OnPoint Subscriber Exclusive
Longer Reads provide in-depth analysis of the ideas and forces shaping politics, economics, international affairs, and more.
The God of Carnage
Donald Trump has already demonstrated his determination to demolish his predecessors’ legacy – and not only at home. If one thing has become abundantly clear, it is that the world order he leaves behind will not be one in which America is first.
https://prosyn.org/4o46vE8
The Apocalypse didn’t arrive with Donald Trump’s inauguration as US president, but the rhetoric of divine wrath surely did. Rather than adopt the soothing or soaring cadences of Washington, Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Kennedy, or Reagan, Trump’s inaugural address invoked “carnage,” “God’s people,” and the “righteous public.” He sounded less like Andrew Jackson, the 1830s populist US president to whom his supporters compare him, than the Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards preaching his terrifying sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”