Why This Pastor Is Pro-Tariffs, Pro-Trump, and Pro-MAGA Despite the 401(k) Crisis
You’re sorry your 401(k) is down. I’m sorry you’re sorry. Here’s why it has to happen. Your 401(k) was never real money anyway, never real profits. Stocks have been inflated for decades because there was no alternative. William Devane and all those guys on Fox selling gold and silver were right. So were Ron Paul and Gary North.
Trump has been talking tariffs and reshoring for much of his public life. This was always his plan. You should’ve seen it coming and priced it in, especially after November 5, 2024.
Here’s a Frontline segment from May 2019, which includes old clips from Larry King on CNN. “They’re laughing at us,” Trump told King, referring back then to the Japanese. “We let Japan come in here and dump everything in our markets, it’s not free trade,” Trump told an 80s’-coiffed Oprah Winfrey. “He’s been saying the same thing for 30 years,” Marc Fisher, author of the biography, Trump Revealed, told Frontline’s NPR correspondent Laura Sullivan. Trump speaks in the “American vernacular,” Steve Bannon told Sullivan in the same segment. That vernacular is simple: Yes, China is laughing at America, but worse, America’s own elites laugh at America too — after having sold everyday Americans to our global competitors. America’s elites have also driven a progressive sexual agenda that mocks God’s law and defies the norms of the created order.
As an Episcopal priest, I was one of the last wage earners to have the kind of compensation package nearly every American family man once enjoyed. I had a defined benefits pension plan, family health insurance, free housing in a church-owned home, and a good cash salary. But I gave that all up when I resigned from the Episcopal ministry last year, because I won’t marry two men. It’s not that anyone was going to force me to do that, but I decided I could no longer be silent about the reasons why I won’t.
You see, America’s elite institutions like to tout their diversity, even their political diversity. To this day, progressive mainline Protestant churches assure their flocks that all are welcome, even Republicans, even Republicans who voted for Trump.
To be fair, there is some truth in it. Before I left the Episcopal Church, I was instrumental in getting The Episcopal Fellowship for Renewal off the ground. They’re a spin-off of Redeemed Zoomer’s Operation Reconquista, a Gen Z spawned, online and in-real-life effort to “take back” the mainline churches from progressive idiocy.
Late last year I was called to replant a historic Congregational Church in Woodbury, Connecticut. Founded in 1670, it affiliated with the United Church of Christ (UCC) in 1961. I’ve since teamed up with both the Puritans in the UCC (another a Redeemed Zoomer spin-off) and Faithful and Welcoming Churches (FWC), a group for “pastors, and laity who consider themselves ECOT (Evangelical, Conservative, Orthodox, or Traditional)” yet who remain in the overwhelmingly progressive UCC.
The Rev. Bob Thompson, the recently retired pastor of Corinth Reformed Church in Hickory, North Carolina and the driving force behind FWC, told me that there will always be members of the UCC who are evangelical, conservative, orthodox, or traditional, and that he plans to stand with them as long as he can.
He also said on a recent broadcast on his local NPR radio station in Wilmington, North Carolina that churches either “self-correct or die.” But the process of either self-correcting or dying is messy. Nothing is more dangerous than cornering a mortally wounded animal. You will get hurt. That’s what happened to me.
In my efforts to help the Episcopal Church self-correct, I found that elite tolerance for conservative thinking only goes so far. Sure, you can think that way, but don’t you dare preach that way and certainly don’t try to reform the church from within. America’s elite institutions, including its churches, form a patchwork system driven by perverse incentives.
Now, I find myself making only a bit more than I made in my first job out of college, nearly 30 years ago. My wife and I are on Connecticut’s Medicaid plan, but we still get to live for free in an old colonial-era parsonage. I had to cash in my 401(k) last year just to make ends meet. Again, all because I won’t marry two men.
So, forgive me when I say, whatever Trump does to dismantle the elite’s perverse incentive structure, I’m all for. After all, it was Big Law, hedge fund managers, and toy farmers who drove me out of my last church, elites who got rich producing absolutely nothing of value, in the so-called knowledge worker economy. It was and is perverse.
The church I currently pastor has — had — a very (very) modest endowment. I’m sure it’s much less now. That means we may not have as much time as we thought to turn things around. The pittance in my wife’s 401(k) is also down. I have 12 years of credit with the Episcopal Church’s pension fund. My current church pays nothing into a 401(k), nothing into a pension.
The local UCC Association isn’t happy I’m here. They say it’s because of my conservative theology, but I suspect it’s also because I’m willing to preach for less than their closed-shop minimums. That puts the whole network of their progressive sinecures at risk. You mean conservative UCC churches can hire Bible-believing ministers at will? Shhh…!
I’m 52. At 55 I could take early retirement from the Episcopal Church and get about $950 a month for the rest of my life. If I wait till 72, it might go up to about $2,000 a month. On the other hand, if Big Law, the hedge fund managers, and the toy farmers had let me put in a full 30 years, I would’ve retired at ~$6,000 a month, tax free. So, when my fellow Yalies in Big Law rush to LinkedIn to virtue signal about the “rule of law” and protecting “democracy” I have to laugh.
Where was Big Law when Trump was being lawfared, and the January 6ers sat in prison? It was men like Attorney Joseph McBride at The McBride Law Firm who took their cases. Back in 2021 I sent him $500 for his work defending Richard Barnett, who put his feet up on Nancy Pelosi’s desk. That’s when I could afford such extravagances.
“Before I took this case, I counted the cost,” McBride told the New York Post. “I knew it would be difficult and that I would make enemies. That is OK. I know deep in my soul that we are on the right side.” How much soul searching did Big Law do about Richard Barnett and hundreds of others like him? Big Law did no such thing because the nightmare wasn’t happening to them. Was Wall Street introspective after 2008? No. Executives took record bonuses the next year and then went right back to doing the same exact thing.
Now, for once, they’re feeling some discomfort. Their world’s been shaken. Trump is threatening their business model. Big Law, meet the Rust Belt. What does the “giant sucking sound” sound like inside the hallways of a white-shoe firm?
And while they still can’t see or hear the little guy, they’ll bemoan the plight of the “judges, lawyers, journalists, and university professors and students… [who] get little sympathy from much of the public” in the second Trump administration. To quote one William Jefferson Clinton, “I feel your pain.” Still, all of you should have been able to see that the economy these past 40 years was fake. Just like you should be able to see that Adam can’t marry Steve, that Jane is not Jim.
The stock market was always fake, at least the modern bull market we’ve enjoyed since the 1980s, has always been fake. That’s because Ronald Reagan, the sexually progressive governor of California (abortion liberalized, 1967; no-fault divorce, 1969) turned conservative darling and two-term president enacted what Christopher Caldwell calls the “generational truce” between his own World War II generation and the Baby Boomers. That truce was financed by the national debt. In other words, by not paying for anything.
Caldwell writes in his book, The Age of Entitlement:
At first, the American Baby Boomers appeared to be doing with little effort what other generations had managed to do only by the sweat of their brow. But that was an illusion. What they were doing was using their generation’s voting power to arrogate future generations’ labor, and trading it to other nations and peoples for labor now. Reaganism meant Reaganomics. Reaganomics meant debt.
That’s how a country loses 90,000 factories in a generation. Joe Biden would famously tell those displaced by this truce to “learn to code.” But Reagan said the same thing more or less, decades before, in a radio address explaining why he wouldn’t invoke tariffs to protect the American worker.
I’m Gen X and possessed of some of my generation’s trademark cynicism. We understood the Boomers and their truce with our grandparents, and we could see that the jig would soon be up.
Still, we had it good. I’m sure many of my classmates from Yale are millionaires by now. Probably without even trying very hard. They married, stayed married, delayed having children until they got their law degrees and MBAs. Maybe they have a few million less in their 401(k)s after Liberation Day, but they still have millions.
Anyway, this collapse was coming. Everyone could see it. The question is whether it was going to be on our terms or China’s terms. Trump has tried to put it on our terms. And that’s better for us in the long run and for our children.
This country might have a future thanks to Trump, but I also worry that it is too little too late and that we will never recover. I truly worry that my grandchildren and great grandchildren (if my line doesn’t die out) will grow up in a country that would be religiously, demographically, and materially unrecognizable to prior generations. Trump did not create this problem. Since the 1980s he has been saying exactly the same thing. He is 100% consistent. He’s actually delivering on what we voted for him to do. He promised tariffs on day one. No one should be surprised.
There’s no bait and switch with him. Unlike with every other Republican in my lifetime — including Ronald Reagan — whom I blame for most of this mess. Trump is the real thing. He’s the only one I’ve seen in my lifetime who’s ever really tried to help this country.
Now, my wife and I are figuring out how to live on $125 a week. That means baking Irish soda bread (only four ingredients) instead of buying expensive Ezekiel Bread English muffins (even though they’re healthy). She makes the dog his treats now. It means cutting down to one meal a day most days. It means cutting out most alcohol, except for a $14 bottle of Chianti on Sundays. The other week, she bought a large Ribeye for $100 at Costco. We cut it up, froze it, and now have steak on Sundays for the next six weeks.
I’ve already lost 15 pounds. My cholesterol was too high anyway, and my liver numbers were shot. Frankly, some belt tightening would do most Americans a lot of good. Look at so many of our sons and daughters. Totally dysgenic. Half of our teenagers have more than a few extra pounds on them and look like they could skip a few meals. RFK, Jr. calling Americans obese is only scratching the surface. He would do well to reinstitute his uncle’s campaign against soft citizens.
All of this and more was fueled by cheap credit and the financialization of the economy — the only driver of the fake stock market — and not actual productivity. Also, by usurious interest rates on credit cards. Who did this benefit? I will tell you. Big Law lawyers. Hedge funders. Toy farmers.
As I’ve often preached, the Lord’s prayer doesn’t say: “Give us this day our fully funded 401(k) plans and a stock market that always goes up and to the right….” It says, “Give us this day our daily bread.”
Wake up, pray up, America.
