Brendan Hoban: Trump’s bullying must not go unchallenged
Western People 11.2.2025 50 years ago, in the summer of 1975, in the bicentenary year of the United States of America, I spent six glorious weeks in sunny California. It was my introduction to the west coast of America. I was based in San Diego and visited San Francisco, Los Angeles as well as numerous […]
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Western People 11.2.2025
50 years ago, in the summer of 1975, in the bicentenary year of the United States of America, I spent six glorious weeks in sunny California. It was my introduction to the west coast of America. I was based in San Diego and visited San Francisco, Los Angeles as well as numerous golf courses.
In the six weeks, I never saw a drop of rain and, on my return to Keenagh in Crossmolina parish, I discovered that during my absence Ireland had also basked in wall-to-wall sunshine in that memorable summer of 1975.
My trip to America involved receiving regular explanations about life in California, not least about the phenomenon of the Santa Ana winds. These were generated (I was told) in deserts east of California and escaped towards the Pacific Ocean through gorges and valleys, accumulating speed and drenching places like Los Angeles with intense heat.
When the recent fires in California swept through parts of Los Angeles, I read that the devastation they brought with them was explained not just by the drought that preceded them but by the Santa Ana winds driving them relentlessly forward.
There is a cruel irony in the contradiction between the recent devastation of parts of Los Angeles and the belief of America’s new president, one Donald Trump, who suggests that there’s no such thing as global warming or climate change! It suits Trump, of course, for his own weird purposes, to ignore how fossil fuels are producing greenhouse gases and to crazily encourage everyone to ‘drill, baby, drill’ for oil.
In a recent editorial in the Catholic publication, The Tablet, the writer notes that victims of the Los Angeles fires have used the word ‘apocalyptic’ to describe the devastation they experienced with the implication that the word ‘apocalyptic’ might well describe the new President in that his ‘drill, baby, drill’ will become ‘burn, baby, burn’ and ‘not just in Los Angeles’. The editorial continues:
‘Los Angeles is a large-scale human tragedy. It is also evidence that it is not just the poorest parts of the world that will suffer from climate change. Los Angeles is a wealthy city in a wealthy country, and some of its richest inhabitants have lost their homes. Global warming is not just about them. It is about us’.
What a tragedy for the United States that at a time of such need they are inflicted with (or rather have inflicted themselves with) a President who is creating such a toxic atmosphere and raising the prospect of so much suffering in pursuit of such a crazed palate of policies: bullying Canada, Mexico and Panama and, unbelievably, trying to inflict the already harassed population of Gaza to a direct experience of ethnic cleansing.
Leaving aside the character of the man, if that word can be used at all in this context, winning the presidency has saved Trump from a prison sentence for his conviction in attempting to overthrow the result of the 2020 presidential election.
Incontrovertibly, the prosecutor Jake Smith shows that Trump was at the very heart of that conspiracy. It beggars belief that a president of the United States would with other conspirators fabricate a false list of electors to cast a doubt on the result of the election. It beggars belief that so many people were prepared to follow Trump’s example of lying. And it beggars belief that elements of the Republican party leadership to their shame did not challenge such a scam. Were there no adults in the room when Trump and his cronies were devising their subversion?
The Smith report is a devastating verdict on Trump and a clear proof that his lack of any sense of right and wrong will have devastating consequences for America and for the world. How did it all come to this?
It really does seem that, with so many capitulating so feebly to Trump’s bullying and his anarchic agenda out of fear or self-interest, Pope Francis seems to be the only one who is prepared to stand up to him.
How sad then to see the chair of the American Bishop’s Conference agreeing with Trump that there are only male and female. Where, a loyal reader wondered, ‘has that bishop being for the last 10-20 years?’ At least Cardinal Robert McElroy as archbishop of Washington is sending an important signal. McElroy, in a comment on ‘welcoming’ Trump’s inauguration specifically pointed out that capital punishment (the execution of those guilty of serious crimes) and deporting migrants were both against the teaching of the Catholic Church.
Trump will soon discover that McElroy is no pushover as he discovered with Bishop Marian Edgar Budde, also of Washington, and a bishop of the Episcopal Church. Dr Budde had the privilege of leading a prayer service in the National Cathedral in Washington to mark Trump’s inauguration with Trump and his Vice-President Vance and their spouses prominent in the front pew. She ended her sermon with these words:
I ask you to have mercy, Mr President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away and that you help those fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here.
Trump was furious and issued a stinging, personal attack on Bishop Budde calling her ‘nasty’, ‘ungracious’ and a ‘Trump-hater’, and demanding that she apologise. Budde quietly responded by saying that she didn’t demand anything of Trump but simply pleaded with him ‘to see the humanity’ of the people he was dealing with. She added: ‘I don’t hate the president. I pray for him and I don’t feel the need to apologise for a request for mercy’.
This brave woman deserves not to be left standing alone.
