On October 5, 2024, the Republican nominee for the presidency of the United States returned to Butler, Pennsylvania, to pick up where he had left off back on September 15^th when a mass-shooter interrupted the rally, injuring Trump’s ear. As I watched the October 5 rally, with Trump in the midst of an adoring throng, with his golden locks glistening under the afternoon sun, I was reminded of the scene in the movie The Ten Commandments, in which the Israelite whom Moses had delivered from Egypt gather to adulation and worship of a golden calf, an idol that Moses’s brother, Aaron, built for them from the crowds’ donated golden belongings.

As it is told in the Book of Exodus (Chapter  32, verses 1-35), when Moses went up Mount Sinai for 40 to receive Yahweh’s [God’s] commandments, the Israelite who stayed behind on the plain below grew restless in the face of his prolonged absence. So, in order for them to have an object of faith to focus on, the crowd asked Moses’s brother to build for them a god. Aaron took their golden earrings and other belongings and molded for them a god in the shape of a golden calf to worship. Not falling for the calf were the Levi tribe.          

John Stothoff Badeau (1903-1995) was a giant of a man, in accomplishments as he was in physical stature. His tall built with broad shoulders would obscure much of the blackboard behind him as he regaled his students with tales of his conversations with the Egyptian president Jamal Abdol-Nasser. In one of those conversations with Nasser, Badeau asked Nasser about how one becomes a leader. Nasser replied that the quickest way is to get in front of a seemingly leaderless crowd.  

The people that comprise today the so-called MAGA [Make America Great Again] movement are the lot that wandered aimlessly on the American political landscape in the post-Clinton era. These were the folks whom Obama had described in 2008 as embittered working middle-class of the old industrial towns “who cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/apr/14/barackobama.uselections2008. In 2016 Hillary Clinton called them a “basket of deplorables,” consisting of racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes, and Islamophobes, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basket_of_deplorables. Meanwhile the Republican Party itself started to rot from within in 2009 when the fiscally conservative Republicans went up against the party’s orthodoxy, thus creating the “Tea Party” movement, contributing to an ideological breach. The crowd of the disenchanted soon coalesced around Trump, a charismatic pop icon, just like the Israelite had gathered around the golden calf.   

The story of the golden calf did not end well for the calf; Moses burned it down upon his return from the mountain. Trump lost the 2020 elections. But will the burnt calf rise from the ashes of on November 5, 2024? It will depend in part on who among the Republican old-guard will do as the Levite did.