"There must be something truly, deliciously freeing in being able to entirely surrender oneself to the life of a unabashed charlatan. Most people, flawed though we all must certainly be, could never genuinely bring themselves to live the life of an inveterate, shameless grifter. We'd be too embarrassed by the grubby business it entailed; our facades would crack under not just the pressure of being confronted by angry naysayers but by the sheer misanthropy of relying on everyone around us to be the dumbest marks imaginable, every single day."
"You commit to being a scumbag, as a way of life. Without doing that, how else does a Christian "pastor" end up standing in front of a giant, 22-foot tall golden statue of Donald Trump at the entrance of a Florida golf course, blithely praising the guy who Tucker Carlson says might be the Antichrist, and manage to ignore the outrageous sacrilege of it all? My guy, it's the first commandment. It's pretty hard to miss! Even non-Christians have heard this stuff!"
"And yet, there he stood: Pastor Mark Burns, a personal friend of Trump's, a "spiritual advisor" to the POTUS and his administration since the very beginning of his first campaign for President in 2016, reveling in the glory of a huge, golden, Trump-shaped calf this week during the unveiling of the statue dubbed Don Colossus, outside the President's own Trump National Doral Miami golf course."
"The President, originally rumored to be in attendance for the unveiling, instead chose to merely call in to salute everybody engaged in blasphemy on the sunny afternoon, perhaps displaying a longer term memory than he's typically capable of in recalling that people were pretty pissed off when he recently posted an image of himself as Jesus."
A life of unabashed deception is portrayed as freeing for those willing to surrender fully to grifting. Most people would be too embarrassed to sustain the daily hypocrisy required to rely on others as gullible marks. An example is given of Pastor Mark Burns, described as a personal friend and spiritual advisor to Donald Trump since 2016. Burns is shown praising a 22-foot golden Trump statue outside a Florida golf course, while ignoring what is framed as sacrilege. The statue is presented as a modern “golden calf,” and the President is said to have called in rather than attend, while also being criticized for earlier blasphemous imagery.
Read at Jezebel
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]