A Washington Post article: "Leaker of U.S. secret documents worked on military base, friend says." [that's my unpaywalled gift link] Subtitle: "THE DISCORD LEAKS | The online group that received hundreds of pages of classified material included foreigners, members tell The Post." Shane Harris and Samuel Oakford. April 12, 2023.
Here's the article's lede:
"The man behind a massive leak of U.S. government secrets that has exposed spying on allies, revealed the grim prospects for Ukraine’s war with Russia and ignited diplomatic fires for the White House is a young, charismatic gun enthusiast who shared highly classified documents with a group of far-flung acquaintances searching for companionship amid the isolation of the pandemic."
Regarding that article, Jeff Sharlet says today:
"The leaker, according to one of his sect of devout Christian teens. This is what I call in THE UNDERTOW an 'innocence cult” of the Right, an implicitly misogynist conflation of strength & purity, God & guns, + the bastardized gnostic gospel of the Trumpocene, secrets & codes.' ... Remember when OK GOP Sen. Jim Inhofe anticipated shape of things to come w/ mantra “God, gays, guns”? (Long time ago. Prescient proto-fascist.) Ukraine leak is result of such theology, trickle down American fundamentalism, ascending imaginary peaks of conspiracism. ... I’m against antifascists throwing “grooming” back at fascists. Term itself can be moral panic weapon. But here—adult gathers depressed teens in secret meetings to rule by aesthetic of “fitness,” violence, & piety in service of criminal expression of his ego—what to call that? ... [there is] a fundamental white supremacist conspiracy theory, designed to seduce 'normies' by convincing them that hate crimes are really government plots." — see the Twitter thread by Jeff Sharlet, 13 Apr 2023
Religion makes some people happy, but their feelings do not mean that their religion is true.
Richard Dawkins:
I wish it were not necessary to add that such beneficial effects in no way boost the truth value of religion’s claims. In George Bernard Shaw’s words, ‘The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.’
A common strategy is for the religion to make the followers feel worthless or broken and then to give them back their sense of worth and wholeness.
Alan Watts:
...if one wants to feel exhilaratingly light-footed, it is always possible to go around for some time with lead in one's shoes — and then take them off. The sense of relief will certainly be proportional to the length of time such shoes have been worn, and to the weight of the lead. This is equivalent to the old trick of religious revivalists who give their followers a tremendous emotional uplift by first implanting an acute sense of sin, and then relieving it through faith in Jesus. But such 'uplifts' do not last...
When we are dissatisfied with life, what we need is not necessarily a religion to fix us, but simply to change our attitude and be grateful for what we do have.
Fenton Johnson:
Dissatisfaction...is the first principle of Buddhism, and thus the foundation on which the whole philosophy is built; if it weren't universally applicable, it would be a pretty weak basis. As a reasonably prosperous, reasonable healthy American I can't really be said to be 'suffering,' at least not in the context of much of the world's population; but we all suffer from dissatisfaction, always and everywhere. And what is the antidote to dissatisfaction? Gratitude.
Perhaps the question we need to ask is not whether God can put up with us until we come to him, fix us in a particular way, and approve of our perfected nature, but whether we can accept ourselves as we are, as works in progress.
Gary Bowen:
I doubt that anyone can achieve religious faith until they start tolerating human frailties.
Sources
Richard Dawkins. The God Delusion. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006. p. 167.
Alan Watts. The Way of Zen. Originally 1957. Vintage Spiritual Classics Edition 1999. p 170. Fenton Johnson in “Keeping Faith,” interviewed by Bo Young. White Crane Journal, Fall 2004, Issue #62, p 7.
Gary Bowen, in Raven Kaldera. Hermaphrodeities: The Transgender Spirituality Workbook. XLibris Press, 2001. p 189.
President Trump is perhaps the least demonstrably Christian U.S. president ever. When he and First Lady Melania Trump attended the funeral service for George H. W. Bush on Dec. 5, 2018, they did not recite the Apostle's Creed that was printed in the program. Seated next to them, Barack and Michelle Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton recited the prayer.
But how do contemporary Christians perceive him?
It can be tricky to pin down what evangelicals think of Trump, in part because it's an impermanent demographic based on self-identification.
It is well known that 81% of self-identified white evangelicals told exit pollsters they voted for Trump in 2016. However, as Napp Nazworth points out, this self-identified group may not correlate to the people who actually attend church or the people who don't vote. There may be many churchgoing Americans who aren't active voters but nevertheless don't like Trump.
The most often cited number when it comes to evangelical support for Trump is "81%," which is likely what Falwell had in mind. But that number comes with many caveats: 1) it only includes white evangelicals, 2) it only includes self-identified evangelicals, which means non-churchgoers and people who don't hold evangelical beliefs could be included, 3) non-voters were not polled and so their numbers are not included in the denominator, and 4) it was based upon exit polls, which are among the least reliable polls.
It's important to note the decline in Christian influence in the United States. Many commentators have suggested that Christians are making a kind of "deal" with the man who happens to have gained power, someone who — just perhaps — they otherwise would not have admired.
Nina Burleigh wrote for Newsweek on April 16, 2018 that white evangelicals have experienced a sharp demographic decline over the last decade. Burleigh attributes this to their children "leaving the faith in droves over its anti-LGBT and anti-science positions"; today, 92 percent of white evangelicals are over age 30. "During the 2016 primary season, white evangelicals were largely divided in their opinion of Trump...But once Republicans nominated him, his favorability among white evangelicals jumped to 61 percent in September 2016...Now, according to a poll conducted in late March [2018], after the Stormy Daniels story was widely discussed, support has risen to a record 75 percent." This suggests that this demographic is substantially unconcerned "by his lawyer’s hush money to Stormy Daniels," "revelations that the married President had a year-long affair with an adult film actress after First Lady Melania gave birth to their son Barron," and "shady business deals". After all, as Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels wrote in Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, "A great many of his supporters were thrilled to hear white Christian America forcefully defended against its perceived enemies. Those were their identities. He was their hero. Whether he got the facts right did not matter."
MUST WATCH: In this video, from April 5, 2018, Trump categorically denies knowing anything about the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels
Trump claimed he doesn't know why Cohen made the payment or where he got the money
THERE ARE AUDIO TAPES "In a conversation captured in an audio recording in approximately September 2016 concerning Woman 1’s account, the Defendant [Trump] and Lawyer A [Cohen] discussed how to obtain the rights to Woman 1’s account from AMI and how to reimburse AMI."
An update on the hush money payments, regarding a lawyer handling the appeal of that case:
Jared Yates Sexton: "We're very lucky, for the record, that this overt corruption is happening. No one thought to put in the law that you can't name your personal lawyer [James M. McDonald] who's in a suit against the Southern District of New York to make them the head of the Southern District of New York. You know why? 'Cause most people's brains don't work that way. You know? You're just like, Well, what are you talking about, I never thought that could happen."
Nick Hauselman: "Well, hang on — The lawyer himself can't accept that position. That's really part of it, right? That's what you would go to law school for, to learn."
Jared: "Well, you'd think — It depends on the law school."
Nick: "I guess so."
Jared: "It depends on where you're going and what they're teaching you, and also whether you carry those ethics into your regular life."
(We're Talking About Revolutionary Shit, Here, Muckrake Podcast, June 19, 2026, 30:23–31:05)
Angie Maxwell wrote in the Washington Post in July 2019 that the Republican Party's late 20th-century "Southern strategy" has "finally come to fruition, and it is still working today. The GOP’s partisan conversion of Southern white evangelicals is so complete that no longer must a Republican candidate hold authentic religious beliefs to secure their support. Nowhere is this clearer than in Southern white evangelical support for Donald Trump. Indeed, only 38 percent of white evangelicals living in the South identified Trump as a Christian, but 84 percent of them still voted for him."
Inspired by an exchange here yesterday, I wrote up a short piece at CAMPAIGN TRAILS about an infamous Lee Atwater quotation that just about everyone gets wrong.
White evangelicals "went from being the least likely to the most likely to agree that a candidate’s personal immorality had nothing to do with public service," an article in the New York Times said in June 2018, referencing a September 2017 article in the paper.
As an example of how Trump merges his lifelong interpersonal habits with his policy: On December 13, 2019, reporter Bob Woodward interviewed Trump, who said he instantly had a good feeling about North Korea's dictator Kim Jong Un. Trump said, as Woodward quoted him in his book Rage: "You meet a woman. In one second, you know whether or not it's all going to happen. It doesn't take you 10 minutes, and it doesn't take you six weeks. It's like, whoa. Okay. You know? It takes somewhat less than a second."
For eight years [during the Obama administration] they watched you relentlessly demonize a black President; a man faithfully married for 26 years; a doting father and husband without a hint of moral scandal or the slightest whiff of infidelity.
