The most sacred ceremony conducted at the Trump inauguration undoubtedly for Donald Trump personally, with its mystical meaning elevating him to his greatest height as an emperor, was the prayer for Fred Trump. Father Frank Mann, a retired priest from Brooklyn, offered a blessing to the ruthless real estate operator who made his fortune in the borough and bankrolled his son’s pilgrimage over the Queensboro Bridge into Manhattan to blow a half-billion dollars through six bankruptcies and the financial collapse of the Taj Mahal Hotel and Trump Castle casino in Jersey City, and a blessing for Fred’s wife, too, without whom “this day would never be the miracle that has just begun”.

Father Frank had struck up a relationship with Donald after he sent him a photograph of how he had weeded the Trump family gravesite at the Lutheran All Faiths Cemetery. A single tombstone marks not only Donald’s parents, but also Fred’s father and mother, Donald’s original immigrant grandparents – Friedrich deemed an undesirable in Germany – and Fred Jr, subject of Fred’s abuse that helped drive him into alcoholism and his early spot in the family plot. “From their place in heaven,” intoned Father Frank, “may they shield their son from all harm by their loving protection and give him the strength to guide our nation along the path that will make America great again”.

Fred had been Donald’s protector in Jersey, going so far as to buy the chips at the Trump Castle to try to erase his impecunious son’s debt, which earned Fred a fine from the New Jersey Casino Control Commission. The invocation of Fred still hovering as Donald’s protector from heaven canonized the ghost as a saint. But the notion that sainthood runs in the family is an Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition rather than a western Christian one. If Fred is a saint, then his radiance can be transmitted genetically to create a royal lineage, which also has an Eastern Orthodox history. In the Catholic tradition, beginning with Charlemagne, certain kings were designated servants of God on their upward trajectory to beatification.

Thus, the Trump inauguration featured a trinity – the father, the son and the Holy Spirit. God Himself was introduced from the podium by Franklin Graham, the evangelical pastor, who possesses an uncanny intuition of the Almighty’s purposes. “He changes the times and the seasons, he removes kings, he raises up kings,” said Graham. “Our Father”– not Fred this time – “today as President Donald J Trump takes the oath of office once again, we come to say thank you, O Lord our God. When Donald Trump’s enemies thought he was down and out, you and you alone saved his life and raised him up with strength and power by your mighty hand.” With that, Graham poured the rhetorical oil of divine anointment. “Be a killer, be a king!” Fred Trump had drilled into Donald.

On the frigid inauguration day, through unknowable divine intervention that had forced the swearing-in inside the rotunda of the Capitol, there were arrayed behind Trump on the dais the billionaires of his new oligarchy of what Steve Bannon called “techno-feudalism”, more prominently seated than Trump’s prospective cabinet, while gathered before Trump were the supine Republican leaders, the priestly justices of the supreme court who had granted him the dispensation of delay and “absolute immunity” that enabled him to evade trial........

© The Guardian