Our psychotic President intends, with the help of William Barr, Attorney General and world-class asslicker, to see how many convicts he can exterminate before he leaves office. In aid of this, I should think, Trump is also re-thinking the method of execution: because there has been difficulty purchasing the poison currently used in murder-by-injection, maybe we should bring back the electric chair or even the firing squad. I am amazed at Trump’s uncharacteristically humane ideas for execution. Most dictators prefer to drop people from airplanes or hang them from the end of a crane or behead them.

And I don’t hear the fair-weather Christians, neither Evangelicals nor Catholics, condemning these upcoming murders. Of course, the Trump Base is keen on capital punishment. They say they want take a life in return for the life that was taken. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” they intone, “it’s in the Bible.” Yes, and it is also rejected by Jesus in the Bible (Matt 5:38-42). Will murdering another person make the person murdered feel any better? Will it make the living feel better? Oh yes, they want “closure for the family,” as if the long-delayed barbaric murder of the killer of a family member will wipe clean the family’s slate of sorrow with the sponge of revenge. 

Another pretense of the enthusiasts for capital punishment is that they want to “see justice done,” to see malefactors “brought to justice.” No, what they want is a legalized revenge, not justice. People carry on about justice as if they knew what is just, thus claiming as their own the divine prerogative. These want to be the arbiters of who deserves to live and who deserves to die, while mindlessly asserting their absolute “pro-life” convictions. It is for people like these that Trump, the Man Above the Law, and his hangmen in his Department of Justice are going to put on a show of not one, but five executions.