This essay is the second in a trilogy of essays entitled as a whole “Evangelicalism and the Kingdom of God.” The third and final installment is scheduled to release on August 30.
The first rule of dealing with a sociopath is: don’t. Just don’t. To the extent that you seek to deal with them, you will end up playing their game on their terms, and this will always lead to your loss, even when you win. This maxim does not mean that you should not interact at any cost with someone with sociopathic tendencies, but it is to say: don’t try to deal with them, and to the extent that you can minimize interaction with such a person, that might be a wise course of action. At the same time, this aphorism relies on a bit of equivocation in the meaning of the word “deal,” because while we might have options to walk away from “wheeling and dealing”—that is, giving something of ours in negotiations—with someone with sociopathic tendencies, it is often the case that dealing with—that is, confronting the fact of and knowing how to respond to—someone with sociopathic tendencies is very often not a choice for many people.
Unfortunately, this rule, including its distinction between the two different senses of “dealing,” seems particularly relevant to the current situation in America. The evidence of President Trump’s sociopathy—if not (debatably) psychopathy given his abuses of power as commander-in-chief of the nation’s military—has only continued to accumulate with his second presidency and the actions of his administration. Putting aside the extremely antisocial behavior of his personal life in which he has raped (according to the common meaning of the term) and sexually assaulted women[1] and has repeatedly been involved in fraudulent activity,[2] the actions of his second presidency such as the anti-constitutional attempt to end birthright citizenship,[3] his abuses of power to target perceived political detractors,[4] his unconscionable mass deportations that violate the U.S.’ moral obligations[5] as well as the law,[6] and his patently immoral use of force abroad[7] all demonstrate a blatant disregard for the dignity, rights, and even humanity of his fellow human beings (and even this list of examples is severely incomplete).
However, just because we have to deal with—that is, confront and respond to—the fact of President Trump’s office does not mean that we have to deal—that is, offer what is ours in negotiations—with President Trump or the worldly power he currently wields as President. On the contrary, in the face of the appalling evil we are seeing perpetrated under the current administration, there still remains hope for redemption, a path forward, and ultimately the triumph of truth, beauty, and goodness in the reign of Jesus of Nazareth, crucified, raised from the dead, and enthroned by God as King over the entire cosmos even at this moment. Because Jesus is Lord, and Caesar (read: President Trump) is not, the children of God can have confidence and hope as they walk in allegiance to Jesus, trusting that the answer to the evil we are seeing is not in ourselves but in the present and coming reign of Jesus, the crucified and risen Messiah.
There are two prongs expressed within this thesis that will be addressed in reverse order: first, the answer to the evil we are seeing is not in ourselves, and second, the first prong does not negate our call to action but rather reorients it toward following Jesus, who is the answer. Put simply, there is no need to dethrone President Trump because he’s not even on the throne to begin with, but that does not leave us with nothing to do.
We Are Not the Answer
The Cosmic Proportions of Our Struggle
In order to understand that the answer to this evil does not reside with us, we must recognize that the problem of President Trump’s evil and lawlessness that the U.S. is encountering at this point in time is bigger than President Trump. Contrary to the false, often unstated, and tempting assumption that if President Trump were not President, then everything would be fine, even if President Trump were impeached, expelled from office, imprisoned, etc., the problem would not be gone. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago, “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”[8] This is a contest between good and evil on a cosmic scale, and consequently, the solution must reflect the cosmic proportions of our struggle. Because of this, there are several potential answers that we might be tempted to look to that are not the solution.
The Answer is Not in Violence (Coercive Force)
First, the solution is not fighting fire with fire, or put more precisely, fighting fire from hell with more fire from hell, including but not limited to immoral violence. This is a categorically wrong path that some people have sadly succumbed to embracing as a solution, as the number of assassination attempts on President Trump illustrates.[9] As much as President Trump has committed and led the commitment of appalling evil, that does not mean that seeking to murder him is the solution—far from it. Despite his callous disregard for the law, that does not mean that we should adopt his same contempt for the law in addressing this crisis that he has helped create in our country. Thinking otherwise relies on a tunnel vision that fails to recognize that this current cultural moment is part of a bigger struggle between good and evil, and that to use evil to overcome evil is ultimately to side with evil and so to lose the battle. To borrow a paraphrase of Friedrich Nietzsche from a close friend, “Beware in slaying the monster, lest you become the monster.”[10]
The Answer is Not in Politics (Collective Force)
In addition, the fact that this problem is bigger than President Trump means that the ultimate answer cannot be found in aligning oneself with a this-worldly political party or movement, no matter how morally right that party or movement may or may not be. In this polarized political climate where conservatives are endorsing President Trump’s immoral actions and liberals are acting like they’re better than that with distaste and disgust for conservatives, consider this: have you ever asked whether both sides might be getting played by the devil? While Trumpian conservatives endorse, rationalize, or ignore immoral, state-sanctioned violence, such as the murders of Geraldo Lunas Campos,[11] Alex Pretti,[12] and Renee Nicole Good,[13] liberal groups have decided to fight against the political regime, with even some individual liberals turning to violent solutions in the name of anti-fascism, as exemplified not only in the tragic murder of Charlie Kirk but also in the many hateful comments from liberal perspectives that followed his passing.[14] Meanwhile, each side clamors for our loyalty and adherence, telling us that we need to join them in order to be on the right side of history, but have we considered that both sides might be compromised in their position, that two wrongs don’t make a right?
