was in the primaries....and they were combative and competitive! No one owns Donald Trump. He's burned the mortgage. We may be wed but he wrote the prenup.....and he gets everything. What we own is Hillary Clinton's eviction notice......and we'd do that again in a New York minute......whatever that means. So the author's assumptions are based on incomplete evidence.
Where Stephen Mansfield could have gone that would have been true is that we did not turn to Jesus Christ....but rather to politics....to ourselves.....and to Donald Trump. In that sense....yes....we do own him. We chose him for our champion but even here it should at least be made very clear that many of us wanted a candidate who knew that our very existence was dependent on the mercies of God.
Winston Churchill heard the poem as a boy but it stayed with him throughout his life. He quoted a portion of it in the first volume his six volume history of the Second World War....The Gathering Storm:.
Who is charge of the clattering train?
The axles creak, and the couplings strain.
For the pace is hot, and the points are near,
And Sleep hath deadened the driver's ear;
And signals flash through the night in vain.
Death is in charge of the clattering train.
There was a special alarm for Barack Obama at the throttle....it generally went unheeded by the media.....there would have been a special alarm had Hillary Clinton assumed the throttle.....but the news media had already disabled that alarm.......so we have Donald Trump.....and the media is now watching intently for alarms.....but where were they when the train took the wrong track under Obama that put us on course for a head-on collision?
