The One Thing Trump Didn't Learn From Roy Cohn

Donald Trump learned a lot from his attorney Roy Cohn. For those of you unaware, Roy Cohn had also been legal counsel for Senator Joe McCarthy during the red baiting of the 50s. One of the things he learned was that when you are attacked, you attack back and harder. We can see that happening every day.

But, here is a lesson that Trump didn't learn from Cohn, and he should have. When McCarthy was censured (or "condemned") by the senate and basically went away in disgrace, his popularity rating was still around 40%. That seems to represent the base of Americans supportive of McCarthy, and also of Trump. But, in the end, what Cohn said did McCarthy in was that people got tired of it.

People got tired of the show. They got tired of the chaos. They got tired of the lies and continually changing story. They got tired of seeing people bullied and abused. The show got old and so it got cancelled. 

I am hearing from more and more people, including Republicans who were not never-Trumpers, that they are tired of the show. It's a rule that ever the showman Trump might have learned, should have learned, but never did.

It's Not About What You Think It's About

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Genesis 19:1-26. Trigger warning for victims of sexual assault and/or sexual abuse.

Last week I said that the early stories in Genesis were etiological stories, that is stories that explain why things are the way they are, but then we transition to the stories of Abraham which begin the story of the people called the Israelites, which are very different. Well, that’s not really a hard and fast rule, because today’s passage is also an origin story. As we heard in the introduction, we are told that the land occupied by Lot had been extremely fertile, it actually says it was like Egypt, but now it’s a waste land, with high temperatures, where little grows, where there are tar pits, it smells like Sulphur and then there are pillars of salt, so what made it that way. Well the story from chapter 19 would seem to answer that question. It’s uninhabitable, it sounds almost as bad as Phoenix, because God destroyed the area raining it with fire and Sulphur, and of course Lot’s wife looked back and was turned into salt, and so this story explains all of that and so we can move on and be done right? I wish it were that easy, but what I can say is that this story is not about homosexuality, which is the most common interpretation, at least for the last 1000 years, but before we get into that, we do have to take a step back.

Lot and Abraham originally travel together to the Promised Land, but as they accumulate possessions, they eventually go their separate ways because their underlings are fighting. As we heard, Lot goes to the cities of the plain, which were Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zoboiim and Bela, sometimes called Baor, and they had been vassals to King Chedorlaomer but then they rebel for some reason. So, King Chedorlaomer gathers some other kings together and they attack and defeat the five cities, taking all their possessions. And while some people fled, we are told that Lot was taken into captivity. When Abraham finds out about this, he goes off and defeats the other kings and returns Lot and his possessions, and the possession of everyone else as well.