The Politics of Pruning: Discernment in the Age of Trump 2.0
Pruning is discernment. It’s not optional; it is survival.
Hydroponics has taught me that to prune well, you must come close. You must kneel near the roots, examine the stems and branches with care, and ask with patience: what can be healed? What is struggling but salvageable? Left unchecked, even healthy growth can become self-destructive—stems overlapping and weakening under their own weight, airflow constricted, and roots draining resources unsustainably. Without pruning, life—whether in a garden, a community, or a nation—collapses under the burden of its own unchecked growth.
When I first started my system, I believed more was better. A fully lush system, with greens everywhere, was thrilling to observe. Every ypod was bursting with life, with green leaves all around. Jalapeños were reaching upward, and celery stalks were clustering tightly. It looked like a success because fruit was beginning to form, and the leaves were vibrant. The system appeared to be alive and healthy. However, beneath that facade of health, a problem was developing: airflow was restricted, creating an inviting environment for pests.
Roots, unchecked, filled the ypods and grew deep into the system, tangling themselves as they grew down into the water tank. Crowded ypods couldn’t retain moisture, leaving plants thirsty throughout the later parts of the day. Plants below suffered as overgrown roots created a way for pests and disease to pass internally from one plant to another. And over time, leaves yellowed from the inside out. Water became nutrient-dense. Fruit slowed.
By the time the damage showed, it was nearly too late. I had mistaken overcrowded growth for thriving. I had confused abundance with health. You can’t always follow the fruit.
Structural Overgrowth and National Decline
I see these same patterns in our social structures and government.
And here, perhaps, is a point of consensus: across the political spectrum—whether conservative or progressive, citizen or immigrant—there is a shared frustration that our government is tangled. Layers of bureaucracy where clarity is needed: endless regulations meant to protect corporations and yet fail miserably to safeguard the communities they impact; complicated immigration systems that leave families in limbo for decades; healthcare policies hindered by special interests; budget processes so inflated that essential services suffer while defense contracts flourish. In this dense canopy of policies and power struggles, progress is stunted, and growth stagnates. Progress is suffocated.
Yet naming the overgrowth is not enough.
What’s required next is discernment: the patient, difficult, necessary work that nurtures and rightsizes systems not for a type of austerity, but for survival. For health. For the common good.
Pruning as Political Discernment
In this moment—in what some are calling Trump 2.0—discernment feels more complex than ever. As deportation squads regroup and policies of exclusion are redrafted under the rhetoric of “order” and “national strength,” the temptation is clear: cut quickly, cut harshly, protect what’s left.
And corporations are following suit. DEI initiatives, once heralded as markers of progress, are quietly disbanded. Corporate statements of solidarity with LGBTQ+ communities, Black Americans, and immigrant families vanish from websites. Shelves once lined with Pride merchandise or culturally inclusive brands now stand stripped, replaced by products whose marketing subtly reinforces the very narratives of erasure and exclusion once challenged.
This is why it matters who holds the shears, because pruning is not neutral. Careless cutting doesn’t lead to renewal, it leads to death—in politics, in business, in the quiet places where justice and belonging are shaped and then denied.
Healthy pruning requires more than retaliatory and reactionary cuts. It requires faithful presence.
Checks, Balances, and the Bypass of Discernment
In democratic life, this is what checks and balances are meant to provide: structural discernment through presence. Multiple branches of governance exist not for efficiency, but for accountability. They are meant to slow down decisions, to force careful evaluation, to protect against overreach, and to resist the temptation of authoritarian pruning disguised as reform.
Under the guise of "draining the swamp" and "protecting American values," Trump-era politics have sought to circumvent careful review. The result is not a thoughtful pruning of overgrowth; instead, it is a systematic dismantling driven by an underlying agenda to restructure mechanisms that promote equity, protect dissent, and prevent the concentration of overgrowth in places of power. Institutions designed for deliberation have been co-opted to remain obedient to authority. Regulatory agencies have been weakened, while judicial appointments are rapidly made not for their legal expertise, but for their ideological loyalty. Legislative processes are bypassed through executive orders, which then create crises at our borders and beyond them. The result is a government that no longer asks, “Is this just?” but instead only wonders, “Does this enhance our grip on control?”
Discernment, Not Destruction
In the midst of political gutting and religious complicity, this is an urgent question for our time, I believe:
In a time marked by political unrest, corporate cynicism, and religious entanglements in empire, what is a faithful restructuring? How do we differentiate between the necessary pruning that promotes collective flourishing and the gutting that pretends to be reform but actually serves only power and profit? In our government, corporations, and faith institutions alike, what is often called "rightsizing" or "efficiency" is, in truth, a gutting of systems built to advantage the vulnerable within systems not built for their flourishing. They call it budget discipline when social services are stripped bare. They call it strategic alignment when corporations abandon commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion in the name of market neutrality. They call it church growth when prophetic voices are silenced for the comfort of the majority.
