Word 2
Last week, comedian Jon Stewart turned his withering gaze on the White House’s 27-year-old press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, who recently told reporters, “It’s frankly ridiculous that anyone in this room would even suggest that President Trump is doing anything for his own benefit.”
As she said this, Leavitt was wearing her signature necklace, a ginormous gold crucifix, so Stewart quipped, ”The more she lies, the bigger her cross gets. It’s like some sort of weird Pinocchio cross.”
Leavitt stopped wearing the crucifix the next day. Still, I was more gratified back in February when U.S. Representative Dave Min, who’s a California Democrat and also a devout Episcopalean, invoked the Bible to diss Leavitt in a tweet, calling her a “fake Christian, like so many in this Golden Calf administration.”
Min was referencing The Book of Exodus, which sees Moses leaving the Israelites for 40 days to receive the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. In Moses’s absence, his brother, Aaron, defies God and embraces a false idol, erecting a statue of a golden calf as he lies to his people, saying,"This is your god, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt!'" When he comes down from Sinai, Moses is so peeved that he incinerates the golden calf, and then mixes the charred remains into a vile watery concoction that he forces the Israelites to drink.
According to Google Ngram, the term “golden calf” was most popular in the nineteenth century. From 1820 on, its usage declined precipitously, but under Trump it’s been enjoying a renaissance. In October, a grassroots Christian social justice group, Faithful America, briefly floated a 15-foot-tall golden calf balloon on the National Mall before being stopped by police. “Why a giant golden calf?” the group said online. “Because it's the perfect metaphor for the way Christian-nationalist leaders like Lance Wallnau, Tony Perkins, and Franklin Graham worship the false idol of MAGA.”