* * *
you never once suggested that God placed him where he was,
you never publicly offered prayers for him and his family,
you never welcomed him to your Christian Universities,
you never gave him the benefit of the doubt in any instance,
you never spoke of offering him forgiveness or mercy,
your evangelists never publicly thanked God for his leadership,
your pastors never took to the pulpit to offer solidarity with him,
you never made any effort to affirm his humanity or show the love of Jesus to him in any quantifiable measure.
* * *
And yet you give carte blanche to a white Republican man so riddled with depravity, so littered with extramarital affairs, so unapologetically vile, with such a vast resume of moral filth — that the mind boggles.
* * *
They see that pigmentation and party are your sole deities.
They see that you aren’t interested in perpetuating the love of God or emulating the heart of Jesus.
They see that you aren’t burdened to love the least, or to be agents of compassion, or to care for your Muslim, gay, African, female, or poor neighbors as yourself.
They see that all you’re really interested in doing, is making a God in your own ivory image and demanding that the world bow down to it.
They recognize this all about white, Republican Jesus — not dark-skinned Jesus of Nazareth.
Ross Douthat wrote for the New York Times in September 2018 that a new survey by the Cato Institute’s Emily Ekins for the Voter Study Group found that whether a Trump voter attends church predicted their views on race. Among Trump voters who never go to church, only half had positive feelings about Black people, and a quarter said their own whiteness was "very important" to their identity. Among Trump voters who frequently go to church, 71 percent had positive feelings about Black people, and only 9 percent said their own whiteness was "very important" to their identity. While the religious and secular groups in the survey had similar incomes, the secular people were "less likely to have college degrees, less likely to be married and more likely to be divorced; they’re also less civically engaged, less satisfied with their neighborhoods and communities, and less trusting and optimistic in general." (Emily Ekins wrote a separate article about it, concluding that "encouraging conservatives to disengage from religion...may in fact make it even harder for left and right to meet in a more compassionate middle.") But why did the churchgoing people vote for Trump, if they disagree with him about race? It seems they made "a pragmatic bet that his policies on abortion and religious liberty were worth living with his Caligulan personal life and racial demagoguery." Early Christianity made such a bet with the Roman emperor Constantine. However, with Trump, it's "the reverse sort of situation: A Christian community trying to make the best of its decline, and allying with a leader whose core appeal depends upon and possibly furthers the de-Christianization of conservatism....it’s hard to see how it can reverse de-Christianization, and easy to see how it might accelerate it."
Paula White, the "spiritual adviser" to Trump, who said a prayer at his inauguration and who formed a White House evangelical advisory council, "has ratcheted up support among evangelicals for the president’s hard-line immigration policies and used her Facebook following of more than 3 million to champion the idea that God has blessed Trump’s plans," according to the Washington Post. When challenged with the proposition that Jesus was a refugee, she once answered, that Jesus had done nothing illegal. "If he had broke the law, then he would have been sinful and he would not have been our Messiah." (Other Christians have challenged this interpretation, as Jesus was, famously, executed.) When she spoke at the rally in June 2019 at which he announced his reelection campaign, she told the crowd, "let every demonic network who has aligned itself against the purpose, against the calling of President Trump, let it be broken, let it be torn down in the name of Jesus!” she prayed. She added: "I declare that President Trump will overcome every strategy from hell and every strategy from the enemy — every strategy — and he will fulfill his calling and his destiny."
"Today, I submitted another FOIA request to the Department of Justice after the Department used Trump’s so-called Religious Liberty Commission mailing list to promote a White Christian Nationalist event scheduled to take place on the National Mall.
They’re calling it “Rededicate 250,” and the list of speakers reads like a Who’s Who of Christian extremism, including multiple members of Trump’s Cabinet, the Chancellor of Liberty University, the president of Hillsdale College, Paula White, Franklin Graham, and many more." (Geoffrey T. Blackwell, Legal Director of American Atheists, May 12, 2026)
"There is a story going around, on both the left and the right, that America’s 'true believers' are a declining force and are now conducting desperate, defensive maneuvers in a secularizing society. But that is not how the leaders of the Christian Nationalist movement see it — because it is not true. They played a key role in putting President Trump in power. They are protecting him now, as they giddily collect their winnings in legislatures and in the courts. Why should they doubt that they can pull off the same trick again?
What Christian nationalists know — and many of us have yet to learn — is that you don’t need a majority to hijack a modern democracy. You just need a sizable minority, marinating in its grievances, willing to act as a bloc, and impervious to correction by fact or argument. Make this group feel good about itself by making other people feel bad about themselves, and dominion may well be in reach."
Franklin Graham, son of the late Billy Graham, planned ten "campaign-style rallies" throughout California in late May and early June 2018 in advance of that state's primary election. The goal is to turn out the evangelical vote. Other kinds of Christians are not receiving the same outreach to attend these rallies, "a tactic that plays directly into the growing separatist sentiment among many white evangelicals," according to Neil J. Young, author of We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics. Of this attempt to stoke "white evangelical resentment and outrage," Young wrote: "Such a dark and alarmist vision might seem to contradict the hopeful joy evangelicals claim their faith provides, but it aligns perfectly with the cynical and conspiratorial worldview Trump has brought to the center of American politics. As such, white evangelicals’ support for Trump doesn’t expose their hypocrisy, as plenty have contended, so much as it plainly reveals their heart." On 13 June, even Graham told the Christian Broadcasting Network that Trump's policy of separating would-be immigrant families at the border is "disgraceful, it’s terrible to see families ripped apart and I don’t support that one bit." He stopped short, however, of holding Trump accountable: "I blame the politicians for the last 20, 30 years that have allowed this to escalate to where it is today."
(Franklin Graham later complained about the ten Republican congresspeople who voted to impeach Trump for incitement to insurrection in 2021. He said they must have betrayed him for "thirty pieces of silver" — i.e., he couldn't imagine they had cast their votes on principle — though he said one must "wonder" what the material reward was.)
Whether Christian power is seen to be declining or rising, many see the new administration as an opportunity to advance a theocratic-leaning political agenda.
I think that the relationship between the leadership of the Council for National Policy and Donald Trump is as purely transactional as you’re going to get in politics. There was a deal cut in fairly stark terms in 2016, in June, where the conservatives from the fundamentalists and these business interests came to Trump and said, 'You don’t have any campaign organization. You don’t have a war chest. You don’t have people on the ground. We’ve got all of those. We’ve got campaign in a box. What we want from you is the right to nominate your federal judges. We want our guy, Mike Pence, as your running mate. We want to write the social platforms for the Republican National Convention.' And the deal was struck, and both sides have honored them. So I think it’s the ultimate quid pro quo.
The deal has also been internalized on an individual, personal level by many people. The theologian Roger E. Olson wrote for Patheos in August 2018 in "Is Trump “Our Cyrus?"
Here I’m not talking about those evangelical Christians who, among others, voted for Trump in order to vote against Hilary Clinton as the “lesser of two evils.” I’m talking about the many evangelical Christians who are now lionize Trump as a kind of new national messiah—not on a par with Jesus Christ but...on a par with whom?
A growing common answer is "He’s our Cyrus.'
* * *
During his approximately thirty year reign he [Cyrus] released the Hebrew people in exile to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple that was destroyed earlier by the Babylonians....the Hebrew people did not consider Cyrus one of them, of course, but a powerful ally — and one raised up by God to deliver them from exile and bondage."
Olson issues a warning: "I strongly suspect that he [Trump] is manipulating his conservative Christian 'base' and would turn on them in a moment if it suited his agenda to be powerful."
Is it hypocritical? Well, yes. Kathleen Parker on Aug. 31, 2018 in the Washington Post decried "the utter hypocrisy of allowing such a foul-mouthed, race-baiting misogynist to occupy the Oval Office after many of these same paragons of virtue impeached Bill Clinton for lying about his irresponsible affair with an intern." But it can be politically expedient to ignore the personal failings of one's own candidate. James Traub wrote in the Atlantic on July 18, 2018:
Elected Democrats lined up to denounce President Bill Clinton’s private behavior during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, though none deemed it worthy of impeachment. Donald Trump’s vastly more outrageous behavior has provoked far less opprobrium from his own party. Republicans aren’t less decent than Democrats; rather, they have come to see political struggle in such apocalyptic terms that no merely personal form of shameful behavior can compete with the political stakes. Thus Christian conservatives hold their tongue rather than jeopardize their chances of getting a Supreme Court justice who will overturn Roe v. Wade. The party of personal morality thus becomes the party of indifference to personal morality.
