I will vote for Donald J. Trump this November. When I did so in 2016 and again in 2020, I was (and am) an anarchocapitalist libertarian. That’s my utterly fallible but defensible political opinion for the Dispensation of Grace. I wish Ron Paul, who had a framed portrait of Murray Rothbard hanging in his congressional office, were running, but he’s not.
In 2015-2016, during the rise of anti-police mania in New York, I’d share this metaphor with anyone who’d listen: when I’m discussing, say, Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT) with a friend in Starbucks, I want a big guy with a bat standing guard outside to protect the conversation. I’m now beginning to identify the possible spiritual costs of employing him.
When Trump the populist protectionist announced his first candidacy, I read four or five of his books. I concluded that while he’s no Rothbardian, he’s the guy with the bat we need as we try to persuade people to see that to end inflation, we must “End the Fed,” not just “Drill, Baby Drill.”
That is, we must not merely increase productivity by drilling for oil but also replace the system of legalized counterfeiting (which renders worthless the Federal Reserve Notes for which we exchange goods and services) with “a perfect and just weight, a perfect and just measure”(Deuteronomy 25:15), that is, a free market currency in precious metals. It seems the lure of fiat currency (“Let there be money!”) is irresistible.
So, I will vote for Trump not because he affirms ABCT, but despite his ignorance on this score. He’s the big guy with the bat not only at Starbucks’s entrance, but also at the border who will raise a deportation army to expel millions of invaders whom Traitor Joe has showered with free stuff at our expense in a Stalinesque attempt to elect a new people, which Brecht suggested is always an option for tyrants. Trump will also, as he demonstrated the first time around, stand up to the bad guys with bats (and guns and bombs) who run other countries.
When I voted for him, however, I had to bracket what I believe to be true about economics to further a practical end, one his enemies have never forgiven him for achieving, however imperfectly.
Now, however, this pragmatic rationale requires me to bracket positions dearer than ABCT. It doesn’t require me to abandon them, of course—just not to make a stink over them. I touched on this very briefly a few months ago, but the platform of the Republican National Convention (RNC) requires more soul-searching. This is me making a stink.
“I was able to kill Roe v. Wade,” Trump bragged at rallies. Not a word about that last night in his RNC speech in acceptance of his party’s nomination, the first since the attempt on his life that so many, secretly or openly, wish had been successful. The regulation of abortion should be left to the states, he says, but above all else “we must win elections.”
As my visitors know, I try to think God’s thoughts after Him, thoughts He breathed onto the pages of Scripture. One is that the imperative to protect human life does not depend on whether the human being’s located in or ex utero.
Just as יהוה (Yahweh) formed אֶצָּרְךָ֤ (esareka; root: יָצַר, yatsar) Adam (not Adam’s body) from the dust of the earth (Genesis 2:7) in meticulous detail, so He formed וַיִּיצֶר֩ (wayyiser; root: יָצַר, yatsar) you (not your body) in your mother’s womb (Jeremiah 1:5; Psalm 139:13-18).
To wantonly take the life of an unborn child, no matter how embryonically immature, or how “inconvenient,” is to commit murder. One does not “regulate” murder. The rapist, not the innocent issue of his crime, deserves the death penalty. (The first Republican President issued The Emancipation Proclamation, not “The Regulation Proclamation”: chattel slavery was to be abolished, not “regulated.”)
The other divine thought is that the union we call marriage is ontologically that of one man and one woman, regardless of what ceremony a given political arrangement may call “marriage.” When it comes to gender יהוה (Yahweh) is decidedly “binary”: one man leaves his parents to become “one flesh” (אֶחָֽד לְבָשָׂ֥ר, ehad lebasar) with one woman (Genesis 2:24). So is His Incarnation, Jesus:
Have you not read that he [that is, יהוה (Yahweh), with Whom Jesus is identical [1]] who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. (Matthew 19:4-6)
God’s proscription of homosexual acts rules out “same-sex marriage” as oxymoronic, but try arguing that proposition in today’s GOP. Its opposition to that arrangement collapsed with Obergefell v. Hodges [2], immediately after which transgenderism became the nation’s latest progressive obsession, which abolishes stable meanings for “male” and “female” and therefore “same sex” itself. In LGBT, the T is the acid that corrodes not only the L, the G, and the B, but also common sense gender equality, as evidenced by men competing in women’s sports.
Compromise born of evasion sooner or later exacts a price, just as deficit spending over the last century decimated the purchasing power of official central bank currency. If you’re an abortion abolitionist, not an abortion “regulator,” if you believe the Constitution’s 14th Amendment applies to unborn human life, well, please keep that opinion to yourself. Same goes for your “old-fashioned” ideas about marriage. They’re not welcome.
On July 13th in Butler, Pennsylvania, God’s meticulous providence protected Donald Trump. But He will not be mocked. Lukewarm on abortion and marriage? He will vomit (ἐμέσαι, emesai) you out of His mouth (Revelation 3:16).
Notes
[1] יהוה said, “I am the first and the last” (Isaiah 44:6); so did Jesus (Revelation 22:13). There cannot be two firsts or two lasts.
[2] Because we don’t impugn the Supreme Court or threaten its Justices when they don’t rule the way we want them to.