Thank You, Thank You, Donald Trump

Photography by Mark Wallheiser, Getty Images

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Thank you, President Trump, for making the unfamiliar familiar for me in 2024. And thank you, Mr. President, for always keeping things interesting. In 2016, you made the world so unfamiliar to me, an ostensibly out and proud queer, that I sought familiarity in the church. Your victories have both surprised and disoriented me.

In 2016, I was certain Hillary Clinton would defeat you. I had champagne in the refrigerator. We know how that turned out.

After your first electoral victory, a part of me gave up on my assumptive world. Giving up on the world, I broke a decade-long ecclesial fast and returned to church—much to my atheist husband’s dismay.

A rainbow comma outside the church initially attracted me to the congregation I’ve belonged to since January 2017. The sign represents the United Church of Christ’s commitment to openness, surprise, newness, and aliveness.

More signs encouraged me to enter the church. I explored its website and discovered that its leadership is entirely female. The senior pastor, whom I now love and trust, is a lesbian.

A few months after joining the church, the pastor’s wife shared an observation with me: You, Mr. President, had brought me back to church. I denied it, but she was absolutely right.

There are many reasons why I became a Christian in the first place. Significant among them was my growing awareness of same-sex desire.

Adam Phillips persuasively argues that conversion is a change to end change—something we do when we are, among other things, afraid of our desire.¹ One reason I became a Christian was to survive the unfamiliar.

I likely returned to the church after your first electoral victory for a similar reason. Your victory defamiliarized my world so much that I sought shelter in the church, a familiar place to hide from what I thought I really loved: queerness.

Thank you, President Trump, for shaking up my assumptive world in 2016.

**

Fast forward to 2024. I was convinced you would lose the election. My confidence was rooted in a mixture of vibes and data.

We rejected you in 2020, and that was before we knew everything we know now: your lies about the 2020 election and your role in instigating the attack on the U.S. government on January 6, 2021, your felony convictions, and your liability for sexual assault.

We also know now that your Supreme Court justices overturned Roe v. Wade and that the conservative majority has now shielded you, a convicted criminal, from any legal accountability for your actions while in office. Sadly, your Court has not given women seeking abortions similar legal protections. Many women have died or suffered irreparable harm because their doctors feared the legal consequences of providing them with the necessary medical care.

Democrats seemed prepared; we sidelined President Biden, who was on a collision course with defeat, and Vice President Harris was running a near-perfect campaign. On the eve of November 5, 2024, I was certain my fellow citizens would reject extremism and double down on dignity, democracy, and generosity.

Mr. President, you understood the mood of our fellow citizens. I didn’t.

And here we are today. As of today, January 23, 2025, you have signed executive orders rolling back protections for Trans* individuals and LGBTQ youth. Through executive order, you have also targeted birthright citizenship. Many of your actions appear designed to undermine the dignity of those you and your followers consider “other,” irrespective of their citizenship status.

You have now scorned Bishop Budde’s call to have mercy on the most vulnerable living within our country’s borders. You have even cast aspersions on the Bishop herself, and for what reason? She humbly asked you, the most powerful man on earth, to consider the inherent dignity of the least powerful among us. At the same time, you have now pardoned almost everyone who attacked the Capital on January 6, 2021.

Given all we now know, expressing gratitude for your victories might seem perverse. But once again, you have shaken up my assumptive world.

This time, however, your victory has really shaken me. Now, I see that the unfamiliar is just more of the same, an all-too-familiar way of relating to the world, women, and men.

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Your second victory proves at least one thing: we are loyal to the familiar. To illustrate our steadfast loyalty to the familiar order of things, let’s take a detour through a bit of Protestant history. Introducing his Institutes of the Christian Religion to King Francis I of France, Calvin writes to deny that his doctrine is radical or revolutionary:

It is as if this doctrine looked to no other end than to wrest the scepters from the hands of kings, to cast down all courts and judgments, to subvert all orders and civil governments, to disrupt the peace and quiet of the people, to abolish all laws, to scatter all lordships and possessions—in short, [than to revolution]!²

Commenting on the just quoted passage from Calvin’s “Prefatory Address to King Francis I of France,” Roland Boer argues:

[A]fter setting his denials to Francis I in the context of the Affair of the Placards, the Münster Revolution, and the Peasants’ Revolt, I have argued that the tension between reform and revolution or between conservativism and radicalism is not found merely between groups. It is also found within. Calvin may say that “we” are not like “them,” but there is an element of “them” in his own thought. In other words, Calvin is not an all-out revolutionary (we can accept his denials to some extent), but he is not a conservative either (the charges of his opponents have a grain of truth to them). His thought struggles between these poles.³

I am skeptical of Boer’s claim that “[Calvin’s] thought struggles between these poles.” To explain, allow me to describe Boer’s argument in different terms.

Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips examines the logic of desire that Boer identifies in his study of Calvin. Rather than using the terms radical and conservative, Phillips prefers experimentalist and essentialist. He argues:

For the experimentalist [Boer’s radical] the risk is always merely more of the same: what is desired is a feeling of aliveness, and a sense of the unanticipated. The experimentalist, that is to say, wants to be surprised (the aim of development should be, say, to become as dependent as possible). For the essentialist [Boer’s conservative] the risk is loss of composure, disorientation: what is desired is reassurance, a feeling of familiarity. The essentialist doesn’t want to be retraumatized. They are both, of course, on to something.⁴

What the experimentalists are on to is that the familiar offers too little pleasure. However, one reason the familiar is a risk for experimentalists is that the unfamiliar may become all-too-familiar.

Likewise, the essentialists are on to the fact that the unfamiliar offers them too much pleasure. The risk in their quest to avoid the unfamiliar is that familiarity itself may become unfamiliar.

What I think Boer misses in his analysis of Calvin is that radicalism/experimentalism and conservatism/essentialism are not polar opposites. They are related tendencies.

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Again, let’s take a detour through a bit of Protestant history, this time a horrific event in the middle of Calvin’s career: the sanctioned murder of Servetus. This event foregrounds Calvin’s political orientation.

Calvin endorsed the execution of Servetus, a spirited theologian and thinker who challenged him for, among other things, creating a new Rome. Servetus was onto something: Calvin was not struggling between polar opposite desires. He was a radical conservative or an experimental essentialist.

You, Mr. President, are a Calvinist: one driven by the unfamiliar you desire to kill. This may explain why you insist on showing contempt for Trans* individuals—or really anyone who disagrees with you.

As you know, both Democrats and liberal Christians claim to offer an alternative to the radical conservatism you share with many of your fellow Republicans and religious followers. What they propose is a conservative radicalism or an essentialist experimentalism.

The conservative radical is driven by the familiar that they desire to eliminate. Thomas Frank, for example, persuasively and pointedly argues that Democrats have spent much of their power over the past few decades on killing off the New Deal, a series of incredible Democratic legislative achievements that actually help(ed) everyday working people.⁵

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Notice, Mr. President, that violence is what both conservatisms have in common. To free ourselves from the unrelenting pull of either the unfamiliar or the familiar, we must violate what and who we claim to love. In other words, we must declare our love objects heretics.

Unfortunately, the sanctioned murder of Servetus is only one chapter in a long history of conservative desiring. David Congdon, in an article for The Presbyterian Outlook, observes:

When Christian nationalists cozy up to [to you, Mr. President,] and seek to gain a seat in American government to punish their enemies, they are thus continuing a tradition going back to the fourth century [i.e., to Augustine], when Christian bishops used Constantine’s political authority to decide which version of Christianity would have legitimacy.

You are well aware, Mr. President, that today’s winners are tomorrow’s heretics. Thankfully, you have shaken me out of love with this all-too-familiar way of loving. I am determined to give up on it.

And what that means, or at least one thing it means, is putting this history of conservative desiring behind the glass of Mallarmé’s bookcase. There, it becomes a felicitous nudge, a reason to write a new, surprising, and enlivening future.⁶

Again, thank you, thank you, Mr. President. You have inspired me to look forward to the future again. As Martha Nussbaum reminds us, the future is the only thing we can change.⁷

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NOTES:

1. See my reading of Phillips, On Wanting To Change (2022), here, section VI. ↩︎
2. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion ([1559] 1960), 1.1, emphasis is mine. Notice all those brillant verbs! ↩︎
3. Roland Bower, Political Grace: The Revolutionary Theology of John Calvin (2009), 20. ↩︎
4. Phillips, On Giving Up (2024), Kindle Edition, 66. ↩︎
5. See Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (2016). ↩︎
6. See Mallarmé, “Crisis of Verse,” in Divagations ([1897], 2009), 201-211. ↩︎
7. See, for example, Nussbaum’s Holberg Prize acceptance speech here. ↩︎