Trump Holds Up a Bible. America Does a Collective Spit-Take

Every now and then in his reality show called “The President,” Donald Trump tries a gag that fails.

The idea probably came to him in the wee hours when he stews and sweats and tweets. It had a glow, it felt right, the idea of getting up there with a goddam Bible on the church steps, shaking that Bible at people like a stick, that Bible must have looked good to him, this square black bomb made of pages full of vengeful energy, this talisman, this secret weapon. So, like all men who lead unexamined lives, like any other pathological narcissist, he had no ability and no interest in seeing himself as a reasonable person might, so he could not see that brother, this is not a good look.

He had no wise helpers, no director ninjas skilled in the art of manipulating show biz narcissists to protect their investment, he’s finally got only amoral yes-men and yes-women around him like press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, so guess what? He went ahead with it.

Hence it was funny as shit. A defining moment in the improvised tragicomedy that is the Trump presidency in decline. A weird, squirmy creepy glad-you’re-not-him flash you try to look away from but cannot. You try to move on but it was too creepy funny sick awful and you had to watch, and your mix of emotions was tinged with worry because it’s not a sitcom or reality television, it’s history. It’s the stuff that will be replayed as an iconic moment for decades when your children and grandchildren ask how you could let this happen and you respond, it wasn’t us it was them, or we didn’t know, or he was mistreated by the press, or he was driven to it by the hostile press or he was doing his best or we really didn’t think he would take it that far and you’ll sound like the credulous and compliant subjects of a thousand other dictators whose clownishness became the iconography of crimes against humanity.

So there he was in front of the church with the Bible. America did a collective spit-take. It’s bracing but sickening at the same time. We hate it but we can’t stop watching.

He’s already unleashed the dogs. He’s already mobilized the greatest military force on earth to help him walk him across the street. He’s already made like a macho man. He can’t back down. The president pauses in front of the church, poses holding the Bible by his side, then holds up the Bible but then, he doesn’t know what to do with it. Was he going to read from it? Was he going to quote from memory? Was he going to call up the spirit of an eloquent statesman or prophet?

He realizes as he’s doing it how hokey and false it looks but the cameras are already rolling. He finds himself standing in front of a church like a man waking up out of a blackout. His next act in the script he’s written in the feverish night is … he hasn’t written the next part, there is no next part, he’s bombing. But he holds up the Bible.

He must know how lame and unworkable this is. That is the moment I saw, the glimpse of what it must be like to be him. Or that is, the moment when I saw him seeing himself, and realizing what a dumb idea it was. There he was, after giving his lackluster yet alarming speech about using the Insurrection Act of 1807 to send the military into states that aren’t being mean enough to protesters, and you could see it in the droop of his arms in front of that church, how the strength went out of him as if the Bible were kryptonite, as if holding it was draining him of all strength and conviction, or frightening him with the thought that the power invested by the religious in the Bible might actually be real, that he might be playing with a power that just might be real … and he looks around for somebody to direct him but there’s nobody there, it’s just him like a naked sleepwalker finding himself in an alien land and facing the possibility of ego-ending shame, the primal injury.

It’s awful and it’s hilarious. You glimpse the man X-ray style, his innards, the vacant space where a soul should be.

The moment goes by quickly. But just for an instant, you saw the president, ashamed, doubtful, then peeved. Immediately in the instant where some self-recognition could take place and would take place in a person with a moral sensibility, all the potential shame and humility is rerouted, can’t let the Trumpian ego experience a moment of humbling fuckup, can’t let them see you sweat, it’s not working but you gotta move on like nothing happened and hope nobody noticed you just shit your pants on the church steps holding a Bible.

Cut!