Get Your Bible here! Just $59.99

Whenever I hear someone say Donald Trump accomplished a lot as president, especially, “growing the economy,” I think of what a wise senator, scholar, and statesman said about 50 years ago. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who also served presidents of both parties, from John Kennedy to Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, said, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own facts. “

It is as true today as it was then, that opinion and fact are often confused in political discourse. It is, for example, fact that Joe Biden is old and will not get younger. Others, including me, are of the opinion that Donald Trump was an embarrassment to the Republican Party and to the country. It is my opinion that Trump, given a second chance, would be a lot worse, uninformed, without interest in the issues or the dignity of the office. I think it is fact and so does Liz Chaney who recently said, "Trump is depraved and unstable."

So, let us start with a fact, not a major one but a revealing one, and a hilarious one in some ways. Trump recently offered Bibles for sale, apparently aiming at the evangelical Christians who hold the opinion as fact that Trump is some kind of earthly deity, maybe ordained by their God in his spare time. Proof? Trump was selling Bibles for $59.99. At Amazon, you can buy a Bible for $3. It has the same authors, and the same words, vision, and religious guidance. The profit goes to Trump, not King James, Moses, or any Holy Bank account.

Pastor Jim Walls of Georgetown University wrote of Trump, “You have made it clear before that you know little about the Bible. So peddling Bibles to help pay your legal costs, with a soon upcoming trial about your alleged affair with a porn star, while your wife was at home with your new baby,” is not surprising.

Trump probably thought his Bible was more expensive because it had been translated from the English in which he thinks was written. He has probably gotten as far as page three.

Trump has created another category beyond Moynihan that is neither new nor unique for him, neither opinion nor fact. It is called a lie. Can we believe, as he says he has, that he has read any one of those Bibles scattered around his apartment? There’s no reason to believe he has read any book since college when his favorite book was written by Dr. Seuss.

Here's a fact. Trump has had a career of lying, cheating on wives, stealing from banks or buddies through success and bankruptcy. That is not just my opinion; those are facts recorded in court documents and decisions, described by journalists, even spoken by some in his family.

Despite all that, he, in some polls, leads President Biden as the presidential election approaches. What are the facts about Joe Biden as president? Faced with a hostile, not just partisan, Congress, he has worked with the energy of a young man in an effort to cut taxes on the working families, raise corporate taxes and those on the wealthy, particularly on thriving pharmaceutical companies. He has done a credible job. That’s a fact.

Norman Sherman of Coralville has worked extensively in politics, including as Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s press secretary, and authored a memoir “From Nowhere to Somewhere.”