“And I want to just thank everybody, and in particular, God. I want to just say we love you, God, and we love our great military, protect them. God bless the Middle East, God bless Israel, and God bless America.
These are the words that conclude Donald Trump's speech announcing and justifying the United States' entry into war against Iran. Words saturated with lies, words to be deconstructed on their own theological ground. Even if it is useless; even if words remain forever powerless and rather ridiculous in the face of the force that is unleashed; precisely because the times humiliate any desire for truth, any will not to give in to the path of pure self-interest.
“I want to just thank everybody, and in particular, God.”
Trump is trying to involve "everyone"—including "God"—in his warlike enterprise. With everyone thanked for it, everyone feels involved and involved in it. A false universalization of the act of war and its responsibility, a feigned political-military unanimity. Power loves the language of unity. Thus, it can give the illusion of being the expression of society in its entirety. This also reinforces its legitimacy: if it speaks on behalf of all, its strength is symbolically enriched by the strength of all.
This first sentence is also an original model of blasphemy. Trump thanks God for a political act that is completely foreign to him: launching a war. The Gospel teaches us that God's presence in history does not involve military campaigns launched by power-hungry states. By thanking God for an event he neither wanted nor asked for, Trump attributes to him an act that is not his own and substitutes for God "his" own God, a God who calls for war and supports it. In a particularly devious way—by seemingly borrowing the humble language of thanksgiving and gratitude—Trump actually covers himself in glory. The most destructive pride takes on the mask of the most innocent humility, the stubborn will to power dons the appearance of openness to grace. Trump honors a God other than the true God; he creates a God that suits him, a God made to measure. In the Bible, this process has a well-known name: idolatry.
God is one actor among others; he is simply thanked "in particular". This is a crude way of extending to all the protagonists of the war the feeling of being in the right, on the right path, on the path desired for them by a God who has been insidiously redefined. The military and the civil servant are thanked in the same way as God. Thus, there is a common work, collaboration, an alliance between men and God. War sanctified, a holy alliance between God and men. In other words: war become sacred, indisputable, outside the realm of moral discernment and democratic rationality.
“I want to just say we love you, God, and we love our great military, protect them.”
We love what desires and does our good. War being thus a good, God who willed it and the army that wages it are eminently lovable. Love, witness to the validity of bombings and the act of sowing death? This is precisely the kind of absurdity that Trump is proclaiming here. "Protect them": we take care of what loves us, we cherish it, we do not want it to die. The manifestation of love is therefore followed by the order not to harm it and to honor its needs and demands.
“God bless the Middle East, God bless Israel, and God bless America.”
According to Trump, there are no competing interests, no hegemonic and imperialist will, no hierarchy of the value of lives—the lives of Israelis and Americans are infinitely more worthy of being lived than the lives of Gazans or Iranians—no, there is only a great plan of universal love willed by God who elected Trump as his lieutenant. This is obviously a lie. This great plan is presented in a Manichean and apocalyptic way: the camp of good against the camp of evil, the camp of “freedom” against the camp of “tyranny.” Yet another image of unity, of totality, behind which an imperial logic advances. The "pax americana"—presented positively as a universal good to which everyone is "entitled"—requires the necessary use of a force that is henceforth deemed liberating.
Trump’s theology resolves to the legitimation of war, deification of force, and sanctification of death; it is a theology of power and violence; a non-Christian and anti-evangelical heresy.