On another front, where Christians are trying to consolidate political power, it isn't exclusively white Christians who are doing so.
Katherine Stewart profiled Jim Domen for the New York Times on June 20, 2018. Domen (who considers himself a "former homosexual") founded Church United and has led it since 2014. It is "a multiethnic group of pastors from a variety of traditions — including Pentecostal and Catholic clergy members" with a mission of “helping pastors transform California at the government and church level.” Domen supports Trump, saying that he has “done more for the Church than many Christian presidents have.” Church United's work to "politicize pastors," as Stewart put it, "started with six affiliated pastors in 2014. The group now counts approximately 500 member pastors."
Some people feel torn.
An example of a middle-of-the-road position is given by Rev. Samuel Rodríguez, who serves at a church in Sacramento, Calif. and who has had private conversations with Trump in the White House. He publicly condemned Trump for his misogynistic, crude comments on the Access Hollywood tape and is also fighting Trump's immigration agenda, but he is willing to work with Trump overall. In May 2018, Rodríguez told BBC World:
"Trump ha hecho más por el movimiento evangélico que cualquier otro presidente desde la época de Ronald Reagan. Se puede medir. Hay 20 puntos que uno puede decir claramente: aquí firmó una orden ejecutiva, aquí firmó una ley, aquí avanzó..."
* * *
"El movimiento latino evangélico no está casado con Donald Trump. Tampoco estaba casado con Obama. Estamos casados con una agenda que va mucho más allá de la personalidad."
"Evangelical voters have long demanded that politicians exemplify Christian character and morality in the public sector. In Donald Trump, however, evangelicals were confronted with a candidate who pledged allegiance to conservative ideals, but embodied none of them.
* * *
Claire Waugh, a senior from Woodbridge, Va., told me that she refused in November to have a Trump vote on her conscience, and that she hates to see the country being "led by a man who spews vitriol against anyone who is unlike him, a man who tries to invoke God’s name when he is acting utterly ungodly.""
Some Christians think that theology, not secular politics, is the way forward.
David Kuo, who worked for the George W. Bush administration, wrote in his 2006 memoir Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction when he was facing a terminal illness (pp. 262-263):
"We Christians need a short fast from politics.
We need to eschew politics to focus more on practicing compassion. We need to spend more time studying Jesus and less time trying to get people elected. Instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year in support of conservative Christian advocacy groups such as the Family Research Council, Eagle Forum, and the panoply of similar groups, let's give that money to charities and groups that are arguably closer to Jesus' heart. And we Christians should spend less time arguing with those on the other side and more time communing with them."
More recently, Daniel Burke wrote for CNN on 13 June 2018 about the Southern Baptist Convention's annual meeting in Dallas that "a small but significant slice" of the 10,000 participants objected to the planned address by Vice President Mike Pence. Younger people seemed more concerned with evangelizing the message of Jesus (what they call "The Great Commission") than with aligning themselves with the Republican Party. Garrett Kell, a pastor, said alignment with the Republican Party was also strategically fraught as it could affect the Southern Baptists' interracial and international relations. (The Southern Baptists formed as a pro-slavery splinter group in 1845, and Pew's 2014 U.S. Religious Landscape Study found that the Southern Baptists remain 85 percent white.) Pence did address the Convention that day, and Burke followed up, saying that "much of Pence's speech was dedicated to praising the accomplishments of his boss, President Donald Trump." He added: "The denomination's executive committee will consider a motion to cease inviting elected officials to speak at national conventions."
Jonathan Merritt, writing for The Atlantic on 16 June, said that the crowd at the annual meeting was significantly younger than he remembered from his childhood. He quoted Baylor University history professor Barry Hankins as saying that this demographic change "has thrust the group into the middle of an identity crisis". They elected 45-year-old J.D. Greear as the president of the Southern Baptists who has promised to make an effort to proportionately represent women and people of color in leadership roles. The denomination addresses public policy through its Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, which opposes President Trump, and Greear said that inviting Pence to speak "sent a terribly mixed signal" about whether the Southern Baptists stood for religion or politics. At least some Southern Baptists, Merritt said, "appear to recognize that tethering themselves to Donald Trump...places the moral credibility of the Southern Baptist Convention at risk." Furthermore, although "Southern Baptists have criticized more liberal denominations for their declines," they, too, are experiencing the same decline; they have lost 1 million members in the past 15 years. Tying themselves to conservative politics is therefore, many conclude, not the answer to reversing this trend.
Michael Gerson, a white evangelical conservative, noted the demographic decline in an August 2019 op-ed for the Washington Post, pointing out that a quarter of Americans over age 65 are white evangelical Protestants, but only 8 percent of Americans ages 18-29 have that identity. Gerson said it is a "scandal" that white evangelicals are not in a state of "panic" about this decline." Gerson said that evangelical support of "religious liberty" legislation reflects "a larger anxiety about lost social standing." He argues that evangelicals should reemphasize their "religious calling," as they did "in late-18th-century and early-19th-century Britain, or mid-19th-century America," rather than continuing to behave "like another political interest group."
In her article "The Religious Right Has It All Wrong. Trump is a 'Test,' Not Their Savior," Cynthia Dagnal-Myron said she believes that Jesus is "asking Christians, through Trump, to follow His lead repeatedly," — note that the capitalized "His" refers to Jesus, not Trump — by having Trump break every law in The Book to see if we're paying attention."
"In a 2011 poll from PRRI and the Religion News Service, 60% of white evangelicals surveyed said that a public official who 'commits an immoral act in their personal life” cannot still “behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.'
But in October 2016, right after The Washington Post published an 'Access Hollywood' recording of Trump making lewd comments about sexual assault, the number of white evangelicals who weren’t willing to give politicians a pass for immoral behavior dropped to 20%.
...white evangelicals were even less likely in late 2018 to connect politicians’ private and public lives in this way. Only 16.5% said they believed privately immoral behavior translates to unethical professional conduct."
In the most recent study, people did not seem to be responding based on principle as much as they seemed to be responding to a particular politician. When white evangelicals had Bill Clinton in mind, they were four-and-a-half times more likely to say that privately immoral behavior was relevant to public life than when they had Donald Trump in mind.
In May 2019, the Jim Bakker show offered viewers the chance to buy a coin with the faces of Cyrus and Trump for a $45 donation. On the show, Lance Wallnau described Trump as "a Cyrus to navigate through the storm" of American politics. He described the coin as "a point of contact" to use in prayer.
"...there’s always been progressive Christian activism in the United States.
I have studied religious thought and action around migrants and refugees for some time – including analyzing the New Sanctuary Movement, a network of churches that offers refuge to undocumented immigrants and advocates for immigration reform.
* * *
Talk of an emerging “religious left” is ahistoric. American Christianity has always had its liberal strains, with pastors and parishioners protesting state-sponsored injustices like slavery, segregation, the Vietnam War and mass deportation.
But the high profile, religiously based moral outrage at Trump’s immigration policies does seem to be spurring some long-overdue rethinking of what it means to be Christian in America."
A Fox News poll conducted October 6-8, 2019 found that, among white evangelicals, 71% of approved of the job Trump is doing. Only 44% had confidence in Congress and only 26% approved of the job Congress is doing. These white evangelicals had favorable opinions of Trump (70%), Pence (64%), the president's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani (46%), the Democratic Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi (21%), Adam Schiff (17%), Bill Barr (34%), Mitch McConnell (37%), Hillary Clinton (24%), the Democratic Party (24%), the Republican Party (63%). And 57% of them were at least somewhat troubled by the situation surrounding Trump's scandal with the Ukrainian president. 73% were concerned about Trump's allegations against Joe Biden in that scandal. While 28% of white evangelicals said that Trump should be impeached and then removed from office, 64% said that he should not be impeached at all. 38% of them said it is, in general, appropriate for a president to ask foreign countries to investigate their political rivals. 34% said they believe Trump feels it is more important to do what is best for him as an individual rather than what is best for the country.
That 71% approval rating among white evangelicals represents a decline from "the 81 percent that backed him over Hillary Clinton in 2016," Eugene Scott wrote in the Washington Post, and it is possible that Trump's military decision that enabled violence against Christians in Syria will cause him to lose more Christian support among American voters.
In October 2019, the Public Religion Research Institute found that, as reported by Relevant Magazine, "75 percent of white evangelicals say they approve of him and, what’s more, 31 percent of that group say there’s 'almost nothing' Trump could do to lose their support." By contrast, "86 percent of black Protestants disapprove of Trump, 67 percent of which say there’s almost nothing Trump could do at this point to change their minds," and a majority of black Protestants, Hispanic Protestants, and Catholics believe that he encourages white supremacists.