The problem with this approach is that, as has already been said, the line between good and evil runs through each one of us. We as humans seek to ignore the intolerable fact that there is evil in us by aligning ourselves with a side that we believe is in the right. This allows us to suppress and avoid the truth of our own brokenness and evil by projecting it onto the “other” side. As a dear friend once told me, “We other in others what we other in ourselves.” As a result, the degree to which we are afraid of darkness (including the darkness of “the other side”) is the degree to which we haven’t faced ourselves.
A Common Presupposition of These Non-Solutions
I believe that these potential and tempting non-solutions are not viable or worthy because they presuppose that this world is all we have to fight for. Fighting fire with fire in addressing an evil political regime—even with political violence—is an act of desperation based in the belief that this is all there is. Ultimately, this just makes both camps into different sides of the same coin stamped with Caesar’s image (see Matthew 22:20-21), because both sides, conservatives and liberals alike, respectively, are either exploiting or fighting for control of worldly political power. Thankfully, Jesus offers us a third way, telling us that his “kingdom is not of this world,” and that his “kingdom is not from here” (John 18:36, LEB). Because Jesus’ upside-down kingdom does not just eschew but subverts the world system, which includes worldly political power and which the Apostle John describes in his first epistle as lying “in the power of the evil one” (1 John 5:19, LEB), there is hope for operating on a different plane—maybe even in a different dimension—than the world, thereby enabling us to avoid the false dichotomies that seek to entrap us into one side or the other.
Finding the Answer in Jesus
Hope for Us and for the World
This hope for not just avoiding but also subverting the “two wrongs make a right” logic of the world lies simply in following Jesus, confessing and rejoicing in the good news of his present and coming reign. Following Jesus begins with acknowledging that Jesus is Lord and is fulfilled in our obedience to Jesus and his teachings in the tangible circumstances and choices of our lives as an expression of giving our complete and whole allegiance to him.[15] This is another way of describing being conformed to his image (see Romans 8:29) and living out our union with him, by which we, those who are in Christ, are saved unto eternal and resurrection life (see Romans 6:5). This is our hope for not getting trapped into the false dichotomies of the world. (Note also how this vision for our future busts the tunnel vision thinking that this world is all there is, which is a presupposition of the desperation undergirding the previously identified non-solutions trending as popular at this point in time.)
However, to be clear, as much as our hope for escaping worldly false dichotomies is in following Jesus, hope for the world is not in our following Jesus. Rather, the hope for the world is in the truth and reality of Jesus’ kingship, which is independent of whether we as particular individuals follow him or not. In other words, Jesus is Lord regardless of whether I myself acknowledge him as such, and the former, not the latter, is the hope for the world.
The Good News
Jesus’ enthronement as king is good news because he is the only one who can make things right. As much as we are participants and have a part to play in this drama, we are not the author of this story, and consequently, we are not the solution. If not one of us has or even could solve the problem of evil within us, then what makes us think that any one of us or all of us together could solve the problem of evil outside of us—that is, in others? How can one who has not figured things out for oneself figure things out for another? The impossibility of this is evidenced by the fact that addressing the evil outside of us (which is really the wrongdoing being committed by other humans around us) is simply an extension of addressing the evil inside of us, because in addressing the evil being perpetrated around us (i.e., by others), it is our response that matters, and it is what is inside of us—both good and evil—that shapes our response. But if we have evil inside of us, we in our own power will not be able to address the evil outside of us without it being a malformed response, which will simply result in perpetuating the cycle of evil.
In light of all this, we need someone who himself overcame evil with love and was able to do so because he himself had no part in evil and evil had no part in him. That person is Jesus, who was crucified to death, buried, and raised to a qualitatively new—that is, resurrected—life, and then ascended into heaven where he now rules with “all authority” at the right hand of God (Matthew 28:18, LEB; see also 1 Corinthians 15:1-5; Hebrews 12:2).
