President Trump Attacked for Giving Offering While at Church in Las Vegas
The act of giving to God or the church isn’t just uncontroversial, it’s expected of Christians.
Tithing — the act of donating one-tenth of one’s earnings — appears rather early in the Bible, in Genesis 14. (For the benefit of those who don’t know, that’s the first book of the Bible, the one with Adam, Eve, Noah, Cain, Abel and most of the other figures in the Good Book you can probably identify who aren’t named Jesus.)
Over the centuries of the Christian era, donations from individuals large and small have kept houses of worship operating, fed the poor, established hospitals and maintained missionary activities in foreign lands. In short, as most churchgoers know, money from believers is what takes care of material needs so religious organizations, no matter what their faith, can attend to the spiritual.
I mention all this background because social media is now all (pardon the pun) atwitter about the fact President Donald Trump gave money at a church.
Trump had made a Sunday visit to the International Church of Las Vegas before a Carson City, Nevada, campaign stop in the battleground state, according to Fox News.
Here was Trump putting the money into the collection bucket:
WATCH: President Trump gives money during services at the International Church of Las Vegas. pic.twitter.com/ZJIKpHm2Sr
— The Hill (@thehill) October 18, 2020
The fact that this was news was probably the biggest piece of news from this non-event. But lo, the devils of social media came round about us, and the ingloriousness of their faux outrage shone round about us:
You can tell in his body language that he’s both extremely uncomfortable parting with his money, and he’s literally never been in a situation where he had to do this.
— ±???_???????± (@Doc_Moulton) October 18, 2020
He will count that as an expense to the campaign. Thinking about how to do sleight of hand. pic.twitter.com/04ZvcfXUPv
— Georgene Redmann (@gmredmann) October 18, 2020
A lot of the hilarity seemed to hinge on the fact that the president was counting the money (or claims that he’d only given $20 or $40):
Love a supposed billionaire who drops a $20 in the collection plate, then asks for change.
— Natalie Danford (@NatalieDanford) October 18, 2020
A “billionaire” who can only donate $20. Such charity. Wow!
— Liberal Wombat in TX (@LiberalWombat) October 18, 2020
Of course he’s counting, he needs to claim the amount on his taxes.
— F O (@frankovi2) October 18, 2020
Wait, wasn’t he either not paying and/or cheating on his taxes? I could have sworn that was the official line as of, say, three hours ago. Or does that not even matter anymore? Did it even matter in the first place?
Some of these insults barely even make sense and some of them were callbacks to Trump jokes that were profoundly old:
“I really don’t think these two tens I grabbed from the collection plate will help. But, what the hell…”
— Andrea Fed #BidenHarris2020Landslide ? (@andreafed) October 18, 2020
“I know they gave this to me to put in the collection plate, but I really want to use it on hamberders ☹”
— Pin Young (@PinYoungActress) October 18, 2020
In case you either forgot and/or missed it, “hamberders” is a reference to a deleted tweet from January of 2019, after the lunch where Trump’s White House served the then-college football national champion Clemson University Tigers hamburgers but misspelled it in the original tweet.
The Hill being what it is — a liberal-leaning Beltway publication with a large, liberal-leaning readership — the vast, vast majority of responses were slamming Trump along lines more or less as intelligent as those above.
But the president did have his defenders, even on The Hill’s Twitter feed.
Let’s be real. If Mr. President pulled out a wad of hundos instead, every armchair atheist in the country would be bitching about him doling out tax dollars to Christians.
There is no amount of money large or small that he could have pulled out that would’ve satisfied everyone.
— GunsNGunpla (@GunsNGunpla) October 19, 2020
Looks like he took a large chunk of cash out (between $80-$100) and counted it LITERALLY just to know how much it was. Didnt put any back. Maybe it was every thing he had on him. Why is this even an issue LOL
— molly ✝️ (@aquatzke) October 19, 2020
And he gives his salary too.. kept a dollar to stay legal..gave his whole pay back into education, national parks..and wrote personal checks to victims of hurricanes while standing in front of what use to be their house. He was always a giver.
— Lady Of The Kingdom (@Chlanandria) October 18, 2020
Oh please, if he’d given a wad of cash, you lot would say it was for publicity! Face it, he could walk on water and you’d say it’s because he couldn’t swim
— Missy (@missy_131) October 18, 2020
Every one of those defenders had a point.
From the early morning of Nov. 9, 2016, when Trump won the presidency, through the almost-four years that have followed, Democrats on Capitol Hill, and hideously biased mainstream media reporters have taken every opportunity to attack him in an effort to stain the legitimacy of his victory.
Anything close to bad news is hyped with breathless abandon — does anyone remember when his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland, was supposed to be the end of his presidency? That was in 2018.
On the other hand, anything that a sane person would consider good news is ignored or downplayed, like the roaring economy that, prior to the coronavirus pandemic, was setting employment records on a regular basis, especially among the groups that liberals claim to care about, like blacks and Hispanics.
So it’s not surprising that a president who has regularly donated his salary to the country’s good — helping veterans, fighting opioid addiction, battling the coronavirus — is mocked for a donation to a place of worship.
None of this should matter. The fact that it did should tell us everything we need to know about the left.
As that last Twitter post put it, if Trump walked on water, liberals would say he couldn’t swim.
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