In many ways, gutting and current political, corporate, and religious strategies are synonymous. They are iterations of the same logic: that survival requires sacrifice. That stability requires the exclusion of those most costly to serve. That power must be protected at any price.
And thus, entire projects are now being written—not to heal, but to hollow out. Under the guise of "efficiency" and the business of "national security," we watch as systems of checks and balances, those long-standing protections of American personal freedom, are quietly dismantled. What once required debate now bypasses due process through the issuance of dangerous executive orders. What once required public accountability now takes place in secretive settings, masked by the language of “order” and “strength.”
Entire populations are excluded from public compassion with the simple stroke of a pen. Immigrant families are viewed not as neighbors but as inconveniences, treated like weeds in need of removal rather than as people connected to communities, relationships, and the delicate narratives of their survival. Protections once fought for—temporary protected status, asylum rights, pathways to citizenship—are now rebranded as threats. And gutting becomes policy as individuals are ushered off into nations and prisons not built for them.
In this age of political violence disguised as governance, the language of pruning has been weaponized—not to rightsize, not to restore balance, but to justify erasure. What should be a careful, discerning act of tending has been twisted into a justification for faithless pruning. Leaders claim to be “trimming bureaucracy,” yet their cuts rarely touch systems of domination. Instead, they target Black and Brown communities, LGBQ+ and Transgender persons, dismantling safeguards where justice struggle to take root, slashing vital services, and gutting civil rights under the guise of reform—revealing that the pruning they champion is not for the health of the nation, but cover for policies that deepen imbalance, preserving overgrowth where power thrives.
So the deeper question beneath it all—the question that matters as small businesses bear the weight of tariffs, as immigrants endure separation and deportation, as Queer Plus and Transgender people face the rollback of hard-won rights, as BIPOC communities see civil liberties stripped away, as disabled people lose access to essential care—is this:
What does it mean to disrupt and resist the logic of empire?
What does it mean to confront a system that names sacrifice as progress, disposability as policy, and erasure as reform?
Because any real change will not come from power conceding its ground, but from our collective refusal to accept the restructuring of our nation as acts of violence against the most vulnerable.
The query in every hydroponic metaphor, political reflection, and theological meditation found in Tending Life In Water is:
Can we commit to cultivating life when empire severs every root to abundance—when, in the name of control, the pathways to nutrient-rich waters are barricaded? Can we commit to nurturing growth when the very reservoirs built to sustain communities are deliberately capped, and the entryways to a hopeful dreaming are rationed as a strategy? How do we restructure—not for self-preservation, but for mutual flourishing? How do we prune not to appease shareholders or donors, but to make room for justice, healing, and life to thrive?
The Necessity of Proximity
“It’s impossible to prune what grows in the wrong direction without intimate involvement. You cannot remove what is unbalanced or unhealthy from a distance. To prune wisely, you must kneel near the soil, near the water, near the roots; you must come close enough to understand. What looks like imbalance from afar may, up close, reveal itself as survival. What seems unhealthy might be a necessary adaptation.” —Roots in Water: Gardening as Protest, Care, and Hope | Terry L Kelly, Jr
In policy, leadership, and movement work, discernment demands proximity. Decisions about who belongs, who is protected, and who gets cut from care cannot be made in executive offices far removed from the streets, shelters, or detention centers they serve. In Jesus’ ministry, healing occurred through touch, presence, and attending to the poorest, most overlooked, and disregarded places of a kingdom (Mark 5:25-34; John 9). Similarly, systemic restructuring requires a deep understanding of the people, communities, and the systems we seek to transform. Without proximity to the most vulnerable—immigrants facing deportation, transgender youth banned from healthcare, Black and Brown families displaced by gentrification—restructuring becomes punishment.
I believe this is where the Church often misses the mark: faithful restructuring always begins with proximity. Proximity is where justice begins.
In the political sphere, faithful restructuring restores checks and balances as protection against authoritarian overreach. When executive orders bypass legislative scrutiny in the name of “efficiency,” we gut democratic life, return to a nostalgic ritual of order, and pave the way for authoritarian control dressed as reform. As Levitsky and Ziblatt argue in How Democracies Die (2018), the erosion of checks and balances rarely arrives with fanfare. It comes incrementally—under the guise of restoring strength, ensuring order, or reclaiming greatness. In such moments, faithful restructuring demands not speed, but scrutiny. It requires re-centering democratic processes as safeguards, not as obstacles.
Executive orders that bypass legislative debate in the name of “efficiency” are not signs of health; they are symptoms of decay. When the pathways of dialogue and dissent are closed, when deliberation is framed as delay, when compromise is branded as weakness, democracy itself is pruned not toward life, but toward authoritarianism.
