Dear MAGAs,This war has you confused, and I’d like to help you.

I see your performative star-spangled posturing, your arrogant middle finger contempt for strangers half a world away, your perverse joy at the broken bodies of people with dark skin and strange headwear, and I feel like someone needs to tell you something:

You’re not Donald Trump.

He is not you.

What I mean is that he is not like you, even though you have placed your very identity in him, even though you wrongly believe there is some possibility that you can attain the undeserved lofty position he occupies, even though you incorrectly feel he represents you in a world you’ve decided has wronged you.

You and he have nothing in common.

He does not share your fierce, though sometimes misplaced, national pride.

The truth is, he is an opportunistic parasite; an insatiable bloodsucker who has left everything he has touched scarred, withered, and lifeless. His 79-year moral slime trail is strewn with assaulted girls, dehumanized tenants, disregarded spouses, bankrupt business partners, slandered women, abducted grandfathers, and nameless corpses. America is simply another host he has slapped his name on and drained of its resources.

He does not share your respect for the men and women of our Military, your children.

They are, to him, the losers and suckers he has called them; expendable collateral damage of his capricious, vain, and pointless acts of aggression in our streets, on foreign waters, and in a rapidly-growing number of nations he has decided to claim, colonize, or deplete.

He does not share your faith in Jesus or your adoration of God.

He has never had any other deity other than the needy, fragile, loveless husk of a man he sees in the mirror. He has never stepped into a church without cameras rolling, never read a Bible beyond the page he sacrilegiously signs, and never had an impulse to love any neighbor as himself. Religion to him is an ill-fitting costume, dusted off and draped over his barbaric frame while he fleeces the sheep.

He does not share your work ethic or your pride in the work of your hands.

He is a ban born on third base and 89 feet; cradled in privilege and opulence that all but a tiny fraction of one percent of this world will ever experience. His success is a grand mirage; a gold-veneer facade built on reality TV, Fox News fiction, and purchased propaganda. He doesn’t give a damn about the working class, because he has built his unearned empire upon its back.

In other words, MAGA friend, you are not him, and he is not you.

He is not of you, or with you, or for you.

You, MAGA friend, are the Iranian people.

The hardworking, honest, human beings living thousands of miles away under the brutal thumb of corrupt leaders whom you claim you seek to emancipate them from, even while disparaging them with slurs and threats.

They may not share your religion or your nation of origin or your mother tongue, but you have far more in common with them than you will ever have with a morally bankrupt billionaire warmonger like Donald Trump. There is no difference between you and the people of Iran who toil their entire lives in systems that are designed to consume them.

They will bury their children and you will bury yours, and he will never shed a single tear for either.

That’s why Donald Trump and his party are in complete control of the presidency and of Congress, and yet your groceries are astronomical, your gas prices are stratospheric, your healthcare costs are crippling you, and your jobs are disappearing.

It’s why he runs the Department of Justice, and yet a legion of pedophiles and rapists are still safely in the shadows, still shielded from accountability.

It’s why he is our Military’s Commander-In-Chief, and thousands of your children are being needlessly placed in harm’s way, staring into the face of the abyss, and delivered like slaughterhouse lambs, for a war you honestly can’t explain or justify because the person sending them cannot.

Just like the atrocities of Ukraine and Gaza before, you are vilifying the victims and applauding the predators, never realizing that your affinity is not with the latter but the former.

So, you can enjoy the temporary intoxication of manufactured patriotism, you can feed on the empty calories of America First, and you can dehumanize a nation you couldn’t distinguish from a dozen others.

You can regurgitate White House talking points that paint millions of innocent people as faceless monsters whose eradication is righteous.And most of all, you can fall prostrate before this sneering, self-pleasuring narcissist who couldn’t care less if you lived or died, or for the suffering and sorrow he is inflicting on multitudes, in the name of a Constitution he has no allegiance to, a God he has no belief in, and a nation has complete contempt for.

But know this truth: the only thing you and Donald Trump have in common is that you both worship Donald Trump.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe