NORTON META TAG
26 July 2026
05 June 2026
31 January 2026
The Bible Character That Most Resembles Trump 28JAN26
The Virgin and Child surrounded by the Holy Innocents (1616) by Rubens
I can imagine NOT MY pres drumpf / trump actually doing what herod did after the birth of Christ, he is enough of a psychopath / sociopath / narcissist to not be bothered by the slaughter of innocents to get his way, to maintain his power. Just look at what he is doing to our country, the dhs domestic terrorism and violence he has unleashed on the residents of America and the wanton military terrorism and aggression he has unleashed on the rest of the world, on our friends and foes alike. He is an evil person and all who support him and do his bidding are complicit in his war crimes, his crimes against humanity, his sins. This from Sojourners.....
The Bible Character That Most Resembles Trump
Chaos fills the streets as families are separated by force, and mothers cry out as their children are taken from them. To exert control and maintain power, a ruler orders agents to detain people off the street. Those the ruler labels as “subversive” are treated as a threat to his reign. The violence is indiscriminate and unrelenting. It does not matter who gets hurt, as long as the ruler stays on the throne.
If your mind went directly to President Donald Trump or the news of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents shooting and killing two Minnesota residents—mom and poet Renee Nicole Macklin Good, and intensive care nurse Alex Pretti—you are not alone. But in this case, I am talking about Herod and his order to kill the children in Bethlehem and its surrounding region (Matthew 2:16). While the parallels are not identical, the shared logic of unrestrained state power is unmistakable.
Herod the Great was a Rome-backed king who ruled Judea. He had a multiethnic background, with his family being Idumean, Arab, and Jewish, and was considered, both by himself and others, as the “king of the Jews.” Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian, recounts how Mark Antony had resolved to make Herod king and even advocated on his behalf to the Roman Senate, showing how imperial power backed his reign. While Herod’s identity and rise to power might be complicated, his abuse and crimes were not. Josephus records how Herod had one of his wives strangled, and multiple sons killed.
In Matthew’s gospel, the author chronicles how news that the true “king of the Jews” has been born put Herod and all of Jerusalem on edge (2:1–5). He recruits the magi to be his spies, asking them to return with word of the child’s location so that he can eliminate this rival to his throne (2:7–8). Matthew’s point is not only that Herod is cruel, but that anxious power is easily threatened. It treats the most vulnerable, such as children and those marked as outsiders, as dangers that must be eliminated.
Some people attempt to justify ICE raids with stories that cast undocumented immigrants as dangerous, subversive, and incapable of assimilating. Claims that noncitizens are voting in federal elections persist, even though credible investigations have repeatedly found this to be extremely rare. The result is a politics of suspicion that makes it easier to profile, detain, and separate people on the basis of who they appear to be, not on the basis of any actual evidence.
The dangerous logic of suspicion and fear surfaced clearly in September 2025, when the Supreme Court stayed a district court order that had temporarily barred immigration agents in Los Angeles from making stops based on racial, linguistic, and cultural markers. Another common basis for aggressive enforcement is the claim that immigrants commit higher rates of crime than U.S.-born citizens. But research from the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute shows that “immigrants in the United States commit crimes at lower rates than the U.S.-born population.” Empowered by the Trump administration, ICE is operating with a logic of anxious state power, where fear turns the outsider into a threat and that “threat” is used to justify indiscriminate violence.
The biblical story of Herod offers an example of what happens when a ruler embraces indiscriminate violence. When Herod realizes the magi are not planning to return to tell him the location of Jesus, he responds with a blanket order: He has boys 2-years-old and younger in Bethlehem and its surrounding region killed (Matthew 2:16). He does not need to know which child is Jesus. He does not care. His command sweeps up an entire community to eliminate a perceived threat to his power. This is one of Matthew’s clearest portraits of how anxious power operates. When rulers feel that their power is being threatened, they reach for indiscriminate force.
Like Herod’s violence in Bethlehem, ICE raids often operate with a blunt, sweeping logic. In practice, raids can upend households in minutes, separating parents from children and forcing families into sudden displacement. Some people detained in the United States have even been transferred to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison, with families struggling to learn where their loved ones are, as immigration agents disappear them without notice, and without an opportunity to retain legal representation. Some have even been deported by “mistake.” And these “mistakes” do not end with noncitizens.
In October 2025, ProPublica reported that more than 170 U.S. citizens were detained by immigration agents. Earlier that year, federal agents raided the wrong home and degradingly forced a family of U.S. citizens in Oklahoma City, Okla., to wait outside in the rain before they could fully dress. This atmosphere has intensified in our current moment. On Jan. 7, 2026, an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Nicole Macklin Good in Minneapolis during a confrontation captured on video. And then again, on Jan. 24, officers with Customs and Border Protection fatally shot Alex Pretti. In both cases, federal officials have tried to frame the shootings as self-defense, accusing the victims of being “domestic terrorists” who were trying to harm immigration agents. This, despite video evidence and eyewitness accounts that directly expose such characterizations for what they are: lies.