To restructure faithfully, then, is to reclaim the slow work of accountability. It is our task to now insist that governance is not a performance of control, but a cultivation of collective well-being. Not control over people, but care for people. Not power concentrated, but flourishing distributed.
In corporate environments, restructuring should involve breaking down exploitative hierarchies and building systems that prioritize worker rights, environmental responsibility, and community well-being, not just the profits of shareholders.
In the Church, restructuring demands a radical disentanglement from empire. As theologian Willie James Jennings reminds us, “The church was meant to be a site of belonging, not of control” (Jennings, The Christian Imagination, 2010). The Church was meant to be a site of liberation, not of assimilation.
If our congregations merely offer spaces where people can belong by conforming—by mirroring the cultural, political, and theological expectations of dominant power—then we are not cultivating the Kingdom of God. We are building temples that reflect the logic of empire. A church that prizes uniformity over difference, control over communion, or purity over solidarity does not testify to the liberating love of Christ. It testifies to empire.
In that light, faithful restructuring in the Church becomes a collective act of repentance: severing the Church’s own attachments to power, to assimilationist theology, and to gatekeeping disguised as pastoral care. It is not about cutting people away—it is about cutting empire out of the Church’s witness. Because what we cut reveals what we worship. And what we refuse to cut—what we protect, nourish, and tend—reveals who we love. Restructuring, then, moves us toward resistance, not against the most vulnerable, but against the systems that demand their silence and erasure in the face of political and social violence.
Because a church entangled with empire cannot be a site of liberation. A Church that mirrors Caesar cannot proclaim Christ.
And for most of us—where restructuring doesn’t begin in courtrooms or capitol buildings—now begins the quiet work of examining our own branches. Because pruning, faithful, life-producing incision, is always internal work before it is external.
Who taught us that certain people, certain communities, certain ways of being could be cut away?
And let me be clear: this isn’t a call for shallow reconciliation. I’m Black, Same-Gender-Loving, and Christian—I know when proximity costs too much. I know what it means to remove my body when someone else’s theology becomes a blade pressed against my existence. I know when a table isn’t worth staying at. Leaving a table isn’t surrender? I know that protecting my life does not forfeit my right to flourish?
But, when did it become normal to watch entire communities deported to swamp islands, detention centers, “Alligator Alcatrazes”, stripped of dignity because they speak the wrong language or their origins aren't from powerful countries? When did deporting bodies become a mark of national strength? When did exile get rebranded as order?
And, when did scapegoating people, families, and their contexts become a platform for political campaigns? When did blaming the vulnerable become a strategy for votes? When did severing ties get rebranded as national safety? When did legislation become a tool for caging difference, rather than cultivating community?
When did we confuse:
Efficiency with wisdom?
Productivity with faithfulness?
Uniformity with health?
Power with justice?
Silence with peace?
Why is corporate profit allowed to replace communal well-being as the measure of success?
Why does comfort matter more than solidarity in our churches?
When did it become right for pulpits to become places of refuge to protect platforms over the displaced, or for preaching to prioritize profit over hearts freed from truth, or for congregations to model sameness over liberation?
These are not rhetorical questions. They are confessions.
If we do not slow down—if we do not kneel close to the roots of our own assumptions—we risk wielding power like every empire before us: to control, not to cultivate. To sever, not to heal.
When has it ever been easier to cut away difference than to heal what divides us; to stop believing we were meant to grow together?
“…I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere in this country.” – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Letter to Birmingham Jail.
Jacob’s Ladder: Becoming the Bridge Between Heaven and Earth
I’ve been thinking about Jacob’s ladder lately—that strange dream of a staircase stretching between earth and heaven, angels ascending and descending. (Genesis 28:10-19). It was a divine vision not given in comfort, but in exile. Fleeing his home, carrying nothing but fear and a stone for a pillow, Jacob finds himself met by God, not to be sent back, but to be blessed in his forward journey. In that uncultivable place, a connection opens—not a monument of power, but a path of grace.
Jewish tradition teaches that Jacob’s ladder represents more than a mystical encounter; it is the soul itself, a bridge stretched between dust and the Divine. The ladder does not rise from heavenly courts, but from Jacob’s body, from his weakness, from his vulnerability. It is not built by conquest. It appears in exile. The ladder is Jacob, and all who would come from him. And its rungs are a promise: that Divine connection is not forged through strength, but revealed through surrender. It is grace, not greatness, that bridges heaven and earth.
And Jacobs' weakness is not failure—it is revelation.
