Tuesday, February 6, 2024

David Bentley Hart in 2011: "the devil is probably eerily similar to Donald Trump—though perhaps just a little nicer."


David Bentley Hart, Eastern Orthodox Theologian

From 2003 to 2020, the Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart wrote a column for First Things magazine.  

In 2011, Hart ended one of his columns with a comment on Donald Trump.  Hart continues to hold his low view of the former President. The essay ends with a 46-word sentence comparing The Donald to The Devil.   

By the way, First Things magazine now leads the worship of Trump for conservative Catholics.  

Here is Hart on Trump:

... Donald Trump... You know the fellow: developer, speculator, television personality, hotelier, political dilettante, conspiracy theorist, and grand croupier—the one with that canopy of hennaed hair jutting out over his eyes like a shelf of limestone.

In particular, I recalled how, back in 1993, when Trump decided he wanted to build special limousine parking lots around his Atlantic City casino and hotel, he had used all his influence to get the state of New Jersey to steal the home of an elderly widow named Vera Coking by declaring “eminent domain” over her property, as well as over a nearby pawn shop and a small family-run Italian restaurant.

She had declined to sell, having lived there for thirty-five years. Moreover, the state offered her only one-fourth what she had been offered for the same house some years before, and Trump could then buy it at a bargain rate. The affair involved the poor woman in an exhausting legal battle, which, happily, she won, with the assistance of the Institute for Justice.

How obvious it seems to me now. Cold, grasping, bleak, graceless, and dull; unctuous, sleek, pitiless, and crass; a pallid vulgarian floating through life on clouds of acrid cologne and trailed by a vanguard of fawning divorce lawyers, the devil is probably eerily similar to Donald Trump—though perhaps just a little nicer.

 

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