A majority of white evangelicals (60%) think that Trump is morally upstanding, a Pew survey found in early 2020. "The evangelical assessment," an NPR article explained, "does come with some reservations. Only about 15% of white evangelicals, for example, say 'morally upstanding' describes Trump 'very well,' while another 45% say the term applies to Trump 'fairly well.'" (Here, they differ from the American population as a whole, two-thirds of which say that "morally upstanding" does not describe Trump.) Furthermore, in the NPR summary: "Almost two-thirds of white evangelicals see Trump as at least 'somewhat religious,' despite his profanity, his sporadic church attendance, and his evident unfamiliarity with the Bible."
Between April and June 2020, white evangelicals' approval of Trump's performance dropped from 78% to 72% in a Pew survey, and yet 82% of them still said they would vote for Trump over Biden. (Pew found that 77% of white evangelicals voted for Trump over Clinton in 2016.)
Other polls had more drastic results. Over two months (March-May 2020), white evangelicals' support for Trump dropped from 77% to 62%. (PRRI survey) "Militant white masculinity has always been at the center of family-values evangelicalism," Kristin Kobes du Mez wrote. "They denigrated feminism, pacifism, and political correctness, and championed war, law enforcement, the military, and the Second Amendment in order to promote a culture where men could exercise their God-given, testosterone-driven authority." That is why, Kobes du Mez argues, one of his biggest problems for his image in the summer of 2020 has been "his West Point commencement address was derailed by his halting descent down a ramp and apparent difficulty in lifting a glass of water to his lips." Any hint of weakness, physical or otherwise, damages his standing with the "family values" crowd.
On the other hand, though, people who approve of Trump may be more likely to declare themselves evangelical essentially on his behalf. From 2016–2020, Ryan Burge wrote in the New York Times, "there was no significant decline in the share of white Americans who identify as evangelical Christians. Instead, the report found the opposite: During Donald Trump’s presidency, the number of white Americans who started identifying as evangelical actually grew." This is based on a 2021 report from the Pew Center. However, Burge writes: "The number of self-identified evangelicals has likely not increased over the last few years because evangelicals have been effective at spreading the Gospel and bringing new converts to the church." Instead: "millions of Americans are being drawn to the evangelical label because of its association with the G.O.P." In recent years, the share of evangelicals who say they rarely attend church has grown, and the non-churchgoing evangelicals are simultaneously becoming more likely to say they are politically conservative. It also appears that non-Christians — for example, Muslims — are adopting the label "evangelical" because they think it means "very religiously engaged and very politically conservative." So the label "evangelical," as a self-descriptor, is changing to mean politically conservative and also some kind of religious, whether that is cultural Christianity or another religion. The result is that "more and more Americans are conflating evangelicalism with Republicanism — and melding two forces to create a movement that is not entirely about politics or religion but power."
essentially see politics as a great battle between White, Christian America and the multiracial, religiously diverse reality of 21st century America. They want someone to help them win that existential fight. Government [in their view] is there not to produce legislative fixes to real-world problems but to engage their enemies on behalf of White Christianity. ... The fixation with defining the United States as a White Christian nation is on full display nightly on Fox News, where replacement theory — not abortion or gay rights — drives so much more of the conversation.
Katherine Stewart said in May 2022 that some Christian nationalism "overlaps with the Great Replacement theory and demographic paranoia in general," although among Latino Christian nationslists, "the argument is not that a preferred racial group is being replaced but that a preferred religious and cultural value system (with supposed economic implications) is under threat.” Stewart prefers to call it "religious nationalism": "a reactionary, authoritarian ideology that centers its grievances on a narrative of lost national greatness and believes in the indispensability of the 'right' religion in recovering that lost greatness."
White-power extremism reveals that the core of this ideology is not the victims it attacks, but rather the thing it attempts to preserve — and the mechanism that transfigures this ideology into racial violence. It imagines that a conspiracy of elites, usually imagined as Jewish “globalists,” are deliberately working to eradicate both white people and white culture. This is why white nationalism is so often virulently antisemitic, and also why it feeds on deep distrust of the media, education, science and other arbiters of expertise.
Although, a distinction is added in this January 2021 academic article by Ruth Braunstein "identifies two ideal-typical versions of this [Christian nationalist] narrative: the white Christian nation and the colorblind Judeo-Christian nation."
Though Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, "wrote in 2016 that Mr. Trump was 'the Great Evangelical Embarrassment,'" nevertheless in 2020 he supported Trump "because Democrats are 'antagonistic to biblical Christianity' on issues like abortion and transgender rights."
By contrast, Marvin Olasky, the editor of the Christian magazine World since 1994, has continued to oppose Trump. He wrote that he "deplored the 'Flight 93' approach — a reference to the hijacked flight on 9/11 where passengers banded together to storm the cockpit — that he sees among many conservatives, who, he says, believe they must use any means necessary to keep America from being destroyed by liberals." He submitted his resignation in November 2021 because he disagrees with the magazine's direction toward American political conservatism. He plans to produce the annual Roe v. Wade issue in early 2022 and then leave.
"Trump’s appealed to the Right in 2016 precisely because he made it clear he wouldn’t be bound by the rules. That’s exactly what reactionary intellectual/pundit Michael Anton captured so precisely in his infamous “Flight 93” essay, published shortly before the 2016 election, in which he made the case for Donald Trump by presenting the Democrats as a fundamental threat to America, akin to the terrorists of 9/11: Anton called on the Right to embrace Trumpism because Trump would be willing to go much further to stop this “Un-American” threat than any of the “ordinary” Republicans who were “merely reactive,” who would keep playing by the rules of the game, and for whom Anton had nothing but contempt. Since Trump, in this interpretation, wasn’t constrained by norms, traditions, or precedents, he alone could be counted on to do whatever was necessary to fight back against the “wholesale cultural and political change” – to “charge the cockpit,” in Anton’s crude analogy, like the passengers of Flight 93 on 9/11. What the American Values Survey is picking up here is how the “Flight 93” mentality is taking over not just the rightwing intellectual sphere, where it’s been hegemonic for a while, but ever larger parts of the Republican Party and its voters as well. It is now “Flight 93” politics, all the time."
A Trump speech in October 2023:
"'On Day One, I will immediately restore and expand the 'Trump travel ban,'' he pledged to the cheering crowd.
* * *
Then Trump again expanded his rhetoric.
“I will implement strong ideological screening of all immigrants,” he said, reading from the teleprompter. “If you hate America, if you want to abolish Israel,” he continued, apparently ad-libbing, “if you don’t like our religion — which a lot of them don’t — if you sympathize with the jihadists, then we don’t want you in our country and you are not getting in. Right?”
The crowd cheered enthusiastically. Trump vamped: “We don’t want you! Get out of here! You’re fired!”
* * *
This is all Trump is getting at. “Our religion” — the religion of those in the room at his event — is right-wing, often evangelical Christianity. In 2020, the density of White Christians in a county was a very good indicator of whom voters in the county supported.
* * *
Parsing Trump's comments is excessive, of course; as stipulated, we know what he means. He means that certain categories of people are inherently dangerous and unacceptable ... He is saying, once again, that he will defend American Christians against perceived threats — threats that might be framed in vague religious terms but which are not fundamentally religious...
He is telling those Americans — White Christian conservatives — that he will make them the focus of America’s protective power."
In 2009, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life asked Americans whether it was ever justifiable to torture suspected terrorists during interrogation, and respondents were 50% more likely to say yes if they were white evangelicals than if they were "religiously unaffiliated."
Katherine Stewart's The Good News Club: The Christian Right's Stealth Assault on America's Children is based on interviews with people involved in the deliberate intrusion of evangelical Christianity into public schools: those who are doing it, and those who are affected by it. Stewart writes: “In 2012, when this book was first published, America’s public elementary schools hosted 3,400 Good News Clubs — evangelical clubs that deceive children young as five into thinking that their public school endorses a certain fundamentalist brand of religion. As of this writing,” she wrote in the Preface to the 2017 Edition, "there are close to 6,000." The effects of the religious agenda are wide-ranging since the Religious Right fears that “the subjects of biology and history and more” are part of an effort to indoctrinate kids with a secularist agenda, and their abstinence-only sex education seems based, in Stewart's estimation, on "sectarian ideas about gender roles."
