Lest Ye Be Judged
Could Trump’s NSPM-7 crackdown lay the legal groundwork for the future prosecution of MAGA ringleaders?
Away in a manger, within the nativity scene outside St. Susanna’s Parish in Dedham, Massachusetts, there is an emptiness where we would expect to find the Baby Jesus and his parents, Mary and Joseph. In the place of the Holy Family, there is a sign reading, “ICE Was Here.” The St. Susanna’s nativity display serves as a shocking but necessary piece of political commentary at a time when Christians around the world honor a homeless, refugee family fleeing the oppression of a violent, narcissistic tyrant hellbent on snatching away their newborn child. It’s often said that the Christmas story is timeless. But the message of Christ’s birth seems more timeless and more timely than ever in 2025, as our nation comes to grips with the damage wrought by the first year of Donald Trump’s Second Administration.
Being part of a movement inspired by so-called Christian Nationalism, Trump’s followers would be aghast at the suggestion that their hateful, lawless, and mentally unhinged leader could ever be regarded as “anti-Christian.” Isn’t Trump the greatest defender of all things American, Christian, and Capitalistic?
That is the message behind Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence (NSPM-7), which explicitly instructs the Executive Branch to disrupt and dismantle all organizations whose “common thread” is “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity.” NSPM-7’s chilling effect on 1st Amendment rights, the widespread unconstitutional kidnappings by ICE, reckless threats to kill or jail members of the Democratic Party, amd the ruthless bombings of shipwrecked passengers in the Caribbean are just a few of the shocking shifts toward fascism that have caused many concerned Americans to ask not only how to stop Trump in the present but how to prosecute him and his henchmen in the future. Evan Stern’s American Nuremberg and Joe Wrote’s Dick Cheney Is Why Donald Trump Must Face Consequences provide compelling arguments for why and how to hold MAGA leadership accountable after this national nightmare comes to an end. Yet, like the original Nuremberg Trials, many proposed prosecutions of Trump and MAGA rely on a retroactive justice that imposes punishments on the perpetrators without a preexisting legal basis for their prosecution. But what if there already was a law that could be used against MAGA to hold them accountable for their crimes and dismantle their networks once Trump is out of power? What if NSPM-7 sets a legal precedent to prosecute MAGA as the nation’s main perpetrator of “Domestic Terrorism” and “Organized Political Violence”? What if NSPM-7 could be co-opted by a Democratic administration to hold Donald Trump and his cronies accountable for their anti-Christian cruelty and greed, their anti-American assault on Constitutional rights and the rule of law, and their anti-Capitalistic orgy of corruption and self-dealing?
MAGA is Anti-Christian
As the nativity scene at St. Susanna’s parish reminds us, Donald Trump has much more in common with the villain of the biblical Christmas story, King Herod, than he does with the homeless, refugee Baby Jesus. Donald Trump also stands in stark contrast to the adult Jesus, whose message of peace and justice bears no resemblance to the hatred, violence, and lawlessness at the heart of the MAGA movement. Christ tells his disciples that in the Kingdom of God, the poor, the hungry, the weeping, and the excluded are blessed (Luke 6:20-22). In America today, skyrocketing Medicare costs and tariff-fueled inflation have made the poor poorer and the hungry hungrier. Those who are marginalized because of race, gender, sexuality, or immigration status have become the favorite target of Trump, subjecting them to more exclusion and heartache than many could imagine a year ago. The most blessed in the Kingdom of God are the most oppressed in Donald Trump’s America.
But what about Trump’s self-proclaimed role as defender of the Christian faith? What about his exalted status among Christian Nationalist ministers in megachurches across the nation? Doesn’t Trump’s declaration that he was saved by God from a 2024 assassination attempt, his promotion of Trump-branded Bibles, and the AI-generated images of him in Papal attire suggest that MAGA is anything but an anti-Christian organization? Not at all. Throughout the New Testament, the Anti-Christ is portrayed not as an outright opponent of religion but one who cloaks himself in religion in an attempt to usurp the power of God for his own purposes. 2 Corinthians proclaims “Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light.” 2 Thessalonians describes the Anti-Christ as “man of lawlessness” who will “exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.” This is not to say that Trump is actually the Anti-Christ, just that his lawless, blasphemous self-aggrandizement bears far more similarity to the biblical Anti-Christ than the blue-haired, non-binary atheists that are the target of Trump’s “anti-Christianity” designation in NSPM-7.
It is not my place to judge the souls of others. I am not God. I am not Jesus Christ. But neither is Donald Trump, Pam Bondi, or Kash Patel. If they are determined to put the Department of Justice in God’s place to judge the souls of the American people, to say who is Christian and who is Anti-Christian, then they must heed Christ’s warning, “Judge not, lest ye be judged” (Matthew 7:1). By using NSPM-7 as a mechanism for the executive branch to judge the Christian virtue of Americans, the Trump Administration is setting itself up to be judged by the next regime for MAGA’s blatant anti-Christian violence and greed. Any tribunal using the actual teachings of Christ rather than the ravings of grifting fundamentalist ministers will rule that Donald Trump and his minions are an anti-Christian stain on American history.
