Integrity beats double-speak every time

We should learn from bad examples (like this one from the Trump administration), lest we tumble down the same path

Daniel in the lions’ den, as depicted by artist Briton Riviere.

Truthful lips endure forever, but a lying tongue lasts only a moment. —Proverbs 12:19

Very few of my readers come to this blog for my opinions of the current US government. I’ve already explained in depth why I believe Christians in the US and elsewhere should not align with the present US administration. If you’re looking for critical views of Donald Trump, the Bulwark and Heather Cox Richardson offer a daily dose.

However, the US government and its president do offer vivid lessons of great value, albeit negative ones, about Christian integrity and character.

On December 4, the US government released its annual National Security Strategy document. Many others have commented on the document’s brash rejection of the established international order, its confrontational dismissal of European attitudes, its disinclination to defend Ukraine, and its support for restoring Russia’s “stability.” Gosh, even a Russian leader praised the document.

On the other hand, the document does highlight some uncomfortable truths about the cultural impact of migration. Indeed, should Sweden become 30 percent Muslim by 2050 (as the Pew Research Center has projected under a high-migration scenario), that shift would have enormous cultural and political implications.

I will focus on something else: the document’s systematic distortion of reality. Of course, politicians always try to tout their successes and minimize their weaknesses. But the Trump administration seems to have gone to a new level of double-speak.

Here are a few examples, with brief comments from me. The quotations come directly from the document.

“Not only did our elites pursue a fundamentally undesirable and impossible goal, in doing so they undermined the very means necessary to achieve that goal: the character of our nation upon which its power, wealth, and decency were built.”

Amazingly, a president who engages regularly in unrestrained rhetoric and who has pardoned the January 6, 2021, US Capitol rioters claims to be sustaining the nation’s character and decency.

“We want to maintain the United States’ unrivaled ‘soft power’ through which we exercise positive influence throughout the world that furthers our interests.”

Soft power refers to doing foreign policy through winning friendships and making allies, rather than through coercion or military force—i.e., hard power. How does a country that has imposed a capricious tariff system on much of the world, threatened to invade Canada and Greenland, and slashed global humanitarian aid claim to be maintaining effective use of soft power?

“We stand for the sovereign rights of nations,”

Tell that to the Canadians whose country Trump wanted to annex.

“In particular, the rights of free speech, freedom of religion and of conscience, and the right to choose and steer our common government are core rights that must never be infringed.”

The Trump administration has used its power to limit free speech on university campuses, and President Trump has personally bullied media organizations with lawsuits. Its Defense Department has adopted standards for media coverage that all reputable media organizations, even conservative-leaning Fox News, have refused to comply with.

These assertions in a strategy document are not an aberration; the Trump administration practices similar denial of reality elsewhere. In one recent instance, when an official report faulted Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for his use of an insecure communication method, Hegseth responded by stating falsely that the report was a “total exoneration” of his actions.

In a particularly ironic instance of double-speak, after a suspect was arrested for allegedly planting pipe bombs in Washington, DC in January 2021, Kash Patel, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, declared, “When you attack American citizens, when you attack our institutions of legislation, when you attack our nation’s Capitol, you attack the very being of our way of life.” He apparently forgot about the 1,500 people who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and whom President Trump pardoned.

Finally, after movie director Rob Reiner and his wife were murdered on December 14, Donald Trump outdid himself by announcing, in a characteristic social-media rant republished by the White House, that Reiner’s death was related to his strong opposition to Trump.

How should Christians reflect on these events?

The Bible describes many government leaders who paralleled Trump’s “stark raving maniac” behavior. Daniel served a couple of them. He seems to have spoken respectfully even to a king who had thrown him to the lions (Daniel 6:21). Similarly, Peter urged Christians to “honor the king” (1 Peter 2:17) at a time when the Roman emperor was not a particularly good person.

Today, for Christians in many countries, respecting their rulers is a necessary act of self-preservation. But the Bible discourages believers from denying the truth, even when threatened with death (Daniel 3:18).

Christians who supported Donald Trump did so mainly because they thought his policies were consistent with Christian values. But as they continue to side with “a false witness who pours out lies” (Proverbs 6:19), they undermine any claim to integrity. If we define truth as whatever we want it to be, how can we claim that the gospel is objective truth for everyone?

If you compromise your integrity in a small way today, tomorrow the devil may invite you to do so in a slightly larger way. As uncomfortable as it may sometimes be, the only way to avoid the appearance of evil (1 Thessalonians 5:22) is to resist ethical compromise the first time and every time.