Whereas the Religious Right maintains a narrative that 1960s Supreme Court decisions against school prayer meant that “God was kicked out of the classroom,” Stewart found by traveling the country to research this book that there were many “religion-driven programs and initiatives inserting themselves into public school systems with unprecedented force and unexpected consequences.” Most of these programs are driven by “a very conservative, even fundamentalist” evangelical Christianity. She spoke with activists who are Biblical infallibilists who believe "they are engaged in a daily struggle with Satan. They also believe that most people who call themselves Christian...will not be among the saved.” Many of them also “believe that the United States has a special role to play in preparing for the imminent end of the world.” Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF) has a creed that people are saved only through faith, not through good behavior. Rich Lang is quoted as calling CEF “a purity cult. It is intentionally exclusive” of those with different religious beliefs. A. Charles Ware, the president of Crossroads Bible College in Indianapolis and a man who is in an interracial marriage, said in a lecture she attended that he wished to redefine “interracial” to use it to disparage relationships between Christians and non-Christians.
Evangelical programs in public schools are harmful not only to people with minority identities but often to the majority of the school population, as the programs sometimes “enter the schools from outside the community together, and are at odds with it from the beginning.” Stewart quoted Jerry Falwell in 1979 as anticipating the day when “we don’t have public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them.” Perhaps for this reason, Good News Club wants to operate inside the public schools, not in nearby churches. “Liberals tend to take for granted," Stewart writes, "the part of the right-wing narrative that suggests that religious activity in the public schools arises from a grassroots demand for it," but she contends that "it is the handiwork of well-tuned and very well connected conservative Christian legal groups, and is imposed upon rather than demanded by communities.”
One of their outreach tactics is plying small children with sweets. “Because the Good News Club seeks to reach children who in many cases are not old enough to read, a centerpiece of its program is the ‘wordless book,’ a simple picture book intended to convey religious doctrine....The CEF itself makes quite clear that the purpose of these exercises is not to educate, but to convert.” Stewart listened to some of the presentations to six-year-olds and said: “It’s like hearing a comedy routine for a second time...Everything is scripted...This is religion on an industrial scale, streamlined and codified into a tight set of procedures crafted by experts for maximum ease of use by middle-aged volunteers and maximum impact on the six-year-old mind.”
Older children have participated in events like “See You At the Pole” where they gather near a flagpole and nail pieces of paper containing names of non-Christian classmates to a cross. The first such event happened in 1990. Such so-called “peer-to-peer evangelism” enables “adults [to] use children to do what they’re not allowed to do on their own.”
Stewart spoke to one parent who, in 2009, emailed the other parents in his child’s first-grade class on a closed mailing list to let them know — in an "innocuous" manner, he thought— what CEF was and that it was present in the school. One parent challenged him with the question “How is this [Christian] group different from any other group?” while another said “I need to protect my kids from people like you.” The email spread off the list and he began receiving anonymous rants, one of which especially concerned him with its strident tone and its claim that “your school is harassing and persecuting christians”. Other parents also felt afraid and did not want to identify themselves to Stewart for the book because, as one put it: “When you get into these extreme forms of religion, it always brings out the crazies.”
Many supporters of the Religious Right have ordinary concerns about modernity: crime, declining educational standards, incivility, and the rate of technological change. What unites them into a movement is their attribution of social ills to a perceived loss of Christian power in the mainstream culture (as indicated by support for the belief in a nonexistent "War on Christmas," as Stewart mentioned once and as I have described in an article for Medium), and their solution is that others “are the problem because we are of the ‘wrong’ religion.” (Robert P. Jones concluded his 2016 book The End of White Christian America in favor of Christians adopting an attitude that ”accepts the death of White Christian America and encourages evangelicals to participate fully in a pluralistic society, but avoids the temptations toward domination and sectarianism, each of which is driven by nostalgia for a lost Christian America.”) Stewart doesn’t claim that Christian influence is dying. On the contrary, she fears: “We are witnessing the creation of an industrial-scale evangelical conversion machine.” History suggests it “will never succeed in changing the world in quite the way it imagines, but that it may very well change the world in ways that we would not wish to imagine.”
I was reminded of something in Asad Haider’s recent book Mistaken Identity by the following passage in Stewart’s conclusion, specifically her reference to “the language of liberalism":
“One reason why we haven’t seen what is happening right in front of us is that the leaders of the religious assault on public education have learned to cloak their agenda in the language of liberalism and relativism. We are all children of the civil rights era now. We all agree that discrimination is bad. We all want to respect one another’s worldview, and we all cherish the right to freedom of speech. We are so used to the idea that the First Amendment is for liberals, and that it is our bulwark against fascist movements, that we fail to notice when it has been turned around and used as a wedge instead.
The judicial strategists of the Christian Right claim that all they want is ‘equal access’ and ‘toleration.’ But that isn’t in fact all they want. They don’t want equality; they want control. They don’t want toleration; they want the opportunity to practice their intolerance. They don’t want their religion to be included in the schools; they want the schools to be absorbed within their religion.”
As I wrote in my review of Haider’s book, he argues that “the modern liberal state begins with ‘collectivities of people’ and inflicts its power upon them which somehow atomizes them into individual ‘political subjects — the basic political unit of liberalism, after all, is the individual.’ People are taught that they have rights as individuals so they must state that their personal identity has somehow been wronged if they are to get reparations from the state.” That’s how we end up with what we call “identity politics,” whether we like it or not. And, as Stewart implies, it's important to be able to tell the difference between a plea to address religious discrimination and a bid to assume control.
Book
Katherine Stewart. The Good News Club: The Christian Right's Stealth Assault on America's Children. (2017 Kindle edition). Hachette, 2012.
Update: A PRRI report found that, in 2006, white evangelical Protestants were 23% of the U.S. population. In 2020, they were only 14% of the U.S. population."
"A decade ago, the radical aims at the ideological core of the Christian nationalist movement were there to see for anybody who looked...[but] most Republican Party leaders at the time distanced themselves from theocratic extremists. They avoided the rhetoric of Seven Mountains dominionism, an ideology that calls explicitly for the domination of the seven “peaks” of modern civilization (including government and education) by Christians of the correct, supposedly biblical variety.
What a difference a decade makes. National organizations like the Faith & Freedom Coalition and the Ziklag Group, which bring together prominent Republican leaders with donors and religious right activists, feature “Seven Mountains” workshops and panels at their gatherings. Nationalist leaders and their political dependents in the Republican Party now state quite openly what before they whispered to one another over their prayer breakfasts."
"Not religious at all" is poised to overtake "moderately religious" as the most prevalent description of how religious Americans consider themselves to be.
"Very religious" remains the least prevalent and continues to decline. Quite the shift from just 13 years ago. pic.twitter.com/nfiryLH5Bz
On Jan. 18, 2018, the Dept. of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced that its Office for Civil Rights would have a new "Conscience and Religious Freedom Division." The idea of a need to protect "religious freedom" has been around for a while. Outwardly, it is based on the concern that a religious person might be forced to do something that violates their conscience or religious belief. Political scientist Andrew Lewis said recently:
"Federal religious freedom laws gained some steam in the mid-1990s, and a decent number of conservatives were involved in them, but there was very little public awareness that they were going on.
It’s not until you see the legalization of same-sex marriage that you see this real drive to protect religious freedom. The day that the Obergefell case was decided...They knew that they were losing this cultural battle and this was a way to preserve what they thought was their orthodox faith in action."
During the 1990s and 2000s while same-sex marriage was debated nationally, many people claimed to oppose legalizing it on the premise that clergy should not be forced to perform same-sex weddings. This threat was never real, since clergy have always been free to refuse to marry people (divorcees and interfaith couples) and to impose religious requirements on the couple before and during the wedding. Since same-sex marriage was legalized nationwide, no clergy have been forced to perform one. The obviousness of the non-threat did not stop it from seizing people's imaginations. Having lost the same-sex marriage battle, Christian conservatives now aim for "religious freedom" laws to ensure that religious people are not forced to do...well, anything that they claim offends their beliefs.
For now, the new HHS division does not directly create or change laws (though it might encourage them). It is supposed to enforce whatever federal laws exist. Its activities will depend in part on what federal laws are created or struck down and what complaints are filed. Its new website does not contain a comprehensive list of all possibly relevant laws, so it is hard to predict what will happen.
The agency is already being selective about how it promotes what it does. Its website talks a bit about abortion and euthanasia and the nondiscrimination provisions in the Affordable Care Act that relate to them, but it doesn't mention the ACA’s Section 1557 which forbids discrimination based on markers including “pregnancy, gender identity, and sex stereotyping" and whose enforcement has been in question since Trump’s election. Its website doesn't mention transgender people at all, but this is one of the points at issue in the public consciousness. If that part of the ACA is repealed, the new Conscience and Religious Freedom Division will have responsibility for enforcing the right of healthcare workers to discriminate against people based on pregnancy and gender.
Drilling down through the website’s complaint process reveals a list of a wide range of relevant employment situations including agencies for adoption, foster care, and social services; mental health centers; drug rehabs; homeless shelters; nursing homes; researchers; insurance companies; and pharmacies. This suggests that religious people anticipate wanting to reserve the right to deny service based on a client’s identity or behavior, not just on specific procedures.
