This photograph should sicken you.

Donald Trump's use of the Bible as his defense of racism should make you sick.

The above photograph of President Donald J. Trump holding a Bible in front of St. John's Church in Washington, D.C., should make you sick to your stomach.

It is the most brazen blasphemy in the history of the presidency.

It is the act of a godless individual whose sole purpose was to curry favor with a gullible segment of the electorate that still believes that this man of privilege -- who sits upon toilets made of gold, has bankrupted his companies repeatedly, has cheated on all three of his wives multiple times, has paid out millions of dollars in settlements to the families of young women he molested in order to avoid prosecution, and even said publicly he would date HIS OWN DAUGHTER if he could -- is somehow "one of them," a supposedly "God-fearing" man of the people that will return our nation to a time when people of color were subservient to the white race.

Donald Trump is not a man of the people. He's a disgusting troll. He is a serial narcissist, a man who is concerned only with enriching himself and his cronies and establishing a legacy for himself as a supreme charismatic leader. He admires dictators. He feels no sense of responsibility whatsoever to the well-being of the nation and its inhabitants unless it can somehow enrich him. The people that would celebrate his tough-talking bravado would be cast aside violently by his bodyguards if they had the opportunity to meet him one-on-one in the street.

Despite his girth, Trump is a small and scared man. Any challenge to his authority is met with bluster first, then by cowering in fear. When the protests that grew in intensity outside the White House gates a few nights ago posed more of a threat than the Secret Service thought it could handle, he was brought to a bunker deep within the bowels of the executive mansion to huddle in fear. Even Richard Nixon, failed and flawed president that he was, still had the courage to speak directly to protesting groups outside the White House gates after the shooting deaths of four students at Kent State University.

Trump has no empathy for anyone or anything other than himself. He has yet to call for unity in the nation following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis by overzealous police officers. His words of condolence are delivered coldly and without passion, and his understanding of the deep anger within the African-American community over yet another instance of excessive police violence against an individual of color is nonexistent.

And now, as the nation burns and his failed policies of divisiveness erode his power, he responded Monday not with contrition or commitment to change the narrative, but with posturing and force. He gave a nauseatingly smug speech in the Rose Garden calling himself the "President of law and order," while at the same time ordering the dispersal of protestors outside the White House gates by the use of force, flash-bang devices and tear gas so he could make this transparently fraudulent pilgrimage to the venerable old church, which had been slightly damaged during the previous night's unrest.

These were not looters or rioters. These were peaceful protestors, acting within their constitutionally-guaranteed rights to protest, who were forcefully moved in full view of television news crews by heavily armed and armored police units so a morbidly obese president could walk the short distance from the White House -- surrounded by more than 30 Secret Service agents -- to hold a Bible in the air (upside down), call his inner circle of advisers to stand around him (quite nervously, it appeared), and then to walk away.

The photo opportunity was egregiously offensive to the Episcopal bishop of Washington, Mariann Budde, who said she was not consulted about the use of the city's most famous Episcopal church as a prop. She called it, "a message antithetical to the teachings of Jesus and everything that our church stands for. To do so, he sanctioned the use of tear gas by police officers in riot gear to clear the church yard."

Former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democrat nominee for president who was speaking in Philadelphia earlier today, also criticized Trump for the Bible stunt. "I just wished he opened it, instead of brandishing it," he said. "He might have learned something."

Unfortunately, that's probably not true. Trump is obsessed with his image and he wants to be regarded as the American "strongman," a title usually used derisively to describe despots and dictators. Like the dictators he admires, Trump announced he would invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 to call in the U.S. military to subdue riots in cities across the nation.

The law has been modified several times since its enactment and was last invoked in 1992 during the Los Angeles riots that took place during the trial of police officers involved in the beating of Rodney King -- and even then, only when California Gov. Pete Wilson requested the assistance of the military to back up the overtaxed police forces and National Guard units.

Trump was within his authority to call in U.S. Army units in Washington because the District of Columbia is federal territory. He has very little authority to send troops into the individual 50 states unless that help is specifically requested by the governors. And already, many governors have told Trump to keep the military out of their states.

This is what it comes to. Trump is clearly trying to turn this civil unrest into his justification for seizing authoritarian levels of power. We have awakened today to see our precious country on the brink of becoming a dictatorship under a failing president that wants to usurp the military to protect his eroding justification to remain in office.

Even Nixon at his worst still understood in the final moments of the Watergate crisis that he was harming the nation by clinging to power. Nixon still loved the country. Trump loves the country only as far as it can further his megalomaniacal pursuits of self-aggrandizement. And I'm convinced that no matter what happens in the November election -- even if Joe Biden wins the popular vote by 10 million and the Electoral College by a comfortable margin -- Trump will claim voter fraud and call for the Second Amendment gun nuts to whom he has pandered to take to the streets and prevent the peaceful transfer of power by any means necessary.

This is not America.