TWO AMERICANS, TWO GODS

A year ago on Easter Sunday, President Trump shared on Truth Social what he called “the golden rule of negotiating and success“: “HE WHO HAS THE GOLD MAKES THE RULES.”

One year on, the gold has not made the rules. What it has made is war.

This Holy Saturday, Trump posted: “Remember when I gave Iran ten days to MAKE A DEAL or OPEN UP THE HORMUZ STRAIT. Time is running out—48 hours before all Hell will reign down on them. Glory be to GOD!”

“Glory be to GOD.” Appended to a threat of mass destruction against a civilian population, on the holiest weekend of the Christian calendar. The brutality of the invocation is the point. At the White House Easter luncheon on April 1, Pastor Paula White-Cain told the president: “Because He rose, we all know we can rise, and, Sir, because of His resurrection you rose up. Because He was victorious, you were victorious.”

The White House posted and then deleted the video within hours.

From Rome comes another voice, from another American. Pope Leo XIV declared on Palm Sunday that “Jesus is the King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.” Echoing Isaiah, he said, “Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood.”

On the occasion of Easter, let us recall a different philosophy:

“Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them,” said Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount, according to Matthew.

We quote from Matthew 5:

“Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.

“For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? Do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? Do not even the publicans so?

“Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.”

Both Trump’s “golden rule” and his administration’s invocation of God’s blessing for its ungodly war glorify raw power over principle. It is a worldview in which justice, truth, and virtue are irrelevant if you’re rich or powerful enough to achieve your aims. It denies the idea that rules should come from natural law, reason, and the consent of the governed, in favor of the “might makes right” outlook of Thrasymachus, so devastatingly countered by Socrates in the first book of Plato’s Republic.

A different concept of the “golden rule” is found in the work of Cotton Mather, whose Essays To Do Good were, excepting the Bible, the writing that most influenced Benjamin Franklin. “If I have been, as you seem to think, a useful citizen,” Franklin wrote in 1784, “the public owes the advantage of it to that book.”

In modernized spelling, Mather writes that there is much to be done, “that the miseries of the world may have remedies and abatements provided for them; and that miserable people may be relieved and comforted…. What an ample field among all these, to Do Good upon!”

Mather’s proposal: “That we resolve and study to do as much good in the world as we can.”

That is a true golden rule.

On Easter Monday, April 6, EIR will act to do good by convening an Emergency Roundtable Dialogue of Civilizations—“Is There Still Time To Prevent the War Against Iran from Escalating into a Global Nuclear Conflict?”—bringing together strategic thinkers and representatives from Iran, the United States, Europe, China, and the Global South, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and Iranian Ambassador Abolfazl Pasandideh. The premise: there is nothing more “impractical” than allowing this war to escalate into nuclear conflict.

The alternative is the Oasis Plan—reconstruction, development corridors, desalination, and a dialogue of civilizations that builds what cannot be bombed away.