Someone might want the birth control pill or the "Plan B" pill to interrupt a possible pregnancy. Someone might want pre- or post-exposure prophylaxis for HIV. It would be good if one's pharmacist would dispense it. The pharmacist's prerogative to make judgments about others does not seem to outweigh the client's prerogative to make choices about their own life. That doesn't seem to be a good definition of political freedom.
If a cosmetic implant ruptures it would be nice to think that one could just get it taken out without starting a debate about whether the patient is really a woman, whether it's really an emergency and exactly how many hours are estimated to remain to allow a different healthcare staff to be recruited,, whether repairing it counts as a sex-reassignment surgery as opposed to only removing it and sending her elsewhere to get it fixed. What kind of moral calculus is that, and what is the benefit? It is much simpler to accept that this is a person who needs the same kind of treatment as anyone else with that problem. But the insistence on so-called "religious freedom" is the endorsement of just that kind of presumptuous, time-wasting, anxiety-provoking, us/them polarizing moral calculus, and there is now a federal agency to attempt to culturally legitimize it.
The scope of the types of discriminations allowable under "religious freedom" is likely to increase. State laws branded under the same “religious freedom” concept are not all healthcare-specific. Some apply more broadly to general business dealings. So, even though this new federal agency may not have the mission of enforcing state law, we should pay attention to how the idea of "religious freedom" is variously interpreted and what versions politically succeed.
"NARAL says the bill bans abortion after 20 weeks with “no exception to protect a woman’s health.” Smith also says there’s “no exception to protect a woman’s health.” The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists warned that “there are many reasons a woman may seek abortion care at 20 weeks, including fatal or serious medical conditions to the woman.” None of these statements makes reference to the exception for life-threatening cases.
Because some of these statements give an incomplete picture of the exceptions in the bill, we award One Pinocchio.
That's interesting, an exception for the woman's life. Hey — where are we in 2023?
"The Republican Party remains bitterly divided on abortion, with some pushing for a 15-week national abortion ban, while others, such as newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson, have supported a proposed federal ban on abortion as early as six weeks." — Republicans face 2024 dilemma after abortion rights issue powers Democrats Gabriella Borter and Tim Reid, Reuters, November 8, 2023
To clarify:
Plan B is to prevent ovulation/implantation w/in 72 hrs of sex. Available over the counter many places.
Plan C / Abortion medication is to terminate a pregnancy /help w/miscarriage up to about 10 weeks’ gestation (from last menstrual period). After implantation. Get online in the US.
Liberty Counsel, the Christian hate group behind Kim Davis’s attempt to have the Supreme Court overturn its marriage equality decision, says their fight to end LGBTQ+ equality is far from over.
“I have no doubt that Davis’s resolve will serve as a catalyst to raise up many more challenges to the wrongly decided Obergefell opinion,” wrote Liberty Counsel President Mat Staver in a message on the group’s website. “Until then, we must pray, fight, and contend for when Obergefell is no longer the law of the land.”
* * *
Staver’s argument is similar to an argument that Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito made in 2020 that the mere existence of married same-sex couples is a violation of Christians’ religious freedom because seeing married same-sex couples encourages people to judge Christians “as bigots.” (That opinion was delivered in the context of a different appeal filed by Davis.)
“Since Obergefell, parties have continually attempted to label people of good will as bigots merely for refusing to alter their religious beliefs in the wake of prevailing orthodoxy,” Thomas wrote at the time.
Religious “Liberty” Commission Just Another Buffoonish Trump Reality Show: We need to call this what it is: a sham, a joke, a mendacious misuse of the fundamental American principle of religious liberty meant to lay the groundwork for the obscene Christian Nationalist policies this administration wants to implement. Fish Stark, Common Dreams, Sep 30, 2025
I think the loss of Nonpolitical monoculture touchpoints (predominantly entertainment) because of streaming, helped contribute to why Trump was able to develop a cult.
"By the early twenty-first century, if you were Christian or evangelical, you had little choice but to vote Republican. Early partisan divides on abortion were followed by increasingly polarized positions on gay rights and eventually transgender rights. Wealthy Republicans used these issues to capture the white working-class vote, and they largely succeeded, even though voting Republican was often not in workers' economic interst. Moral imperatives and cultural identities were now, more than ever, driving voting patterns. White evangelicals now represent two-thirds of the Republican Party. By contrast, non-Christians — including agnostics, Jews, and Muslims — represent half of the Democratic Party."
"During the late eighties and throughout the nineties," Susie Meister wrote in early 2016 before the election, "evangelicalism hit its stride communicating and promoting a very specific message that amounted to a chorus of sound bites about “family values,” militarism, and the pro-life movement." Meister, someone who "attended church several times a week," realized:
"I could no longer reconcile Jesus’s calls for non-judgment, loving your enemies, and taking up your cross with many of the Religious Right’s positions on social services, women’s rights, and the LGBT community. Even though I felt alone in my theological shift, I was not. A recent Pew Research Center poll puts the evangelical retention rate at 65%...It isn’t just general education that can shift beliefs; indeed a recent study by Baylor University researcher Aaron Franzen found that increased reading of the Bible correlated with greater passion for social justice — a trait typically associated with liberalism."
She noted that Trump isn't the first example of Christians overlooking the personal history of their preferred candidate: "From Ronald Reagan’s divorce to Mitt Romney’s Mormonism, evangelical Christians give passes to those whose rhetoric is most in line with their philosophy and who they believe can win the election, even if that person’s biography isn’t in line with their religious doctrine."
Around the same time, in early 2016, an article on The Weekly Challenger began by calling Trump "a political cult leader" The article says that the "white working class" isn't seeing quite as much benefit from their historic white privilege anymore, as they "are killing themselves with pills and alcohol, committing suicide with guns, and dying of despair" and also just dying of old age which means that "the Republican Party’s base of voters is rapidly shrinking." Trump leverages what psychologists call "terror management theory," as, "when scared or under threat, conservative authoritarians are more likely to become tribal, bigoted, racist and generally more hostile to those they identify as some type of Other."
Given that the demographic base is shrinking, can the Republican Party just become...less racist, sexist, homophobic, and isolationist to expand their appeal to wider demographics? No, they can't, because that will explode what is left of their core base right now. Since the 1960s, "racism has been fundamental to American conservatism, and the GOP in particular," writes Zak Cheney-Rice in 2019, "even as its purportedly defining tenets have proven to be negotiable, from small government to antagonism toward autocrats to reduced deficit spending." Republican leaders (given how the party has defined itself for a half-century) will give up all other governing principles before they will give up their racism. This is not a matter of party "infiltration by a few bad eggs. On the contrary, it’s been apparent since the Nixon administration that the Republican Party would collapse without support from racists." They know they're in a losing battle and they're circling the wagons. The actual people who currently support the Republican Party will not be injured if the party gives up its racism or its power, but the Party itself as an institution may fall apart. What they have to do is radically transform the party to be anti-racist so that it no longer resembles what it's been saying and doing for the past half-century and reorganizes what remains of its core supporters. The leaders won't go through this effort. Unfortunately, "the movement’s racism problem is not the result of a hijacking or a coup, but of popular will. There are no innocents among today’s Republicans. There’s only the ugliness they’ve unleashed, and whether they’ve the courage to risk political ruin in order to eradicate it."
"The vast majority of black Protestants (80 percent), religiously unaffiliated Americans (75 percent), Hispanic Catholics (74 percent) and non-Christian religious Americans (73 percent) surveyed said they have negative opinions about Trump. Slim majorities of white mainline Protestants and white Catholics (both 52 percent) also said they are not fans of the president.
In fact, the only religious group that had a majority of respondents voicing a favorable opinion of Trump was white evangelical Protestants, with 68 percent of them saying they have a favorable view of Trump, including 28 percent with a very favorable opinion of the president." (Carol Kuruvilla, Huffington Post)
Apart from the clear pro-Trump majority among white evangelicals, writes Diana Butler Bass, "white Christianity right now is a dumpster of discord; internecine warfare has not been this bad since the 1920s when controversy ripped American churches apart on whether human beings evolved from monkeys." As a personal example, although Bass and her brother "grew up in the same Methodist Sunday school," they stopped speaking after the Charlottesville incident "when we argued about white nationalism and racism," as she reports two years after that incident.
My brother, as an adult, traded that God for a tougher, stricter one who exercises judgment against all who refuse to bend the knee, a kind of Emperor-God, enthroned in glory. This God has often shown up in Christian history; including in American fundamentalism. But from 1980 onward, he underwent a revival in several strands of American religion including Pentecostalism, neo-Calvinism, traditionalist Roman Catholicism, and some Orthodox communities. He is a masculine Sovereign, and a winner-God for people feeling displaced in a pluralistic world. And after 9/11, this militaristic God became more real.
