Ex-Bush Official Blasts Trump’s Recent ‘Dehumanizing’ Rhetoric as a ‘Sickening Episode’ In The History Of American Christianity

Peter Wehner, a longtime Republican political operator and former speechwriter to former President George W. Bush, joined MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Monday to discuss a recent article he wrote about Donald Trump, which appeared to irk the 45th president over the weekend.

Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski noted that the article appeared to “set Trump off” as he attacked The Atlantic on Saturday in a Truth Social post following its publication. Brzezinski then read from Wehner’s article in The Atlantic titled, “Have You Listened Lately to What Trump Is Saying?”

Co-host Joe Scarborough then reacted to the article, saying, “You know, Pete, this is not a close call. What you just threw out there is not a close call. You and I grew up in similar backgrounds. We read from the same Bible. We learned from the same Bible. People can look at me and go, ‘Oh, Joe, he’s backslid.’”

Scarborough continued, adding:

Well, it’s not about me. It’s about reading the Bible and understanding what it says and understanding the conflict between Donald Trump and everything that Jesus teaches. Everything in the Beatitudes, everything in the Sermon Mount. You’ve got a guy that some self-professed Christians are following who talks about, well, terminating the Constitution, but he uses fascist attacks, like you said, to dehumanize his enemies. He says to staff members that his vice president deserves lynching. He talks about executing generals.

He mocks and ridicules an 82-year-old man who was brutalized with a hammer and almost killed. And Pete you just said it. What shocks me is not that Trump’s saying it. It’s the people who are laughing and cheering him on.

And I ask the question my parents would ask me, like if if I had done something like that, who raised you? You were raised better than that. Who raised you? And that’s the question I ask those people who are cheering on the assaults of 82-year-old men and the dehumanization of all political opponents.

“Yeah, that’s well said, Joe. It is a moral inversion, too, that we have seen the people who for most of their life have claimed one ethic, have not only wandered away from that ethic, but they’ve inverted it and they are now enthusiastically behind a person who in embodies is a kind of cruelty and dehumanization that is really unprecedented in American history,” Wehner replied, adding:

It’s the subordination of faith to politics, but not just politics, but a particularly malicious and malignant kind of politics. And I think it can only be understood in part through the frame of psychology that this is a kind of mass psychosis that’s that’s that’s happening. You know, David Hume said that that reason is that passions are a slave to reason. And I think that that’s what is happening.

I think passions are dominating. And this is a very combustible mix of hatred and of fear and of militancy. They have to elevate the threat of Joe Biden. They have to try and turn him into some kind of progressive woke warrior or, you know, AOC. And so they have to escalate the sense that that this is an existential attack on everything that they want. And I also think that this this actually brings forth a kind of psychic satisfaction that a lot of people. Who feel like they have been dishonored and discredited. And they see Trump as their, as he put it, their retribution. And they seem to get excited by that.

Scarborough agreed and doubled down on his previous statements detailing some of Trump’s more outrageous rhetoric of late.

“Yeah, look, I think that that’s eloquently put, Joe and I share your outrage,” Wehner replied, adding:

And I would say it’s doubly so for those of us who are the Christian faith, because this is an affirmation of the Christian faith, is doing tremendous injury. But this has happened historically. I mean, if you look through the 20th century, you see the German national church with Nazism, you see the Dutch Reformed Church with apartheid. You saw what happened in Rwanda — 90% of the country is Christian. Unfortunately, there is a long history of this dehumanization, these passions consuming people, including people of faith.

And that’s why I think there has to be such a pushback from others to try and in a sense, shake them and to say, do you know what you’re doing? Do you know what you’re a part of that you’ve jettisoned almost everything that you claim to most cherish in your life, to make inner peace with this man who’s a sociopath, an unfiltered sociopath. And he is undisguised. I mean, that’s the other thing which you’re getting at. He’s undisguised in who he is and what he wants to do. And that not only pushes him away, but it brings them toward him. And it’s just a sickening episode in the history of American politics, but also in the history of American Christianity.

Watch the full clip above via MSNBC.

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