God's Call for Interruptive Action in Response to the Trump Regime
Featuring biblical scholar and teacher, Dr. Walter Brueggemann
Beloved in Christ,
Let us not be naive. You and I are living under the thumb of an American dictator in a rapidly accelerating totalitarian police state that is aided and abetted by the Republican Party and assisted by the Supreme Court’s pro-authoritarian majority.
Donald Trump is the only American citizen and president (thus far) to have been judicially declared above the law and therefore free, with impunity, to exercise the de facto powers of a dictator.
As a consequence of Trump’s vengefully pathological and punitive character, there will soon be a flurry of concentration camps constructed across this land, similar to Florida’s barbed-wire “Alligator Alcatraz”—all to the sadistic delight of the dictator.
This draconian Trumpian scheme is straight out of Hitler’s Nazi playbook.
It is part of what the Nazified Germans called Gleichschaltung, which is the broad coordination of all things political, cultural, juridical, economic, religious, and penal, forced in conformity to the dictator’s totalitarian wishes and aimed at the elimination of all societal opposition. As we have collectively witnessed ever since Trump re-entered the White House, the dominoes have fallen one-by-one.
First, Trump rapidly subjugated the entire Republican Party. Ostensibly grown men and women turned into craven, obsequious sycophants.
Then, hell-bent to destroy vital government agencies and services, he set about to remake them as subjects of his imperial homage, regardless of how many longstanding and faithful public servants he sacrificed in the interest of imposing his self-admiring grandiosity upon all three branches of government.
Then, he summarily, and without requisite congressional approval, eradicated funds already committed for HIV/AIDS prevention, in addition to other life-saving public health programs promised to brown and black-skin people living in poverty-stricken countries, many of whom are dying as you read these words, thanks to the moral depravity of one man and his legions of subservient lackeys.
Then, he took aim at institutions of higher learning and important scientific and medical research programs, strangling them by withholding federal grant moneys in order to bend them to his imperious will.
Then, he decimated preschool, after-school, and adult educational programs nationwide, intentionally making children and working parents the casualties of his tortuous and tormenting mental gymnastics.
Then, he attacked the LGBTQ+ community with venomous intent to destroy their lives, health, and livelihood, including those who faithfully and courageously served the country as members of the Armed Services.
Then, he straight-out betrayed the beneficiaries of Medicaid, Affordable Care health insurance, and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance food stamps, upon which those multi-millions of persons depend for daily survival, even as he narcissistically consumed upwards of $45 million on his 79th birthday military parade.
Next, he sicced his politicized DOJ attack dogs on Democratic opponents and former Republican critics, as well as public prosecutors and law firms he deemed a threat to his flagrant lawlessness, while pardoning his mobster comrades in the January 6th, 2021, insurrection which he himself had spawned.
And all the while, he browbeat and sued mainstream commercial media while threatening to yank funding from public media stations all across the country because he, like all dictators, cannot tolerate a free press guaranteeing free expression of opposing points of view in a free society.
Not least, he has turned the office of the presidency, at home and abroad, into his own personal, freewheeling, self-aggrandizing, money-making enterprise, because he sees himself as above the law and exempt from avoiding conflicts of interest and maintaining ethical boundaries.
Meanwhile, mega donors, media moguls, and corporate CEOs, with deep pockets to protect against Trump’s lust for mammon, have engaged in exactly what their counterparts did in Nazi Germany as Hitler rose to power. They have undertaken “self-coordination,” meaning they obey in advance and cower before the coattails of Der Führer. The German word for such individual surrender is Selbstgleichschaltung. Yes, this, too, is straight out of Hitler’s Nazi playbook.
And now—repeatedly—like an ever-beating drum, Trump’s hatchet men and women militarize and mobilize the instruments of governmental power, abducting and arresting people left and right, obsessed as they are with eradicating immigrants, like exterminators chasing gutter rats with chemical spray guns. This, too, is straight out of Hitler’s Nazi playbook.
The construction of concentration camps, let us be mindful, will be but the beginning of Trump’s systematic charity toward none and malice for all.
However . . . . let us pause for a moment.