READ MORE: The Chaplain Helping the Timberwolves Stand in Solidarity with Minnesota
To be clear, my comparison between Herod and Trump is not meant to suggest they are the same, as if history, context, and specific actions directly parallel one another. Instead, I am drawing on what New Testament scholar Love Lazarus Sechrest calls “associative hermeneutics,” which reads ancient and modern situations as analogues, identifying the “rhyme” between their social dynamics. In this case, the Trump administration initially claimed it would target the “worst of the worst,” yet these actions have instead swept up innocent families, people in our congregations, and others who are simply trying to survive in our society. Even if you think deporting some individuals is justified, disregarding their humanity, sending them to prisons in a third country, and separating families is not moral. Setting Herod and Trump side–by–side reveals how Trump’s brutality, carried out by ICE agents, “rhymes” with Herod’s indiscriminate actions. In this case, the sound is not a symphony of love and moral action, but a cacophony of violence.
This chorus of threats is spreading fear across immigrant communities. ICE pressures neighbors to police one another. They treat whole populations as threats. They treat nonviolent resistance as tantamount to domestic terrorism. In the face of these seemingly insurmountable powers, Christians can embrace prophetic responsibility. On Sunday, Jan. 18, protesters nonviolently disrupted a service at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minn., a church in the Southern Baptist Convention. One of the pastors, David Easterwood, serves as the acting director of the ICE St. Paul field office. The peaceful protesters raised their voices in unison, bellowing “ICE out” and “justice for Renee Good.” In shouting this melody of protest, they offered a beautiful example of how Christians can tell the truth, name what is happening, and speak to unjust systems with moral clarity. Despite being arrested on felony charges for her participation in organizing the nonviolent protest at Cities Church, Rev. Nekima Levy Armstrong told Democracy Now! after her release that “We cannot be silent at a time like this … I am continuing to use my voice to speak out against this fascism, tyranny and authoritarianism of the Trump administration. And others have to do the same.”
As we continue to witness ICE’s actions against our neighbors, I cannot help but see echoes of Herod’s world in our own, as state terror abounds, and tyranny reigns. Yet Herod did not have the final word. He could not stop God’s purposes. Rev. David Black, the Chicago pastor one who was shot with pepper balls outside an ICE processing facility in Broadview, Ill., put it plainly to Sojourners in October 2025: “When I look at a lot of my Christian siblings, who I see being so profoundly confused and misled, I believe that they have been made to follow a faith that is based in fear, coercion, and control.” Instead of living in fear of the “other,” we can and should embrace our neighbors, treating them as if we were caring for Christ himself (Matthew 25:31–46).
Rubin James Yi McClain is an opinion writer for the 2026 Sojourners Journalism Cohort.
17 January 2026
21 December 2025
WHEN NOT MY PRES DRUMPF / TRUMP FINALLY LEAVES US.....20DEZ25
Trump Delivers Attacks and Deflects Blame for Americans’ Economic Worries 17DEZ25
A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!
Trump Carries On Criticism Of McCain, As A Republican Calls His Words 'Deplorable'
President Trump continues to pile on criticism of the late Sen. John McCain, complaining on Wednesday during a speech in Ohio that the Arizona senator's family never thanked him for the Vietnam War hero's funeral, which involved large ceremonies in Washington, D.C.
"I gave him the kind of funeral that he wanted, which as president I had to approve," Trump told a crowd at an Army tank manufacturing plant in Lima. "I don't care about this. I didn't get [a] thank you. That's OK. We sent him on the way, but I wasn't a fan of John McCain."
Trump was the only living president not to attend McCain's September 2018 service at the National Cathedral, during which several speakers made not-so-veiled comparisons between the current commander in chief and the 2008 GOP presidential nominee who had been tortured for over five years after his plane was shot down over Vietnam. McCain's daughter Meghan said during her emotional eulogy that "the America of John McCain has no need to be made great again because America was always great" — an allusion to the president's campaign slogan.
Trump's latest comments are only the latest salvo of the past few days, continuing a years-long feud with McCain, even from beyond the grave, and he's irritating several Republican senators.
Just hours before Trump's latest hits against McCain, Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee Chairman Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., said that the president's continued slights against the Navy veteran and his Vietnam War service are "deplorable."