Applying This to Us
So how does all this relate to dealing or not dealing with President Trump? In response, the answer is not in ourselves because we ourselves are part of the problem. In this cosmic contest between good and evil, there is only one person who can and will triumph over evil, and that person is Jesus. Our hope is—and can only be—in him, which means that our call is to submit ourselves to his reign so that we can share in his resurrection life in the eternal age. This reorients our action so that it is guided by enacted allegiance[16] to Jesus the King, the one who is actually on the throne and the only one who can ultimately set things right. This does not alleviate us of the responsibility to act (see James 1:25) but instead imposes on us a more costly option for acting that involves commitment of our own bodies to the task before us in enacting our allegiance to Jesus as King.
Surprisingly, or perhaps not so surprisingly, this reorientation is exactly what the world needs to find peace. The wrongdoing that President Trump is promoting and committing is not just the overt malfeasance of those acts listed in the introduction above, among others. The deeper evil that he perpetrates is getting people to react to him. When they do this, they reorient their personal universe, their reality around him—even if in opposition to him—but this can only result in a skewed position, for how can you get an accurate measurement from a mis-placed instrument? This explains, unfortunately, how both those aligned with President Trump and those aligned against him have both been misaligned. Thus, if you want to resist the evil that President Trump is perpetrating, reorient your reality around Jesus and his kingdom.
Incidentally, this will also help you resist the blatantly immoral acts that President Trump’s administration is perpetrating. When you start following Jesus’ teachings, such as really simple but really hard things like loving your neighbor, even your enemy (see Matthew 22:39 and 5:44), this will work as an antidote to the acrimoniousness, among other maladies, spreading throughout our society. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,”[17] but by the same token, one might say: an act of love anywhere is an act of resistance against evil everywhere.
This love that we are called to is not just a nice sentiment. It is the way of Jesus, which entails subversive suffering in solidarity with the oppressed. As Archbishop Oscar Romero, who himself would become a martyr, said at a funeral mass for the martyred Father Rafael Palacios, “We can present along with the blood of teachers, of laborers, of peasants, the blood of our priests. This is communion in love. It would be sad, if in a country where murder is being committed so horribly, we were not to find priests also among the victims. They are the testimony of a church incarnated in the problems of its people.”[18] Loving our neighbor should and in all likelihood will include acts of self-sacrifice where we refuse to aid, abet, be complicit in, or be a bystander to evil, even if it involves personal cost to ourselves; show love for those who are victimized by the empire; and speak truth about the wrongdoing we are witnessing, but ultimately, all this must not be just about defeating evil, though the evil needs to be addressed. Even more so, it must be about the triumph of truth, beauty, and goodness in the love of Christ.
In Review
This essay began by advising that the best way to deal with President Trump is not to do so but also by observing that it is impossible to not acknowledge the impact of the fact that Donald Trump is currently the duly elected President of the United States of America. But in the end, maybe neither of these points really matters. When we reorient our reality to the person, and particularly the enthronement, of the Lord Jesus Christ, we see that our hope is not in ourselves nor in this world. Rather, our hope is in Jesus, as the Apostle Paul declared, “For our commonwealth exists in heaven, from which also we eagerly await a savior, the Lord Jesus Christ” (Philippians 3:20, LEB). At the same time, placing our hope in Jesus moves us to act in accordance with his Way, even when that involves self-sacrifice, thereby subverting the evil of this world system. In the end, we are called to follow the one person who can set things right, and that person is Jesus, the King of Kings (see Revelation 19:16). Our hope must be set on him and him alone, even as he has declared: “And the one seated on the throne said, ‘Behold, I am making all things new!’” (Revelation 21:5, LEB).
[1] Jack Queen and Luc Cohen, “Trump Sexually Abused Writer E. Jean Carroll, Must Pay Her $5 Million, Jury Says,” Legal, Reuters, May 9, 2023, https://www.reuters.com/legal/jurors-set-deliberate-civil-rape-case-against-donald-trump-2023-05-09/; Aysha Bagchi, “Did Donald Trump Rape E. Jean Carroll? Here’s What a Jury and Judge Said.,” USA TODAY, January 29, 2024, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2024/01/29/donald-trump-rape-e-jean-carroll/72295009007/; Michael Barbaro and Megan Twohey, “Crossing the Line: How Donald Trump Behaved With Women in Private,” U.S., The New York Times, May 14, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/15/us/politics/donald-trump-women.html.