Ever since the January 2025 presidential inauguration, countless millions of Americans, again and again, have asked the same essential question in one way or another. And they are continuing to answer it.
What can I do?
What should I do?
What must I do?
Those same millions of diverse citizens and non-citizens are increasingly taking to the streets with placards lifted high and voices crying for righteousness and justice. They are confronting legislators to their faces, calling them to account for their failure to defend democracy, the Constitution, and the welfare of the people.
Each day, more and more conscientious and compassionate Americans come forth to lend assistance to individuals and families whom the Trump administration and its masked agents aggressively single out and terrorize with lawless and inhumane persecutory arrests, detainments, disappearances, and deportations. And courageous attorneys dauntlessly bring those fearful and hunted-down persons’ rightful causes before the courts of justice.
All of these actions, and more, belong to the groundswell of compassionate and empathetic Americans who are selflessly responding to “What can we—should we—must we—do?”
For those of us who are Christians, there is also the divine imperative with which we must reckon and act.
We, who earnestly seek to be faithful to Jesus Christ and the gospel, know that it is crucial for us to be steeped in the authoritative witness of the biblical texts that speak of the prophets and people of God who were our forebears in the faith that we received and now commit to live. For they in their own time were engaged on many an occasion in conflict and resistance to unjust and cruel earthly powers that ruled with coiled fists of callous dismissal rather than open hands of welcoming compassion.
Just so, as confessing Christians whose mission extends beyond the walls of our safe places and sanctuaries, I invite us to turn to some of those seminal texts, along with the interpretive guidance of the beloved Dr. Walter Brueggemann, who but a short month ago joined the company of “all the saints who from their labors rest.”
Dr. Brueggemann’s favorite passage of scripture, which remained central to his life as a biblical scholar and servant of the gospel, was this: “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” (Psalm 119:105).
Ten years ago, in 2015, as Donald Trump appeared upon the American political stage, Dr. Brueggemann gave a series of talks entitled “Justice: From Zion Back to Sinai,” during the Fuller Forum at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. One of those talks he called “Justice from Below.”
Brueggemann’s words are foundational and indispensable for what lies immediately before us as we open ourselves to what God is calling us to do in response to the authoritarian plague that besets our nation, including churches, synagogues, and the entire spectrum of faith communities.
Here are a few of Dr. Brueggemann’s theological claims as he summons us to interruptive actions of “Justice from Below”:
“The Old Testament is an act of imagination about a transformed alternative to the predatory regime of Pharaoh.”
“In order to understand transformative justice from below, . . . we have to walk through the narrative of injustice that features Pharaoh . . . . [whose] practice of injustice is disrupted by the gospel.”
“Pharaoh is a metaphor for all predatory economies. . . . If you’ve seen one Pharaoh, you’ve seen all Pharaohs because all Pharaohs are predatory.” “Pharoah’s narrative will always end in violence.”
“Can that totalizing narrative of injustice be effectively interrupted?”
“It turns out that Yahweh is a magnet for the cries of injustice when they are brought to public speech. So the [biblical] text says their cry rose up to God, and God heard, and God saw, and God knew, and God remembered” as God acted.
“The Jesus movement in the New Testament is an act of imagination about a transformative alternative to the predatory regime of Rome.” “Pax Romana was a violent regime.”
“The church in our time in the United States and . . . globally is an act of imagination about a transformative alternative to the predatory regime of military capitalism that reduces human life to dispensable commodities.”
Editorial Note: The Nazification (Gleichschaltung) of the federal government and American social and cultural institutions—destructive as this is of the lives of ordinary citizens and non-citizens, coupled with Trump’s purposely inhumane actions, and bolstered by Trump’s “Big, Ugly Bill”—looks very different to the power brokers of capitalist greed than it does to the stranger, the poor, and the dispossessed, when placed before the scrutiny of the Word of God in the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Gospels.
“The big story of the Bible,” says Dr. Brueggemann, “is the story of interruption.”
And that’s the divine imperative for which you and I as confessing Christians come into the picture.
Walter Brueggemann was a true prophet. May God raise up many more such In this hour of need.