In bodies and identities that have long been considered "other", what the world often labels as weakness becomes a space for divine encounter in this witness of the text. It shows us that we are never outside of God's presence; our weaknesses are sacred vulnerabilities where the Divine shows up most fully. Weakness is not a deficiency to be overcome, but a gateway to solidarity that prioritizes our shared human experience—a place where survival itself bears witness to grace. As Audre Lorde reminds us, our differences are not the source of our division; rather, they are the wellspring of our strength. Weakness reveals what an empire cannot recognize: that love, mutuality, and mercy are the truest forms of power. What the empire names as broken, God calls beloved. What power dismisses as useless, heaven calls necessary.
From Jacob’s fragile rest, the angels begin their ascent from the earth itself. They ascend first, among us, and not from distant skies. Perhaps Jacob’s vision represents not only a cosmic truth but also a human calling. Perhaps the ladder is not only meant to be seen, but is meant to be lived. To be a bridge and a messenger. To be the point where heaven touches earth.
And this vision of Jacob quietly echoes back to the Tower of Babel.
In Babel, humanity aimed to create its own path to heaven—a monument built of brick and ambition (Genesis 11:1–9). Their goal was dominance: to make a name for themselves, to exert control, and to rise through sameness and strength. However, the tower of Babel results not in unity, but in confusion and division.
In contrast to the builders of Babel, Jacob does not seek to create or construct. Instead, he finds rest and explores his dreams in connection to the Divine in ways that are not through human effort but through grace. Alone and feeling powerless, he becomes the site where heaven meets earth. A ladder not built by pride and ego. While Babel attempts to achieve control and creates chaos, Jacob receives communion and mercy.
This distinction highlights the difference between empire and covenant, between domination and mercy.
And it invites a harder question, especially for the Church in this moment:
What the heck are y'all building?
Are we constructing towers—structures of power—that rise by exclusion, seeking to dominate, control, and protect the powerful? Or are we becoming ladders—living bridges of compassion—where mercy flows freely between heaven and earth?
Because we cannot be both.
A tower rises by pushing others down. A ladder stands by lifting others up.
Which are we?
Are we living as ladders that extend kindness, defend the vulnerable, and choose compassion when faced with the erasure demanded by rogue kings and the subsequent systems that manage menacing exhibitions of control? Are we living as ladders that prioritize justice over dominance, welcoming the displaced instead of shutting them out? Each act of mercy becomes another rung, and each moment of compassion adds a step to connect what power has tried to sever.
In exile, Jacob's ladder touches the earth. Perhaps the same is true in our own places of exile.
Closing: Pruning as a Politics of Proximity and Grace
And so, again, pruning is discernment.
True pruning is not quick cuts demanded by empires, driven by those with big egos and little acuity. It is not the superficial removal that pretends to be reform. Instead, true pruning is a slow, patient, and thoughtful process. It involves the sacred task of nurturing life, not trimming just for appearances, but tending to ensure abundance.
Pruning, done rightly, shapes growth toward flourishing. Done carelessly, it becomes control masked as order—scarcity in the name of strength.
We are living in the age of Trump 2.0, an era dominated not only by political pageantry but by a dangerous fusion of Christian nationalism, white supremacy, and authoritarian logic. In such a time, the temptation is always to cut first and question later. It is the age of appeasement, where cuts are made not because they are just, but because they are “common sense”—a currency to purchase favor from the political right.
But the politics of pruning call us to a different posture: Knees to the soil. Hands steady. Heart open.
Because what we touch, while sometimes delicate, is always sacred. It is the site of the holy and the miraculous. Every cut must legislate healing. Every restructuring must make room for life.
And more than strategy, it demands proximity to the wounded, the overlooked, the ones empire deems expendable. It demands we refuse it’s wicked machinery of efficiency, sameness, and control. It demands we stop building towers and start becoming ladders. To become bridges, not walls. To become people who make space for healing at the site of sharp and unguided cuts—people who come close enough to examine without erasing. To discern without destroying. To tend with love. Because liberation does not come from a distant place.
It begins at the roots.
Footnotes & Resources:
See: Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) (Verso, 2020), on how bloated systems fail to meet human needs while funding militarism and corporate welfare.
Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions (William Morrow, 2000), argues that love—whether personal or political—requires attention and accountability.
See: Minda Harts, “Why DEI Work Is Under Threat—And What To Do About It,” Harvard Business Review, 2024.
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (Crown Publishing, 2018).
See: Brennan Center for Justice, “Executive Orders and the Erosion of Democratic Norms,” 2021.
Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (Yale University Press, 2010).
Ibid.
📖 Up Next in the Series:
A Critique of Common Sense → Expected August 22nd
We’ll explore what happens when political leaders disguise domination as reform—and how to discern the difference between pruning that bears fruit and pruning that harms the vine.
📖 Previous in the Series:
← Roots in Water: Gardening as Protest, Care, and Hope
We explored how growing kale and cucumbers in water has taught me about justice, hope, and resistance in a world that often feels uncultivable.
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