MAGA is Anti-American
Make America Great Again…doesn’t get more pro-American than that, right? How could MAGA ever be considered anti-American? The answer to that question requires us to reflect on what it means to be an American. Throughout a nearly 250-year history, what set America apart was the fact that we were uniquely a country whose bonds were forged not by blood and soil but by shared principles and common ideals, such as democratic governance, freedom of speech and religion, the rule of law, etc. Franklin D. Roosevelt summed up this traditional idea of what it means to be an American when he declared, “The principle on which this country was founded and by which it has always been governed is that Americanism is a matter of mind and heart; Americanism is not, and never was, a matter of race or ancestry.” Even as the principal dismantler of the New Deal economic structure, Ronald Reagan, echoed FDR’s belief that becoming an American only requires a sincere embrace of our nation’s common principles: “You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”
Trump and MAGA claim to want to restore traditional American greatness. In reality, they are seeking to radically redefine what it means to be an American in ways that our forebears would undoubtedly condemn as blatantly anti-American. Within the Second Trump Administration, no one has played a more prominent role in MAGA’s obscenely anti-American redefinition of Americanism than J.D. Vance. During a July 5th speech at the right-wing Claremont Institute, Vance argued for a shift away from the traditional “creedal” view of citizenship (i.e., what makes us American is a set of common beliefs and principles) and toward a “heritage” view that emphasizes ancestry and culture as defining features of what it means to be a true American. “America is not just an idea,” Vance declared, “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.” As a Yale-trained lawyer, Vance is clever enough to avoid coming out with a full-throated endorsement of blood and soil ethno-nationalism as the defining feature of what it means to be an American. But the trajectory of Vance’s rhetoric is revealed in the Trump Administration policies that attack our traditional, creedal definitions of Americanism: e.g., ending birthright citizenship, detaining and deporting legal residents without due process, pardoning insurrectionists impeding free and fair elections, chilling free speech in the media and higher education through harassment and revocation of funding, etc. Vance is providing the ideological velvet glove to cover Trump’s iron fist that is currently smashing our traditional creedal definition of Americanism in favor of a concept of nationhood based on common ancestry and culture. Just as MAGA’s definition of what it means to be a Christian completely contradicts the teachings of Christ, MAGA’s definition of what it means to be an American completely contradicts the words of our Founding Fathers and our greatest modern presidents. In the right hands, NSPM-7 could be used to root out MAGA extremism as one of the most dangerous and violent “anti-American” forces in the country.
MAGA is Anti-Capitalist
To the MAGA faithful, Donald Trump is seen as the shining face of American Capitalism - billionaire real estate mogul, branding genius, reality TV star, social media savant, businessman extraordinaire. To his critics on the Left, Trump is the face of all that is wrong with American Capitalism - the greed, excess, and cruelty of the system incarnated in orange flesh and cold blood.
Trump can rightfully be seen as the face of America’s current economic system, but to call that system “Capitalism” is to give too much credibility to the economic processes that brought about Trump’s riches and too much respect for the man who hijacked those processes to his own benefit. Calling our economic system Capitalism suggests that the wealthy, like Trump, reached their status through determination, innovation, and successfully catering to the needs of the consumer in a way that is more efficient and effective than the competition. In reality, Trump has been a serial failure at business, having racked up six bankruptcies. Trump’s wealth is a product not of ingenuity and hard work, but of inheritance, flagrant breach of contract, unending litigation, tax breaks from government allies, social media provocation, and fraudulent self-promotion. Over the past year, the Trump family has seen its greatest increase ever in net worth, not by providing anything of value to society but by using their political and media clout to promote various sleezy crypto projects that have invariably increased the wealth of Trump and his inner circle at the expense of nearly every MAGA supporter who fell for the scams. Trump’s personal wealth is not the result of skillfully playing by the rules of Capitalism but rather his ability to thrive in our actual economic system, a unique strain of oligarchic parasitism I have labeled Collusionism.
Trump has also proven a threat to idealized Capitalism, not just in his personal conduct, but also in the policies he has enacted over the past year. From erratically transactional tariff schemes that have wreaked havoc on world markets to using taxpayer money to purchase shares in companies like Intel and MP Materials to negotiating a “golden share” for himself in Nippon Steel after allowing their acquisition of US Steel, Trump’s deviation from the principles of idealized Capitalism has drawn the ire of free market libertarian purists like Rand Paul and the Cato Institute. In the same way that MAGA’s fraudulent brand of Christianity and Americanism will do far more damage to faith in God and Country than could ever be inflicted by a flag-burning atheist, MAGA’s scam version of Capitalism will inflict far more damage on Americans’ faith in our economic system than the efforts of all the country’s Socialists and Marxists combined.
Whether anyone with the guts to prosecute MAGA leadership would even care about protecting the ideals of American Capitalism is a valid question. But assuming those determined to punish Trump valued Capitalism at all, the “anti-Capitalism” clause of NSPM-7 could be invoked to punish MAGA for substituting the rule of law, fair competition, and laissez-faire principles for outright corruption, corporate favoritism, self-dealing, and erratically transactional trade protectionism.
Light in the Darkness
The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned. (Isaiah 9:2)
The message of Christmas is one of rebirth, of seeking light even in the darkest times. More and more Americans are waking up to the fact that we are now living in a land of deep darkness. To maintain our faith in ourselves and in our country, we must plan for a brighter future where those who have plunged us into this darkness face real consequences for their actions. To judge Trump and the MAGA elite by the terms of NSPM-7 is to hold them accountable by the terms they have imposed on the American people. The punishments should be just and merciful, but without real punishment for the MAGA ringleaders, there will be no justice or mercy in this land. Regardless of what you believe, I hope this holiday season you take some solace in the words of the Gospel of John, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” To overcome darkness, we must look to the light and the hope that those who caused so much pain are brought to justice, and that in Christmas Future, Mary, Joseph, and Baby Jesus will safely return to the nativity scene at St. Susanna’s Parish.