New York Times and The Week, Writers say Trump is more like Nietzsche than Christ

By Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America (Donald Trump) [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons
By Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America (Donald Trump) [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons
Journalists say Trump has Nietzschean morality rather than Christian morality.

According to Damon Linker of The Week and Peter Wehner of the New York Times, Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher, would have been proud of Donald Trump. They believe that Trump has a Nietzschean morality rather than a Christian one.

Nietzsche was a person who embraced strong people and despised the weak. Donald Trump is also a person who believes that strength is intrinsically good and weakness is intrinsically bad.

New York Times and The Week Writers say Trump is more like Nietzsche than Christ.[/tweetthis]

Nietzsche preferred master morality over slave morality. For him, “good” meant to be happy, and to have all the things associated with happiness, such as power, wealth, health, strength and so on. “Bad,” on the other hand, meant to be like the slaves that the warrior aristocracy who had the master morality ruled over, poor, pathetic, sick, weak, disgusting, an object of hatred and pity and so on. Nietzsche was a person who loathed Christianity, and Christ, as well.

Trump, throughout his campaign, has shown contempt for the weak and the vulnerable people, whom he tagged as “losers.” To him, those people include people with disabilities, people with no political power, people who are not physically attractive and prisoners of war. He does not approve of empathy and compassion. He is an ambitious man, and he crushes anyone who he thinks are obstacles to his ambitions.

Trump claims that he is a true Christian and that the Bible is his favorite book. However, Christianity is all about forgiveness. To be a true Christian is to be the salt and light to the world, to stand for justice, care for the poor and be an agent of reconciliation in a broken world. Last month, Trump met with hundreds of evangelical leaders. After the meeting, a number of them softened their stance towards him and started supporting him.

According to James Dobson, one of the most influential leaders in the evangelical world, Trump is a person who is tender to things of the Spirit. The president of Liberty University, Jerry Falwell Jr., hailed Trump as a man of God who could lead America to greatness. Robert Jeffress, the pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, going one step ahead, said that those Christians who would sit at home and not vote for Trump would be succumbing to their pride rather than their principle.

According to Wehner, this sudden “calling” of the Evangelical Christians in supporting Donald Trump has no place in politics. This only showcases their thirst for power. Their past moral proclamations have all been for show. According to Jacques Ellul, French philosopher and theologian, the worst problem of the Church is politics. It has been, and is, her constant temptation and the evangelicals have obviously succumbed to it.

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