[2] Jonah E. Bromwich et al., “Trump’s Company Gets Maximum Punishment for Evading Taxes,” New York, The New York Times, January 13, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/13/nyregion/trump-organization-tax-fraud.html; Ben Protess et al., “Trump Convicted on All Counts to Become America’s First Felon President,” New York, The New York Times, May 30, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/30/nyregion/trump-convicted-hush-money-trial.html; Steve Reilly, “USA TODAY Exclusive: Hundreds Allege Donald Trump Doesn’t Pay His Bills,” USA TODAY, April 25, 2018, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/06/09/donald-trump-unpaid-bills-republican-president-laswuits/85297274/.
[3] Tierney Sneed, “Judge Blocks Trump’s ‘Blatantly Unconstitutional’ Executive Order That Aims to End Birthright Citizenship | CNN Politics,” CNN, January 23, 2025, https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/23/politics/birthright-citizenship-lawsuit-hearing-seattle.
[4] Ryan Lucas, “Federal Judge Strikes down Trump Order Targeting the Law Firm Perkins Coie,” Politics, NPR, May 2, 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/05/02/nx-s1-5385355/perkins-coie-trump-executive-order-law-firms.
[5] Maya Yang, “Over 145,000 US Children Separated from Parents since Trump’s ICE Surge, Study Estimates,” US News, The Guardian, May 18, 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/18/children-parents-detained-trump-mass-deportation-push; Ruth Maclean et al., “U.S. Migrants Deported to Congo: ‘Where on Earth Is This Place?,’” World, The New York Times, May 15, 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/15/world/africa/deportation-congo-migrants-trump.html.
[6] “How ICE Defies Judges’ Orders to Release Detainees, Step by Step,” POLITICO, February 10, 2026, https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/10/ice-immigration-detention-court-orders-00771727.
[7] Ben Finley et al., “A Timeline of U.S. Military Escalation against Venezuela Leading to Maduro’s Capture,” PBS News, January 3, 2026, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/a-timeline-of-u-s-military-escalation-against-venezuela-leading-to-maduros-capture.
[8] Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1, 1918-1956]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (HarperCollins, 2020), 102, https://www.hoopladigital.com/ebook/the-gulag-archipelago-[volume-1]-aleksandr-i-solzhenitsyn/13486319.
[9] Al Jazeera Staff, “Timeline: Trump Assassination Attempts and Security Incidents,” Al Jazeera, April 26, 2026, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/26/timeline-trump-assassination-attempts-and-security-incidents; James Piazza, “Latest Attack Threatening President Trump Reflects Rising Political Violence in US,” with Alfonso Serrano, The Conversation, April 26, 2026, https://doi.org/10.64628/AAI.rpntgqkcf.
[10] “A Quote by Friedrich Nietzsche,” https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/272885-beware-that-when-fighting-monsters-you-yourself-do-not-become.
[11] Michael Biesecker and Ryan J. Foley, “Autopsy Finds Cuban Immigrant in ICE Custody Died of Homicide Due to Asphyxia,” AP News, January 21, 2026, https://apnews.com/article/ice-immigration-detention-death-texas-f04b5cb76f175255e58b947f0e14bc12.
[12] Ximena Bustillo, “Internal Review Contradicts White House Narrative of Pretti’s Death,” Immigration, NPR, January 28, 2026, https://www.npr.org/2026/01/27/g-s1-107608/alex-pretti-death-internal-review-immigration.
[13] “Renee Nicole Good: Who Was the Woman Killed by ICE in Minneapolis?,” January 13, 2026, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1jepdjy256o; Bill Chappell, “What We Know One Day after the Killing of Renee Good by an ICE Agent in Minneapolis,” Minneapolis Shootings and Protests, NPR, January 8, 2026, https://www.npr.org/2026/01/08/nx-s1-5671061/minneapolis-ice-shooting-noem.
[14] Odette Yousef, “Why Did Alleged Assassin Target Kirk? Evidence Paints Complicated Picture,” National, NPR, September 18, 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/09/18/nx-s1-5544446/charlie-kirk-suspect-shooter-motive; Anna Betts, “Dozens of Workers Penalized after Charlie Kirk Shooting, from Journalists to Jimmy Kimmel,” US News, The Guardian, September 19, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/19/workers-disciplined-charlie-kirk-shooting.
[15] Matthew W. Bates, Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King (Baker Academic, a division of Baker Publishing Group, 2017), 92.
[16] Bates, Salvation by Allegiance Alone, 92–93, 98.
[17] Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” April 16, 1963, https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html.
[18] James R. Brockman, Romero: A Life: The Essential Biography of a Modern Martyr and Christian Hero, 25th Anniversary Edition (Orbis Books, 2005), 177.
Photo credit: By Unknown artist – https://icons.pstgu.ru/icon/2036, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=489650