Manning: Trump's Unwillingness to Forgive His Enemies Might Be More Biblical Than Many People Think
Last night Trump blew apart a 60 Minutes interview on two particular points. First, he stunningly reversed course on full deportation of the army of illegals Biden ushered into the country. Second, he gave us one of the most unvarnished glimpses of his core as he responded to an insightful question from interviewer Ross Douthat.
“[Let’s say] You’re entering the next life and all you have to do to enter paradise is feel love and forgiveness for James Comey, Nancy Pelosi, anyone who you have expressed hate for over the years. Do you think you can do it?”
Trump hit Douthat with one of the most honest responses in political history.
“If I said to you, sure, the easy answer to that, oh, yes, I could forgive. No, I don’t think it’s an easy question. I found them to be extremely dishonest people. Very bad people. Very bad for our country. I love our country far more than I can love people and people like that…. The answer is no. I want to be honest.”
I venture that the vast majority of Christians will sigh. The few out there on the left will seize on it to say, “see, we told you he’s not a Christian.” More conservative or MAGA Christians will shake their heads and say “why did you say that and did you really mean it?”
Let’s take on three questions that arise directly from Trump’s comments. First, can you be a Christian without also forgiving those who wrong you? Second, is Trump’s present state of unforgiveness sin? Third, can Trump love his enemies (as Christ teaches) when he hasn’t forgiven them?
The answer to question one is absolutely. You can be a Christian and still commit all manner of sins. In the book of 1 John, the apostle writes, “My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.” Some of the most profound Christians and preachers in history were quick to remind us of the same – Luther, Augustine, Spurgeon, Edwards, and Wesley, among many, many others. So there we go, question one down. As long as we’re stuck in these sin-sick bodies, sin is going to dog us, and that includes difficulty forgiving.
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Now for question two – is Trump’s present state of unforgiveness sin? The answer is “not necessarily,” and the reasoning is less complicated than some think.
A dear friend of mine was once betrayed by his protégé. The man cheated on his wife, who happened to be my friend’s daughter. My friend struggled and struggled with forgiveness. Tossing and turning one night, my friend got up, went to his keyboard, and wrote out a note of complete and total forgiveness. But here’s the twist – my friend didn’t send it. He slid it into his filing cabinet, and kept it there safe and sound for the day that man asked for his forgiveness.
After Jesus spoke to Peter in Galilee about forgiving seventy times seven (basically infinitely), He further developed the thought speaking with His disciples on the journey to Jerusalem, saying “If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him. Even if he sins against you seven times in a day, and seven times returns to you saying, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive him.” Luke 17:3-4
Christ lays out the pattern as “sin, rebuke, repentance, forgiveness.” The forgiveness doesn’t come before the repentance. Now, there is a valid counter-position that models the process as forgiveness first and then a reconciliation once the person asks forgiveness. Fair enough. We’re not trying to stake an absolute claim here. We’re exploring whether there’s a case – a case – for Trump’s unforgiveness to co-exist with a faith in Christ.
Trump critics might quickly say that he is vindictive and simply refuses to forgive. But that’s not true.
Think about Lindsey Graham. On CNN in 2015, Graham threw the first punch in the famous Trump-Graham feud, saying “You know how you make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell,” and called him “a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.” Trump soon posted Graham’s personal cell phone in retaliation. Later they became good friends and very close allies.
Then there’s JD. Again, throwing the first punch, Vance publicly stated he couldn’t stomach Trump, found him noxious and reprehensible, like cultural heroin. He hated him so much that he voted for Bulwark beauty Evan McMullin. Later Vance backtracked and we all know where things ended up from there.
Let’s not forget champion Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who in 2015 called out Trump, describing him as not having “met the threshold” on national security readiness after a Hugh Hewitt interview. The real sparring began later when the schoolyard taunts hit, and my favorite of Trump’s insults landed – ‘Little Marco.’ Again, though, look where Rubio has ended up.
Those obviously aren’t the only cases. RFK Jr., Tulsi, and the list goes on.
(It’s also worth noting that he is shockingly magnanimous at times. Remember, after winning 2016 and being asked if he was going to go after Hillary Clinton, Trump said, “She’s been through enough.” Trump ’45 didn’t bother to fire everyone from Obama’s admin, leaving in place people like Francis Collins, Robert Work, Nicholas Rasmussen among others, and of course the loathsome James Comey. What did Biden do? He got locked out of the White House – literally – on his inauguration day because even the White House doorman hadn’t survived his purge.)
In Vance, Graham, and Michael Cohen (of all people), we see very clear examples of their having gone to Trump to make amends. The results were restored relationships, forgiveness, friendships, and remarkably frequent cabinet positions. Trump doesn’t seem to have a problem forgetting so much as letting go before the reconciliation takes place.
Question three is maybe the hardest. Can Trump love others – even his enemies – when he hasn’t forgiven them?
Maybe you have witnessed this, but I’ve never seen Trump wish ill or failure on anyone whom he saw as working for good in the right way. That doesn’t mean his assessments of what “good” and “right way” are always right but, like Trump, what else do any of us have to go on other than our own assessments informed by reason and revelation?
