Tucker Carlson Questions Christian Support for Trump After Venezuela Oil Seizure and Inauguration Day Bible Rejection
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Tucker Carlson Questions Christian Support for Trump After Venezuela Oil Seizure and Inauguration Day Bible Rejection
Tucker Carlson examines a critical moment when Christian supporters should have questioned their backing of Donald Trump. Following Trump's explicit justification for removing Venezuela's president to seize oil and his deliberate choice not to place his hand on the Bible during his inauguration oath, Carlson argues these actions reveal a fundamental rejection of biblical principles that should concern Christians. He contends that Trump's open endorsement of taking resources by force violates the foundational Christian and American prohibition against theft, implicating all supporters as accessories to an immoral act that sets a dangerous precedent for international relations.
Millions of American Christians voted for Donald Trump in the last election, and millions more Christians around the world rooted for him to win. Many still support Donald Trump. The reason for this support was never his personal piety. Trump, to his credit, has never claimed to be personally pious or especially religious in any sense. Christians voted for him and still support him because he seemed like a protector, someone who might save them from the growing and highly aggressive agnosticism, if not atheism, of the technology class, the bureaucratic class, godless nations, and nations of other religions that oppose us.
Donald Trump seemed like someone who would protect Christians, who was committed to the free exercise of religion in this country, and who was also committed to ending abortion. Whether or not he himself opposed abortion, whether he was pro-life in any meaningful sense, didn't seem to matter. He would appoint justices that opposed abortion, that thought Roe v. Wade was unconstitutional. He did that. He would carry the flag for their issues and was sympathetic to them, and they supported him on that basis.
The Venezuela Moment: A Turning Point
Can Christians still support him? That's the question Christians should have begun to ask themselves on January 4th of this year. That was the day the president announced the capture and arrest of the president of Venezuela, Nicholas Maduro, who was without question an anti-American leader and a socialist, not someone most Americans liked or really had cause to like. The problem was not necessarily that Trump was against an anti-American leader. In fact, that was a benefit in the eyes of most of his voters. The problem was why we did it and why the president told us he did it, and that was for the oil.
In the days before that operation in early January, the president tweeted out and sent out on his Truth Social account, and also said in public, "We're doing this because we want the oil because that oil belongs to the United States." He never explained how exactly the United States would own the natural resources of a foreign country. Apparently, American oil companies helped develop the oil fields in Venezuela. Therefore, we own the oil. That was the idea, and they stole it from us. But there was no real effort to explain how that works or how that makes any sense at all. Instead, you had the president of the United States say, "We need the oil. Oil is really important," true and true, "therefore, we're going to take it." And therefore, apparently, we did.
In the days after that operation, the successful removal of the president of the country and the installation of his vice president Deli Rodriguez as president, our president, Donald Trump, held a widely publicized on-camera meeting with the heads of American oil companies and talked through how we're going to split up the natural resources of Venezuela and why this is great for America.
Why Christians Should Have Paused
Why should Christians have paused at exactly that moment and asked, "Can I still support this? Is this what I voted for? Is this what I want? Is this acceptable?" The reason is simple: Trump at that moment revealed that the motive was taking something that we wanted. That's not acceptable for Christians. In fact, that's not acceptable for Americans or any civilized people because taking other people's stuff by force cannot be allowed. Preventing that is the basis of our legal code.
If there's one thing that every person knows in a civilized country, you can't steal without penalty. It's not allowed. That doesn't belong to you. You can't shoplift. You can't rob banks. You can't embezzle. You can't invade countries to steal their stuff because they're all varieties of the same theme, which is theft. Theft is wrong under the American legal code, but it's also wrong under the Christian legal code. Theft is wrong, spelled out really clearly. It's also intuitive.
Here was the president saying, "We're just stealing this because we can." As a practical matter, that's quite a thing to say out loud given that we know from history that the things you do will be done unto you. Once you set a standard, you will have to live by that standard. Write a law, you'll be judged by that law. If the new law is "I can take it because I want it and I have more power than you," at some point we can rest assured the tables will be turned and the things that we want and cherish and have earned and that we own will be taken from us by force at the moment when some other power has more force than we do.
The Law of the Jungle Versus God's Law
It's really simple, sometimes called the law of the jungle, and it may be the law of nature, but people don't want to live under that law because it is a brutal and unforgiving law. So they create higher laws or they appeal to the highest law of all, which is God's law, which prohibits that. This was a profound moment in American history, probably in the history of the modern world, where the most powerful nation said, "If we want it, we'll take it." No one's ever said that before. They've done it under the guise of ideology. They've made up stories to hide the fact they're doing it. But to say you're doing it implicates everybody else in the crime.
You can't say you didn't know. Your president just told you on television, "We took out their president because we want his oil." At that point, you're an accessory to the crime, whether you want to be or not. It's at that point that a lot of people should have spoken up and said, "I'm out. Not that I hate Trump or don't like his entire program. Lots of things about it I love. I'm grateful. Maybe I'd vote for him again. But I can't support theft because it's immoral." But they didn't. Maybe some did, but certainly the leaders of the American Christian churches by and large said absolutely nothing.
The Inauguration Day Bible Moment
Maybe because they said nothing, this accelerated. These are the same people who sort of didn't notice somehow that on inauguration day the president did not take his oath of office with his hand on the Bible. His wife stood next to him holding it. I was about 15 feet away and saw it, but he did not put his hand on the Bible. That should have been maybe a clue that we need to pause and think about what is this. Why wouldn't you put your hand on the Bible?
If you don't believe in the Bible, you think it's just a book, there's no cost to you to putting your hand on it, just kind of following the protocol, going along with the tradition. All presidents do it. Why aren't you doing it? And you're not doing it intentionally. You're choosing not to put your hand on the Bible when you take that oath. That suggests not that you don't believe it's real, because if you didn't believe it was real, why would you care? You'd put on the costume and take it off. Doesn't matter. That suggests you know it is real and you're rejecting it intentionally. You know what you're doing and you're doing it anyway.
But nobody asked questions about that either. It seemed kind of inappropriate given the celebration then in progress to ask why wouldn't you put your hand on the Bible when you take the oath of office to lead our nation. But pretty much nobody did. I didn't. I'll admit that. I saw it and didn't say one word. It's bothered me ever since.
Rejecting Biblical Limits on Power
But right around January 4th, it became clear that maybe he didn't put his hand on the Bible because he affirmatively rejects what's inside that book. What's inside that book are limits on human behavior. If there's one theme that spans all 66 books in the Christian Bible, it's that you are not God. You cannot assume his powers because you don't have them. You may convince yourself you have them. You may want them. You may have been promised them. But in the end, they're not yours and you'll never have them. You can only destroy yourself and the people around you by pretending that you do.
That is the consistent message that spans from Genesis to Revelation. People who ignore that law are punished just like people who ignore gravity or freezing temperatures are punished because these are laws that were not created by people. They supersede people.
