IN A recent interview on Fox News, President Trump claimed that the tariffs that he was at that point proposing to levy on imported goods “would make America so rich you won’t know where to spend it”. The result was an immediate drop of 500 points on the Dow Jones index, and ongoing confusion and chaos from banks and financial institutions. The President’s appeal to raw avarice provoked a reality check, which has not yet resolved itself, as the President changes tack to cut “beautiful deals” with the US’s trading partners.
What I find most disturbing in the President’s MAGA rhetoric is the naked appeal to avarice. The uncontrollable lust for wealth has always been condemned in Western discourse. The Roman poet Ovid warned of Midas, whose golden touch converted even food and drink to gold — pretty useless when hunger set in. While the Bible occasionally refers to wealth as a blessing, avarice is condemned constantly in Christian writing and preaching. It is as dangerous to the soul as lust or rage. The Western ideal, whether Christian or pagan, has always been moderation.
President Trump has the backing of many Evangelicals, who have sanitised the desire for riches in the so-called “prosperity gospel”, though even this comes with the expectation that a proportion of any acquired wealth should be recycled into the service of the gospel.
British Christians have attacked Margaret Thatcher for promoting “Greed is good,” but her efforts at wealth-promotion came with a Wesleyan expectation that greater wealth would greatly enhance charitable giving, and she was said to be disappointed when this did not happen as a result of her financial policies.
The sad thing about President Trump’s appeal is that it is aimed at those of his supporters who have genuinely lost out financially, as the industries on which they depended have collapsed. His ambition is based on their victimhood and his seductive promise that they will be “so rich you won’t know where to spend it”.
Watching the President at the Pope’s funeral, in his “Look-at-me” blue suit, I couldn’t help wondering how he heard Cardinal Re’s homily on Pope Francis’s love for the poor and downtrodden. He was not pleased when the Bishop of Washington, the Rt Revd Mariann Edgar Budde, condemned his immigration policies at his inauguration service (News, 31 January).
But my guess is that most protest merely washes over him. He has the Christian Right in his pocket, and, looking ahead (he is 78), he has not ruled out a third term in office. Of course, in the end, greed makes him vulnerable. In her 2021 book Putin’s People, the former Financial Times Moscow correspondent Catherine Belton demonstrated how, from the 1970s onwards, Mr Trump was supported financially in his lucrative property ventures by Russian officials linked to the KGB. The unnerving possibility must be considered that he has already sold the US to its greatest rival.