President Donald Trump delivered a predictably meandering and grievance-filled speech to a packed White House Press Briefing room on Tuesday. (January 20, 2026) He spoke for one hour and forty-five minutes to mark the one-year anniversary of his return to office. Trump’s communication staff called the thirty-one-page binder, which he threw on the floor within the first few minutes, “365 Wins in 365 Days!” Really? At the end of this marathon of madness, which included an interminable litany of lies and abusive rhetoric, he took questions from reporters. One reporter asked Trump if God would be proud of his first year in office. In response, Trump said: “God is proud of the job I’ve done.” I beg to differ strenuously. The only way that God would be proud of the job Trump has done is if God approved of the bullying and brutality of this monstrous administration, and I cannot imagine that God approves one bit. Indeed, I wonder what God thought when Trump said that the only limit to his power is his own morality, a morality that supported the murderous actions of ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, in the killing of Renee Nicole Good. I wonder too what God thinks of Stephen Miller’s claim that “might makes right.”
In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Miller, a top White House adviser, dismissed the international law treaty guarantees of the right of nations to self-determination, territorial sovereignty and independence, as “legal niceties.” Miller declared: “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.
David Adler, a columnist for Yahoo News, commented on Miller’s ideology:
Miller’s view is not new, but rather one of ancient vintage. It reflects the singular assertion and projection of raw, brutal power — might makes right — which dominated the Old World before the desire among nations to create a civilized order led to the establishment of international law which, among other things, sought to restrain warfare and promote peace and stability.
Miller’s platform is grounded in Thucydides’ classic, “The Peloponnesian War,” in which he described the war between Athens and Sparta (431-404 BCE), and revealed the savage world of power politics in the Athenians’ demand to the Melians that they join their empire, or face destruction. In the realm of international relations, the Athenians stated, “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”
Might makes right; justice only truly applies between equals. In such a world, the weak must submit to the demands of the strong, or they will face destruction as the Melians did, when their men were killed and children and women were enslaved.
There is no doubt in my mind that the thinking, policies and actions of this administration horrify God, and God is deeply offended by those who defend and support it.
David French, a columnist for the New York Times, wrote a thought-provoking piece recently, titled, An Old Theory Helps Explain What Happened to Renee Good. (January 18, 2026) In it, he puts forward what he thinks is happening among us as a nation. I ask your indulgence for this lengthy excerpt. He writes:
Last March, Aziz Huq, a University of Chicago law professor, wrote a prescient (and deeply disturbing) piece for The Atlantic that revived (Ernst) Fraenkel’s (dual state) analysis for this new American age.
Fraenkel had observed the rise of Nazi rule as a working lawyer and committed social democrat and noted that ordinary Germans enjoyed the benefit of what Huq describes as a “capitalist economy governed by stable laws” even as other parts of the German system changed into an engine of genocide and war.
The two components of the dual state are the normative state — the seemingly normal world that you and I inhabit, where, as Huq writes, the “ordinary legal system of rules, procedures and precedents” applies — and the prerogative state, which is marked (in Fraenkel’s words) by “unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees.” (The Supreme Court established this state with its presidential immunity ruling- my thought))
“The key here,” Huq writes, “is that this prerogative state does not immediately and completely overrun the normative state. Rather, Fraenkel argued, dictatorships create a lawless zone that runs alongside the normative state.”
It’s the continued existence of the normative state that lulls a population to sleep. It makes you discount the warnings of others. “Surely,” you say to yourself, “things aren’t that bad. My life is pretty much what it was.”
And so it is with the government. Trump is proving the wisdom of Madison’s words. Any legal or political system built around trust in the integrity of the president is doomed to failure.
Eventually the people will elect a bad and corrupt person to the presidency, and he will wield every tool, power and prerogative that was designed for good to build his own edifice of oppression and greed.
If we can endure this crisis, there will be a time of reflection and reform. It happened after the Civil War. It happened during the civil rights movement. It happened after Watergate. And when the time for reform comes again, it must focus on the abolition of the prerogative state.
Angels do not govern us — men and women do — and no man or woman should be immune from the rule of law. We’ve taken that idea for granted for far too long, to the point where we’ve abandoned the “auxiliary precautions” the founders knew we needed. Now we are paying the price in blood.
Do we think that God is proud of what we have so complicitly created, this prerogative state, the Caesar of our modern era, which sends masked and armed troops to our streets and our homes in search of our neighbors and friends? Do we think that God is proud of us as we permit the richest nation in world to cut aid to the poorest, sickest and hungriest? Do we think that God is proud of us as we sleepily permit the normative state of our lives to exist uninfluenced by a prerogative state that illegally bomb boats out of the water and violates national sovereignties with a claim of impunity, justified only by a corrupt, violent, and greedy ideology of Might Makes Right?
Monday was Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a national holiday that went unacknowledged by DJT, no surprise! Reverend King, in following Jesus Christ, was fundamentally opposed to and profoundly rejected the “might makes right” doctrine. On repeated occasions, he preached and argued that moral, non-violent action is superior to brute force. He maintained that while “right” may be temporarily defeated and “evil” may be triumphant, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” (adapted from the 19th century abolitionist minister, Theodore Parker) Love, righteousness and peace with prevail over raw power, and “the time is always right to do right.” Now is the time to do right; to engage and confront the prerogative state with courage, conviction and non-violent action. Now is the right time for each of us to make God proud of us by using our Christian voices to tell the nation what we value and our bodies in peaceful protest of what we will not accept.