A Dungeons & Dragons manual, Villain Design Handbook, informally uses a simpler definition: “for the purpose of this book a cult is defined as any exclusive group that uses fear and intimidation to control its members.”
"[Mark] Lilla and others have suggested that political cults tend to fill religious vacuums; that is, they tend to arise when people lose faith in the efficacy of the religious status quo to manage their problems. In other words, in times of confusion and fear, people will vouchsafe unto symbols of the nation, the state, the race, the leader, and so on what they used to reserve for God and related religious symbols. Political religion therefore always competes in some form with preexisting religious organizations and beliefs, giving rise to a range of outcomes that include cooptation, intimidation, repression, and other possibilities as well. This precisely is what led Voegelin to insist on similarities between authoritarian and totalitarian systems and religious systems..."
Using an 11-point list of cultic structure and belief, Garfinkle finds that Trumpism is cultic only to a "middling extent," and moreover its cultiness has been decreasing since the election was won. He warns that, nevertheless, "[t]o the extent it is more cult-like than its recent predecessors, the 'excitement' may be just ahead of us as the movement circles the wagons."
It's not true — Shannon Ashley wrote in 2018, identifying herself as someone who once emerged from a cult — that cults are "always religious," that only a few people are at risk for joining cults, that cults "prey on the weak and are easy to identify," and that most people who join are lost causes and can never emerge. A real cult, she says, uses "thought reform to challenge reality."
Reza Aslan, author of God: A Human History, points out in an interview on Nov. 20, 2017 that "to this day, still, three-quarters of white evangelicals strongly support him," and "support for him is highest among those who go to church at least once a week." He asks why churchgoing makes one more likely to support a
"lying, lecherous, greedy, sexist, racist, narcissistic sociopath whose entire worldview makes a mockery of Christianity, makes a mockery of basic Christian tenets like humility, and empathy, and care for the poor. And scholars like myself have been just wracking our brains trying to figure this out, 'cause it makes no sense."
He observes that this is limited to white evangelicals (as two-thirds of evangelicals of color supported Hillary Clinton). He also observes that white evangelicals (who called themselves "Values Voters") used to say that public morality was important for politicians, but today, atheists are more likely to say that. Aslan concludes that Trump has "transformed a large swath of white evangelicals into his own personal cult." Aslan is using "cult" in a "pejorative sense...it's a 'value judgment' word." He believes Trumpism is a cult insofar it is "an insulated group of individuals in thrall to a charismatic leader to whom they have given divine status, prophetic status, and that is definitively what has happened among a large swath of white evangelicals when it comes to Trump."
On June 19, 2019, TV pastor (and "End Times prepper") Jim Bakker said on his show that Trump was elected "because God's people voted and the world knows it, the enemies of the gospel know it." He warned that "if we keep losing, you’re going to see the leaders of the church and the leaders of the gospel and the political conservative leaders that are powerful, you are going to see them suddenly die, suddenly killed—suddenly as they were driving, suddenly as they were in a boat, suddenly in an airplane—you’re going to see it one after another.” He knows this because "God spoke this to me years ago what would happen near the end and I believe we’re in that time." In August 2018, Bakker warned that "the evil in this country is so bad, if I was a Republican — which I have been my whole life — I couldn’t wear a hat with my candidate on it without concern about being murdered in the street." However, Bakker is aware that Trump does not fit the image of a typical Christian leader. In January 2020, Right Wing Watch shared a video of Bakker apparently joking that, because Trump is so difficult to love or even to forgive, only true Christians are prepared to love and accept Trump.
Evangelicals aside, most Americans are displeased with the president, and therefore his approach to campaigning and governing may not survive in American politics. Ezra Klein's Nov. 7 article in Vox:
"Trumpism without Trump was possible before Trump was president. It might be possible after he’s president. It’s not possible while he’s president.
In 2016, Trump had the advantage of being a true outsider: He had no record to answer for, no unemployment rate to explain, no votes to justify. For all his oddities and eccentricities, he was a blank slate — a businessman to those who wanted a businessman, a culture warrior to those who wanted a culture warrior, a pragmatist to those who wanted a pragmatist, a conservative to those who wanted a conservative, and so on. He was theory severed from practice; “ism” without the reality check of is.
But now we have Trumpism with Trump, and the American people don’t much like it. Trump is no longer an abstraction, Trumpism no longer an idea. Instead, we are watching the real thing: a White House in chaos, a legislative agenda in shambles, a world in which nuclear war is likelier and America’s global leadership is diminished. Trump isn’t merely unpopular; he is less popular than any president at this point in their term since the advent of modern polling, and he is that unpopular even though the economy is growing and Americans are not dying in large numbers overseas."
At least a couple scandals centered around Liberty University.
First, in 2015, Liberty's chief information officer John Gauger accepted an offer of $50,000 from the Trump campaign to manipulate the polls on two news websites. Trump's former personal attorney Michael Cohen gave him a Walmart bag containing roughly $12,000 in cash and a collectible MMA boxing glove; he never delivered the rest of the money.
Secondly, the following year, there was a politicized Christian battle. Going into the 2016 Republican caucuses, Sen. Ted Cruz (whose father is an evangelical pastor) had expected the support of Liberty's president Jerry Falwell Jr., but shortly before the causes, Falwell (a businessman, not a pastor like his father) suddenly announced his support for Trump.
When the Access Hollywood tape was released in October 2016 before the election, Newsweek reports, "student journalists accused [Liberty's president Jerry] Falwell Jr. of censorship for axing an opinion piece in the student newspaper that blasted the then-Republican nominee." Liberty, the largest employer in Lynchburg, Va., had hosted Trump as a commencement speaker in 2017. In March 2018, Falwell appeared on CNN, defending Trump's character in the wake of sex scandals. Some Liberty students criticized Falwell for this:
To be clear, most Liberty students are not moral relativists like Falwell. Most don’t even know he was on TV tonight. That veneer of logos behind him makes it look like we all stand behind his words. Some do, but many do not. https://t.co/WGnXYIhLWW
A new organization called Red Letter Christians planned a revival event in Lynchburg for April 2018, intended to be somewhat of a political protest against Falwell. Professional evangelicals were afraid of damaging their ties to Liberty, so Red Letter Christians had a difficult time recruiting speakers for the event. Shortly before the event, Falwell banned the Red Letter Christians from campus and said the student newspaper couldn't cover the event. Red Letter exec director Don Golden said he wasn't inclined to ask permission to do what he does, since "we weren’t asked permission for evangelical leaders to say that Donald Trump is the president for evangelicals." In the end, the hall they rented for the revival was filled to less than one-fifth capacity, though many people watched online.
When asked at the end of 2018, "Is there anything President Trump could do that would endanger that support from you or other evangelical leaders?" Falwell answered, "No." A long investigative article published in the New York Times in June 2019, based on information gathered "from a lawsuit filed against the Falwells in Florida; the investigation into Mr. [Michael] Cohen by federal prosecutors in New York; and the gonzo-style tactics of the comedian and actor Tom Arnold," found that Michael Cohen, then Trump's lawyer, had been willing to help the Falwells with 2015 lawsuit over ownership of the gay-friendly Miami Hostel. As a favor to Jerry and Becki Falwell, who were being threatened with the revelation of compromising photographs of them, Cohen was thinking of buying and burying the photographs. The photos may have conveniently disappeared on their own without Cohen's involvement, however, and, since then, "no photos have surfaced."
A New York Times editorial on June 7, 2018 suggested that "the cult of Trump" really is just about the man:
"Mr. Trump’s favorability rating among Republicans is at 87 percent — the second-highest rating within a president’s party at an administration’s 500-day mark since World War II. (George W. Bush was slightly higher following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.) The absence of Republican criticism of Mr. Trump, in turn, serves to reinforce his popularity, creating a cycle cravenness that has now made it risky for even the staunchest of conservatives to question Mr. Trump. * * * Former House speaker John Boehner addressed the crowd at a policy conference in May 2018: 'There is no Republican Party. There’s a Trump party. The Republican Party is kind of taking a nap somewhere.'"
Scot Lehigh satirized in the Boston Globe on June 21: "The Great Trumpkin had hoped to rally the entire cult to his side. Just follow Corey’s lead and offer a sneering 'womp womp' to stories of traumatized kids. Why, the Thugwomps, with its nice 19th century ring, could even become the new nickname of the Grand Old Cult!"
