In The Godfather, a ‘Baptism of Fire’ is enacted as the final act in the five families’ war, which witnesses a complete victory for Michael Corleone, who stands in a church saying that he “renounces Satan and all his works”, while his men massacre scores. United States President Donald Trump opened his first full day in office on Saturday, January 21, at a prayer service at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, before he embarked on signing his first 19 executive orders that mimicked Corleone’s deeds. With one fundamental exception: Trump targeted monotheism and America itself.
Although executive orders are seldom effective, they disrupt lives, shape perceptions and otherwise leave more or less permanent impressions with serious blow-back effects. They are not useful tools to “rule”, but governing is not a Trump priority. Instead, we see the outlines of a systematic assault on faith — monotheism in particular — notwithstanding what Mark Burns, an evangelical pastor from the Harvest Praise & Worship Centre in Easley, South Carolina, said. Burns participated in a private service for Trump at St John’s Episcopal Church in Washington last week and told the BBC: “I want to assure all those listening to this broadcast, Donald Trump loves God. He has a personal relationship. It is not so much a religious relationship. There’s a difference.”
The man who allegedly sought “the counsel of the Almighty in every decision he makes”, simply overlooked to mention Jews to commemorate the International Holocaust Remembrance Day and, adding insult to injury, revealed that the omission was on purpose because other victims also suffered and died in the Holocaust.
A few days later, one of Trump’s executive orders suspended for 120 days the admission of all refugees and, in a separate decision, severely restricted immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries. Trump declared that he was going to grant Christians priority status to enter the US, although a Syrian Christian family was turned back from Philadelphia International Airport after travelling from Lebanon. The family of six was denied entry and flew back to Beirut via Doha.
Interestingly, the Pew Research Center revealed last October that 38,901 Muslim refugees entered the US during fiscal year 2016, or almost the same number of Christian refugees — 37,521. Time will tell whether this will change, but any effort to give preference to Christian refugees or immigrants, which will be unconstitutional under existing US laws, will harm Arab Christians as most are removed from their ancestral lands. In fact, this may well be an established objective of successive American administrations, though the current one prefers blatant declarations.
Equally apocalyptic, Trump’s infamous campaign calls for a “Muslim ban” was far more deliberate, as border officials began to detain people. The president took umbrage at the label, denying that his premeditated actions were a ban against Muslims that, he alleged, the media misreported. “This is about terror and keeping our country safe,” he said, even if he failed to see how his latest executive order was little more than an evolution of what he repeated throughout the past year. It was Trump who used the term “ban all Muslims from entering the US”, even if he gradually transformed the prose into “extreme vetting”.
Pursuit of happiness
Trump is an autocrat who is keen to building an autocracy. He will never change methods, which means that everyone else will be required to adapt, including those who truly believe in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for everyone — not simply the privileged he represents. We will see whether his administration and, more important, the legislative and judiciary branches, will uphold the law.
Of course, Trump will rely on the old standby diversion of ensuring liberty in the name of safety, something that one of the founding fathers anticipated. It was the extraordinary Benjamin Franklin who had declared: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Regrettably, a good portion of the American electorate in 2016 failed to heed Franklin’s warnings.
Americans and others ought to reflect on Franklin’s other cautionary remarks when he responded to a Mrs Powel of Philadelphia — who asked him about what the 1787 deliberations at the Constitutional Convention produced behind closed doors, a republic or a monarchy. The answer was straightforward: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
What Trump’s first few days in office displayed was an utter defiance of the very concept of the American republic, best described in the first amendment of the US Constitution, which guarantees freedom to worship and exercise free speech. It did not encourage discrimination, predict “alternative facts”, nor did it envisage the Corleone-style chaos we must now live through.
Dr Joseph A. Kechichian is the author of the just-published The Attempt to Uproot Sunni Arab Influence: A Geo-Strategic Analysis of the Western, Israeli and Iranian Quest for Domination (Sussex: 2017).