The people whom we know Trump hates are, to a one, animus-driven, hateful, shockingly self-serving, spiteful, corrosive, destructive, and hypocritical in ways that exploit Americans in general and the least among us in particular.
There’s not room in this piece to go over the pox spread by Obama, Biden, Hillary, Pelosi, Comey, Schiff, Kinzinger, Schumer, AOC, Omar/Nur Said Elmi, Jeffries, Warren, and so many others.
We all know what they’ve done and who they hate – Americans who want to live normal lives, follow Christ as the Bible teaches, value tradition, want to secure our country for our posterity in particular, and believe America has been an overwhelming force for good in the world, not evil.
They exploit the poor, promising them help in exchange for votes, then they hollow out their industries, destroy their children’s education, flood their men with pornography and their women with toxic childless feminism. They rage against God and destroy virtue. And if that’s not bad enough, they pay people to assure that the infirm and the drug-addicted will always live on the streets.
They “oppress the poor… [and show] contempt for their Maker” (Proverbs 14:31). They “sell the innocent for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals. They trample on the heads of the poor as on the dust of the ground and deny justice to the oppressed” (Amos 2:6-7). They are “arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy” (Ezekiel 16:49). Are there any better examples of what God condemns in the Old Testament than what these people stand for and do?
Regardless, many will say “Christians are not allowed to hate.” Not quite. We’re not allowed to hate in the same way we’re not allowed to be angry. The scripture actually says “be angry and sin not” (Ephesians 4:26). It’s more than possible to be angry without sinning. And it’s possible to hate without sinning.
Remarkably, it’s the nature of love that allows us to hate without sinning. One of the best working definitions of love I have ever run into is “love is wanting what is best for the other person, even when he doesn’t want it for himself.” Read that again. Pretty good, right?
That was a nearly magical revelation for me. If loving your enemies means feeling warm affection for them, that’s impossible for all but the most pious. But if it’s wanting what’s best your enemies – as in wanting them to do the right thing, to be at peace with God, and to do what is best for others – that makes Jesus’ command to love our enemies nearly trivial, if now downright joyful.
A reasonable person, though, would tell us not to forget about Trump’s comment at Charlie Kirk’s funeral, the one where he says “I don’t want what’s best for [my enemies].” That’s fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go very far. We’ve already seen that once one of Trump’s “enemies” realigns himself, Trump (generally, though not always) cheers them on. Again, see JD, Marco, Lindsey, and the rest of that crew. When Trump says he “hates” his enemies and “doesn’t want what’s best,” he means what Rush Limbaugh meant when he said he hoped Barack Obama “failed.” He wanted Obama to be a good president. But he also knew Obama’s goal, and he wanted him to fail to accomplish it. In the same way Trump doesn’t want what’s best for his enemies in the sense that he doesn’t want their efforts to succeed. If you think none of that’s true and Trump’s just filled with hate, remember… Trump is the one who said Hillary had “been through enough” during 2016 and that he wasn’t going to investigate/prosecute her.
Now, if that formulation of love is fair, it’s more than possible to hate people who abuse the poor, while wanting what is best for those people at the same time, because what is best for them is good for them and because it redounds to the benefit of the poor and everyone else. In other words, it’s possible to love and hate them at the same time. We know that God does this. Just look at Proverbs 6:16-19:
“There are six things the Lord hates, seven that are detestable to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked schemes, feet that are quick to rush into evil, a false witness who pours out lies, and a person who stirs up conflict in the community.”
I suggest that Trump has a version of this and that we have seen it play out lots of times. He hates plenty. But, like we saw above it tends to be contained to those who get in the way of his objectives, he is also seemingly quick to forgive, and he doesn’t tend to throw the first punch. The overriding factor in all of this is that he appears to want the best for the country and the best for others. He just hates what gets in the way of that.
Now, back to Douthat’s question: “You’re entering the next life and all you have to do to enter paradise is feel love and forgiveness for James Comey, Nancy Pelosi, anyone who you have expressed hate for over the years. Do you think you can do it?”
And then Trump’s answer: “I found them to be extremely dishonest people. Very bad people. Very bad for our country. I love our country far more than I can love people and people like that…. The answer is no. I want to be honest.”
We’ve established that God hates the things that these people have done. Trump hates those same things. God loves those people. And there’s more than a case that Trump loves his enemies, because he clearly does forgive when they repent and he seems to want them to repent because he knows that would be best for everyone.
If wanting what’s best for the other person even when they don’t want it for themselves is a working definition of love, Trump demonstrates love. Sometimes crudely. Sometimes ham-handedly. But it’s clearly there.
Now, whether or not you hate someone won’t determine whether you get into heaven. The single determining factor for that is whether you have surrendered your life to Christ. Once you do, Christ’s righteousness is applied to you, and God no longer sees your sin in a judgmental sense and instead sees His own Son’s blood sacrifice.
Each of us will, though, have to give an account of what we did here. The sinful and useless things will be burned up, and we will be rewarded for the things that were good and holy and of eternal value.
Unforgiveness on Trump’s end won’t keep him out of heaven. And it may well be the case that unforgiveness on his end won’t even be a topic that comes up. As long as he was willing to forgive if they did the right thing, I’d suggest that that’s far more than any human inclination. There’s an element of the divine there as well, for after all, isn’t that how God treats us?
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