"It will be deplorable seven months from now if he says it again. And I will continue to speak out, because there's one thing we've got to do — you may not like immigration, you may not like this, you may not like that, you may be a Republican, you may be a Democrat, but we're all Americans," Isakson said during an interview with Georgia Public Broadcasting's Political Rewind with Bill Nigut. "There aren't Democratic casualties and Republican casualties on the battlefield — there are American casualties. And we should never reduce the service that people give to this country, including the offering of their own life, to anything but political fodder in Washington, D.C."
Isakson said he was just keeping a promise he made shortly after the Arizona senator's death to defend McCain's honor and military record from anyone who would dare to besmirch it — even the president.
"If my kids ever said John McCain was never a war hero...they'd have a serious conversation with me, and I would have it with them," Isakson told GPB.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is pictured speaking to reporters in the Capitol in October 2017. He died from brain cancer in August 2018.
Yet, that is the language Trump has continued to use about McCain, who died in August from an aggressive form of brain cancer. Over the weekend, Trump revived his criticism, tweeting about McCain's involvement in alerting the FBI to a controversial Russia dossier, the subject of recent news reports. Trump also then retweeted a woman who wrote she "hated" McCain and that "Millions of Americans truly LOVE President Trump, not McCain. I'm one!"
On Tuesday in the Oval Office, Trump echoed those sentiments again, saying that, "I was never a fan of John McCain, and I never will be."
Isakson also issued a rebuke to Trump in the wake of McCain's death, when at first the White House didn't issue the traditional proclamation to lower all flags on federal grounds to half-staff to honor McCain, something the Georgia senator reminded the conservative online publication The Bulwark Wednesday morning when he said he would be pushing back again. Trump eventually relented on that issue, ordering flags lowered until McCain's burial, as is customary.
The bad blood between Trump and McCain has festered for several years now. Shortly after Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, McCain criticized him for his announcement speech in which the real estate magnate had called Mexican immigrants "rapists" and "murderers." Trump retorted when he held a campaign rally in Phoenix, as the crowd booed their senior senator. McCain later said Trump had "fired up the crazies."
The major breach in their relationship came in July 2015 when Trump — who avoided the Vietnam draft after claiming he had bone spurs — said that McCain, who endured over five years of torture as a prisoner of war at the infamous Hanoi Hilton, was only seen as was "a war hero because he was captured" and that he liked "people that weren't captured."
There did appear to be a detente at one point after Trump endorsed McCain in his GOP Senate primary. Trump even referenced that in his Wednesday speech, saying he had given McCain his blessing "at his request." However, just before Election Day 2016, McCain — as did many other Republicans — abandoned him following the release of a 2005 Access Hollywood video where Trump had bragged about groping women.
The two never reconciled, and the following summer McCain would announce he had been diagnosed with brain cancer. Shortly after that, the Arizona senator returned to the Senate in August 2017 to cast a "no" vote against the GOP's plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which Trump still sees as the ultimate betrayal and mocks McCain for. He often dramatically re-enacted the senator's emphatic thumbs down on the Senate floor during rallies, even as McCain was undergoing treatment.
Over the past year, Trump has struck up a surprising alliance with Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who often refers to McCain as his best friend in the Senate and faces a re-election bid next year. In a February interview with The New York Times Magazine, Graham noted that McCain also had to move to the right when he faced primary threats back home: "If you don't want to get re-elected, you're in the wrong business...I have never been called this much by a president in my life."
Following Trump's weekend remarks hitting McCain, Graham tweeted that "nothing about his service will ever be changed or diminished."
Back home in South Carolina, Graham did address the president directly, but his comments were still far more tepid than Isakson's admonition.
"I think the president's comments about Senator McCain hurt him more than they hurt the legacy of Senator McCain," Graham told local reporters Wednesday. "I'm going to try and continue to help the president....I've gotten to know the president, we have a good working relationship. I like him — I don't like it when he says things about my friend John McCain."
Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, a freshman who was the Republican nominee for president in 2012, also took on Trump's comments on Tuesday, tweeting that "I can't understand why the President would, once again, disparage a man as exemplary as my friend John McCain: heroic, courageous, patriotic, honorable, self-effacing, self-sacrificing, empathetic, and driven by duty to family, country, and God."
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., also praised McCain and his service on Wednesday, though he made no direct reference to Trump.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said he plans to revive a bill he had proposed last year to rename the Russell Senate Office Building in honor of McCain.
McConnell and some other Republicans had not come on board with that idea initially, and Isakson also told GPB he wasn't fully behind that yet, which would mean stripping the name of former Georgia Democratic Sen. Richard Russell — an avowed segregationist — off of it. Isakson argued that if that was the case, even other monuments in D.C. honoring former Presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who were slaveholders, should be looked at.
Instead, the Georgia senator suggested waiting for the recommendations from a group considering how to best honor McCain, which includes his widow, Cindy, and his children.






