Insulation vs. Installation: A tale of 2 presidents

In 1985, my first year as a doctoral student studying Hebrew/Semitic literature at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, I was hired as an administrator at First United Methodist Church on State Street. Looking out my new office window across our parking lot to First Baptist Church, I was told the story of our local newspaper’s embarrassing snafu upon that church’s hiring of Dr. Jitsuo Morikawa. Instead of announcing the new pastor’s “installation,” the headline read, “The Insulation of Dr. Morikawa.”

Huge difference! The Christian Century laughingly categorized the mistake as a Freudian slip, since we naturally prefer insulation to installation.

With those two words, I offer a tale of two American presidents – the insulated Joe Biden followed by, thankfully, a president truly installed into that office, Donald Trump.

Cloistered from voters during the 2020 campaign, Biden’s cognitive impairment remained shielded right up until his debate with Trump last June. Stupidly challenging Trump to “make my day” (when he might conceivably have weaseled out on the premise that his opponent was a “convicted felon”), Biden’s disastrous performance sent Pelosi, Schumer and Obama into the fetid White House attic to vacuum out the rotting insulation that had long sheltered Biden from exposure.

America needs a real president, and on Jan. 20, Donald Trump was genuinely installed into the office. True to the word’s etymology, we now have a president “in the stall,” taking upon himself the yoke of leadership and going to work in fulfilling his campaign pledges by pulling the sharp plow of responsible government across the long-neglected ground of the American body politic.

Plowing is an apt metaphor, Trump’s blade churning up the hard-baked soil of the Deep State, loosening the dirt for the planting of new seed with hopes of a golden harvest on the horizon.

As a pastor, I recall a child in the pew who, during the sermon, laid her head in her father’s lap. Seeing her daughter gently cushioned, mom whispered, “There, Henry, how sweet. You always did want to be a pillar of the church.”

The word play between “pillow” and “pillar” tells precisely the same tale of these two American presidents. After four years of Biden pillowed and insulated, Trump is now installed as the key pillar of the executive branch.

He can’t do it alone, though. Like oxen “in the stall” being yoked together to accomplish plowing, a single pillar cannot be enough. That grandest MAGA hope for Trump 2.0 is that his picks for key government positions will be better than Trump 1.0.

It’s looking good. Those lesser, yet nevertheless vital, pillars chosen by Trump to hold up the infrastructure of government are determined to restore our once proud institutions to respect, after having been weakened by open border and DEI policies, rampant wokeism leading to trans-craziness, blatant lawfare against Trump and others, from J6 participants to parents at school boards or praying pro-life advocates.

If Joe Biden has been the pillar of anything, it is of his own family’s corrupt involvement in influence peddling, he claiming Hunter’s infamous title for his father: the Big Guy.

Back to Ann Arbor. Later in the same year of 1985, Oct. 14 to be exact, I left my State Street office to walk only a few blocks through campus toward the Michigan Union. Vice President Bush had been sent by President Reagan to speak, and I wanted to hear him.

Why then? Why there? Oct. 14 was the 25th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s first mention, during the 1960 presidential race with Richard Nixon, of what would become the Peace Corps. Bush was to stand on the steps of the Michigan Union, at the very spot recognized as the birth of the Peace Corps, and I wanted to be there to hear the story.

After the third of four televised debates with Nixon in New York, JFK flew to Ann Arbor to campaign in the swing state of Michigan. It was an unannounced visit, the intent being to sneak the senator in, allowing his head to hit the pillow for a precious few hours of sleep.

Word of his arrival leaked, though, so that when he stepped out of the car at the Michigan Union at 2 a.m., he saw over 5,000 students and faculty gathered, awaiting his arrival.

He felt he had to speak, and did for a spontaneous three minutes in which he invited students to yoke their energies together for the good of America and the world.

Kennedy opened, “I want to express my thanks to you, as a graduate of the Michigan of the East, Harvard University.”

Then, growing serious, he continued, “How many of you who are going to be doctors are willing to spend your days in Ghana? Technicians or engineers, how many of you are willing to work in the Foreign Service and spend your lives traveling around the world? On your willingness … to contribute part of your life to this country, I think will depend the answer whether a free society can compete. I think it can! And I think Americans are willing to contribute. … So, I come here tonight … to go to bed!”

That joke line was followed by the inspirational words of a leader calling, not for his people to seek insulation, but to be installed as pillars: “But I also come here tonight to ask you join in the effort. This is the longest short speech I’ve ever made; therefore, I’ll finish it! Let me say in conclusion, this university is not maintained by its alumni or by the state merely to help its graduates have an economic advantage in the life struggle. There is certainly a greater purpose.”

Sen. Kennedy had come to Ann Arbor for a few hours of pillowed insulation. Instead, he challenged the students to be installed as pillars of service.

Remembering JFK’s words, I think of Donald Trump, one with abundant resources to have surrounded himself with pillows, insulating himself from the hard work of plowing the neglected field with competent and visionary policies.

Like JFK, Trump chose installation over insulation, and America will be better for it.