Duty to Warn: What Are We Doing?

I’d like to talk about the fact that Donald Trump is selling us out to the international jihadists, having already sold us out to Vladimir Putin.

This is really strange because I grew up in an evangelical right-wing family. In fact, my father, Francis Schaeffer, was—along with Dr. C. Everett Koop, Ronald Reagan’s Surgeon General—known as the father, if you like, of the evangelical anti-abortion pro-life movement back in the 1970s. And we moved in those circles. My parents would stay in the White House with President Ford. In fact, Mike Ford babysat my daughter when she was two years old 50 years ago. That is the circle I grew up in.

But the one thing that Republicans never did was bow the knee before the Russian state and the Soviet empire, let alone the jihadist Arab countries or the Muslim powers in Saudi Arabia, spreading their international Wahhabist propaganda. America was many things, but it was not a nation that empowered either jihadist or Soviet or Russian expansionism.

How things have changed.

We side with Vladimir Putin against Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian people. And now, Trump has taken a $400 million plane as a gift from a state that has been deep in financing jihadist causes around the world. He’s in Saudi Arabia, bowing before a royal family that had a journalist living in America murdered in one of their embassies—cut up with bone saws. Somehow that’s okay because Donald Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and the rest of the family, when not cashing in on Bitcoins they’ve sold to gullible MAGA followers, now are cashing in on their connections with the international terrorists who financed 9/11, provided 19 of the 20 hijackers, and who were forgiven because of the Bush family oil connections.

We attacked Iraq for no reason that had nothing to do with 9/11 and let the Saudis off the hook. So Trump is not alone in doing this, but now he is making business deals in Saudi Arabia, all of which will function to make his family even richer—a family that has become $1 billion richer since the election and now is adding a plane to their collection of private enterprise and cashing in grifter-like.

Oh, and of course he’s taken Elon Musk with him, who will also cash in as another grifter on a connection with Saudi Arabia that he already has—who helped fund his takeover of Twitter, turned it against the United States, made it pro-Saudi, and all the rest of it.

Where will this end? I have friends living in my neighborhood who voted for Donald Trump. Is this what they voted for? Did MAGA voters vote for him to get a $400 million plane that he wants to keep after he leaves office? Did they vote for him making deals with the Saudis, these international funders of jihadists across the world? Did they make a deal with him to back Vladimir Putin instead of Ukraine, to basically dismantle NATO and tell European allies that they are on their own?

I’m 72 years old. I’ve seen a lot of things, but I’ve seen nothing like this.

And by the way, this has nothing to do with politics. I would be saying the same thing as a Republican if I could have gotten in a time machine in the 1970s and 80s when I was a staunch evangelical right-wing Republican helping to form a movement out of which MAGA came as it stormed the Capitol. Mea culpa, yes—that had to do with my family laying the groundwork for religious right activism.

But fast forward to the present: would anybody have believed back in those days—Dr. Dobson and all the other right-wing activists who were going to Russia, trying to involve the Russian Orthodox Church in our culture wars and all the rest of it—that Donald Trump would abandon American interests and make deals with the Saudis and the Qataris and these other people in the Middle East, funders of jihad globally, cut deals with them to his own personal benefit, undercutting American security internationally, undercutting our efforts against terror?

Would anybody have believed this? And why are liberals so quiet about this? Well, maybe because they’re scared of being accused of being Islamophobic or whatever. But the truth of the matter is, the Saudis and these other families are our enemies—enemies rooted back into a 1,400-year conflict between Islam and Christianity and the West.

Okay, the West has sinned too—the Crusades and all the rest of it. I am not saying that we are in the right and they are in the wrong. I’m not even commenting on Christianity as superior to or inferior to Islam. That’s not my point here. But right now in the world as it is, the Saudis are not our friends. They cash in on us, but they’re not our friends—nor are these families, these ruling non-democratic families in the Middle East we’re making deals with to get planes from, to be bribed by, that are buying Donald Trump’s Bitcoins to prop up his own billion-dollar wealth.

Nor are our friends here in this country like Elon Musk, cashing in on this as now Donald Trump is allowing all these agencies that should be regulating Tesla and SpaceX and Starlink to deregulate them, giving Musk what he wants.

These are grifters cashing in on you and me at the same time as cutting Medicaid to nine million people who are the most needy. At what point do MAGA voters, who will be dying of measles or their kids will, or their kids will be dying of flu because they don’t get vaccines—because of the craziness of Kennedy and what Trump has done in appointing these loonies—at what point will they look at our deals that he’s making for his own benefit with the Saudis and these Middle Eastern states run by people who finance jihadists, jihadists in suits, if you like, or in fancy robes, and say, what are we doing here with them?

At what point will someone say that you can’t back the state of Israel and back the chief financing of jihadism all over the world coming out of Saudi Arabia from their business communities, like the Bin Ladens and all the rest of them?

At what point will real questions be asked by people who consider themselves conservatives? Why are we sucking up to the Russians who are the historic enemies—not just of Europe, but of the entire world—and always have been with their wars? Against the Ottoman Empire, against Sweden. Peter the Great, who amused himself by torturing people with his own hands to death, whom Putin quotes. Or the Russian Orthodox Church that kept people steeped in a servile state of serfdom for centuries.

What are we doing giving away our own democracy and sucking up to these natural enemies of a democratic, free country where there’s free speech, where our leaders don’t cash in on their office?

No president in American history has been as corrupt as Donald Trump.

Everyone knows that is true—even MAGA voters. But they somehow wink at it and say, well, this is just part of the deal. But it’s not. And sucking up to the Saudis and to the Middle Eastern kingdoms and sucking up to the Russians is not what American presidents do.

When he comes home with his $400 million jet, when he comes home with Jared Kushner—billions of dollars in deals with the Saudis—and his friend Elon Musk—billions of deals with the Saudis—as taxes are lowered again for the billionaires, as deregulation allows Starlink to do whatever it wants, put up tens of thousands more satellites to corner the entire communications network for the globe—at what point does someone just scream: corruption, treason?

So right now, if you look at the news, you will see Trump sucking up to the international financiers of jihadism globally—and have been for the last 50 years. The Taliban and all the rest of it would not exist without the Saudis and their financing and their “spiritual leadership” with their Wahhabist extreme mullahs in Saudi Arabia.

Not all Muslims are extremists by any extent, and the majority are horrified by the Saudis and don’t want to be under their control. But what is Trump doing there?

It’s time someone said it.

And you know, this issue is very personal to me, since my son served in the Marine Corps at the beginning of the war in Afghanistan—two tours of duty, as well as one in Iraq. And you know, when he was sent out with other Marines to look for bin Laden, with a group that didn’t find bin Laden, what he was chasing was a Saudi who was financed by other Saudis, including some members of the royal family.

How have we come to the place where a Marine’s father can no longer be proud of his country because the president is selling us down the river for personal profit to the very people who financed the Taliban and the jihadists who were shooting at my son?

I come out of a right-wing evangelical background. I can just tell you right now that the right-wing evangelicals in the ’70s—like Pat Robertson and these others that I knew—the right-wing evangelicals who did things like the Moral Majority: this was not part of their program.

What has happened to MAGA? That it is now putting a president in the White House who’s literally lying down and personally profiting from and grubbing in the money trough of Saudi money and Russian money.

That’s what this is about.

It’s corruption.