“Frankly, Norway sucks. Norway has become a shithouse country, actually. I didn’t get the Nobel Prize even though I ended it. So I don’t want anybody from Norway. I don’t want anything to do with Norway.” — President Trump (transcript from the New York Times, October 26, 2026)
Last June, during a vacation, my husband and I found ourselves in the Tromsø airport, in the far north of mainland Norway, for a flight to Oslo. While we were in the security line, there was a Norwegian man just ahead of us and, though he didn’t have very good English (rare for Norwegians, in our experience), he wanted to engage in a little banter about the United States and our President. It was fairly clear that he assumed that we were not big fans of the current President of the U.S. (maybe because we were in Norway?), and he was eager to have a moment of commonality across our countries that we regular human beings can get along just fine without saying nasty things about each other. I was certainly eager to let him know that I did not vote for the current President and I do not share his views on pretty much anything.
The President is rather glib in his assessments about people and places, using language from one extreme to the other. I can’t recall any time when his opinions have fallen somewhere in the middle. And, most of his appraisals have something to do with how a person or country has treated him specifically— as in the case of his (mis)perceptions of Norway— or how he recognizes almost any kind of difference as threatening and not worth even a sliver of respect.
It’s one thing to list the many cruel, questionable, unsettling, and just plain wrong assessments the President has made over the course of the last decade as a political figure (and in the years prior as well). It’s quite another to reflect on the fact that this man who regularly, and freely, lobs terrible and vile remarks about other human beings has been elected President twice, the second time also winning the popular vote. In 2016, Mr. Trump won roughly 46% of the vote, with 62,984,828 votes. In 2024, he won 49.8% of the vote, with 77,302,580 votes.
More than seventy-seven million people voted for a man who, on tape, bragged about groping women, was convicted of sexual abuse and defamation, and doubled-down on the “Central Park Five” (or “Exonerated Five),” a group for whom Mr. Trump demanded the death penalty, even after the innocence of the five men was established.
As David Brooks has pondered: how could, in 2024, more than seventy-seven million voters not see anything morally disqualifying in a man who does not hide his misogyny, racism, his complete lack of decency?
This is a question of great significance, a question that must be considered— in a public and sustained way. At some point, Donald Trump will no longer be president and he will no longer be a political figure. What wreckage is he leaving behind? Or, what wreckage has he exposed that’s been there all along?
No matter what happens on Tuesday, on Election Day, this question is a momentous one. Whether there’s a blue wave, or not, we must spend time with the reality that we are no longer a country with a robust, shared moral compass. We are no longer a country that values, across the board, character and civility.
When I’ve asked the question about what good church-going people should be doing in the midst of this deeply concerning landscape, I get a lot of stunned and perplexed faces. What can any one person, or small group, possibly do?
For people of faith, gauging one’s ability to make a difference is simply not a faithful calculus. Sure, the landscape is daunting, especially for those whose families are filled with people who have joyfully embraced new-found opportunities to denigrate those who look and seem different. It’s a big job to set out to bear witness to loving God completely and loving our neighbor as ourselves. Yet, it is also too important not to be about this holy work.
As I often do, in times when the task seems much too big, I think about the stories at the end of each of the Gospels. Only a small number of women dared to witness the the crucifixion of Jesus. Most of Jesus’s close friends were either on their way out of town or locked in a room, fearing that they were next. Somehow, those deeply frightened people managed to begin the work that would eventually become the Christian church.
A quote attributed to Mahatma Ghandi provides a bit of inspiration in this regard: “Whatever you do in life will be insignificant but it is very important that you do it because you can’t know. You can’t ever really know the meaning of your life. And you don’t need to. Every life has a meaning, whether it lasts one hundred years or one hundred seconds.”
For many of us, what we are called to do is not actually all that different from how we are already living our lives. What’s necessary is to live in that way more intentionally and more determinedly, always on the lookout for opportunities to build up, rather than tear down, to walk in the way of love, in the footsteps of our Savior.