The ultimate cause of this situation, however, is Trump himself. His followers are not asked to follow the contours of an ideology. They are asked to embrace his impulses and instincts. Those instincts move in a clear direction: toward feeding racial and ethnic divisions, salting national wounds, undermining rival institutions and violating restrictive precedents. But the unifying principle is Trump himself.
G.K. Chesterton argued that the egotist is the exact opposite of the dogmatist. The dogmatist believes there is an objective truth that he wants everyone to see. The egotist believes that all his views are interesting because they are related to him.
When it comes to President Trump, it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between a political strategy and a nervous breakdown. His tweeted trash talk, his meandering stream of consciousness media availabilities and his shameless embrace of sleaziness are not the signs of a healthy mind. Trump’s followers might eventually look up to find they were actors in someone else’s delusion.
* * *
Trump is effectively setting a new standard of political morality and requiring his supporters to defend it. He is asking elected Republicans, in particular, to agree with his claim that a practice uniformly viewed as corruption in the past is actually an example of fighting corruption now. That is the little thing, the small thing, which Trump demands of his followers: To call hot cold. To call black white. To call wrong right.
Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s idea of “incommensurability” strikes me as relevant here. If all moral claims are merely “emotive” — statements about ourselves rather than the nature of reality — then there is no way to argue between them.
* * *
Trump is the emotivist par excellence. He holds no objective, abstract beliefs about the meaning of justice or duty. He approves of things that help him and disapproves of things that hurt him. There is no other moral grounding.
Rather than shaping President Trump’s agenda in Christian ways, they [white evangelical Protestants] have been reshaped into the image of Trump himself. Or, more accurately, they have become involved in a political throuple with Trump and Fox News, in which each feeds the grievances and conspiracy thinking of the others.
The result has properly been called cultlike. For many followers, Trump has defined an alternative, insular universe of facts and values that only marginally resembles our own.
* * *
Thirty-one percent say there is almost nothing that Trump could do to forfeit their approval. This is preemptive permission for any violation of the moral law or the constitutional order. It is not support; it is obeisance.
In January 2022, Democratic strategist Paul Begala pointed out that Republicans no longer have a political ideology apart from Trump. In 2006, "16 G.O.P. senators...voted to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act," yet now in 2022, those same senators are blocking that same legislation, because now they see that, if USAmericans vote, then Trump cannot win. They no longer have political beliefs (if they ever did); more obviously, they have Trumpism.
But what are the aims?
If Trumpism is a cult, what is its ideology and what are its goals?
Perhaps none. In June 2018, Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Corker said: "It's becoming a cultish thing, isn't it?" He elaborated that this is "an administration that wakes up every day on an ad hoc basis just making stuff up as they go along with no coherency to it".
"You just can’t," Charles M. Blow wrote in the New York Times on June 20, 2018, "construct prisons for babies. You can’t rip children from mothers and fathers. You can’t use the power of the American government to institute and oversee a program of state-sponsored child abuse. You can’t have a system where the process and possibility of reunification is murky and maybe futile." Complaining that "although two-thirds of Americans overall opposed the policy, a majority of Republicans supported it," he offered this diagnosis: "That to me goes beyond standard political tribalism. That ventures into the territory that the Tennessee Republican senator Bob Corker described last week: This is cultlike." Indeed: "Not even the sight of devastated families could move the party that once called itself the party of family values. Not even the idea of 'tender age' internment camps for babies could move the party built on the protection of 'unborn babies.'"
Tribalism is now not just one force in American politics, it’s the overwhelming one, and tribalism abhors reality if it impugns the tribe. But you can’t have both tribalism and public health...What we are seeing is whether this tribalism can be sustained even when it costs tens of thousands of lives, even when it means exposing yourself to a deadly virus, even when it is literally more important than your own life. We are entering the Jonestown phase of the Trump cult this summer.
What is a cult?
"The concept of cult was implicit in the work of Howard Becker on spiritualism, who described cult in terms of an ‘amorphous, loose-textured, uncondensed type of social structure ... is that of purely personal ecstatic experience, salvation, comfort and mental or physical healing’ (Von Wiese & Becker cited in Nelson, 1968). Becker’s interpretation formed the basis of the definition provided by J. Milton Yinger (1957, cited in Nelson, 1968), who maintained that a cult is normally a small, short-lived group, developed around the personality of a charismatic leader."
— Lisa Sugiura, The Incel Rebellion: The Rise of the Manosphere and the Virtual War Against Women (2021), open access.
Aside: According to a 2023 CNN story, "an unincorporated area of Volusia County, [Florida,] Cassadaga is home to the Southern Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp, a community founded around the religious movement Spiritualism that is 'based upon the principle of continuous life demonstrated through Mediumship,' according to the camp’s official press kit."
Mary Midgley wrote in the early 1980s that Nazism lacked any consistent ideology except for hatred of Jews.
"In general, then, there are strong objections to viewing all wrongdoers as mad, as well as strong temptations to do it, and for many cases people do not find this explanation plausible. In these cases, however, another strategy often comes into play to make the offence look intelligible. This is to credit the offenders with having a complete morality of their own, which, for them, justifies their actions. This idea leads people to suppose that (for instance) the Nazis must have been original reasoners, with an independent, consistent and well-thought-out ethical theory — a view which their careers and writings do not support at all. As Hannah Arendt points out, at the Nuremburg trials the lack of this much-advertised commodity became painfully obvious. 'The defendants accused and betrayed each other and assured the world that they 'had always been against it'....Although most of them must have known that they were doomed, not a single one of them had the guts to defend the Nazi ideology.' This was not just from a failure of nerve, though that in itself would be significant in a movement apparently devoted to the military virtues. It was also because there was not really much coherent ideology that could be defended. The only part of it which carried real passionate conviction was emotional and destructive; it was the hatred of the Jews. This always remained constant, but almost every other element varied according to the audience addressed and the political possibilities of the moment. The enemy might be Communism or capitalism, the elite or the rabble, France or Russia or the Weimar government, just as interest dictated at the time. It was therefore hard to say much that was positive and constructive about the aims of the regime. Germany was to expand, but why it would be a good thing that it should do so remained obscure." (Mary Midgley. Wickedness: A Philosophical Essay. (First published by Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984.) Kindle edition: Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.)
The inevitable observation is that Nazism did not need a complex ideology to be very dangerous, not only to Jews, but to other identity groups and vulnerable people and to foreign and domestic government institutions.
Political cults may be prone to fail ultimately since, as Cheeseman and Klaas write, "the electorate is often deeply cynical about politicians. For all the capacity of presidents to build personality cults, citizens are generally skeptical about the motivations of political leaders and their ability and determination to deliver on their promises." (Nicholas Cheeseman and Brian Klaas. How to Rig an Election. New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2018.)
Jeremy W. Peters interviewed several Trump supporters for the New York Times in a June 23, 2018 article. One woman said that “overblown” criticism from the left “makes me angry at them, which causes me to want to defend him [Trump] to them more." A man said: "He’s not a perfect guy; he does some stupid stuff. But when they’re hounding him all the time it just gets old. Give the guy a little.” Another woman said: "It bothers me that he doesn’t tell the truth, but I guess I kind of expect that, and I expect that from the media, too — not to always tell the truth or to slant it one way." And another man described hearing criticism more as a visceral rather than intellectual experience: "It’s kind of like when you experience a sensation over and over and over again. A sensation is no longer a sensation. It’s just, 'Oh, here we are again.'" Other people emphasized the responsibility of immigrants for their own fate — "I think it’s terrible about the kids getting split up from their parents. But the parents shouldn’t have been here" — or of the left for their comments and activism — “It’s just incredible what the nation is trying to do to disrupt this president and his agenda." A high school student said: "I have a fair bit of skepticism toward him [Trump]. But I feel like he is trying his best."
The next morning, Tom Nichols threaded his tweets: "The NYT piece on Trump supporters digging in is why I said, well over a year ago, that there was no way to reason with them. There is no level of moral collapse or political incompetence they will not defend.
The question is why. ... They double-down because they know that even if they win, they lose. They're desperately trying to recapture a world that doesn't exist, and never did. That old lady crying for Trump?" — here, Nichols referred to a June 21 MSNBC interview — "She knows it's over. The world she once loved - or thought she did - isn't coming back. ... This explains a lot of the fury, I think, and why Trumpers are the angriest winners in American political history. They won, but they know it doesn't mean anything, and they double down out of shame and fear. What choice is there? ... when people are ashamed of themselves, they double down. The people in the NYT story *know*. They *know*. But once you defend the indefensible, there's no climb-down. That's why there's no point in trying to reason with them." (tweets 1, 3, 5, 7) In response to a comment, Nichols added: "We are no longer a virtuous country. The rest is just the endgame." Cesar Falson commented: "It’s like being lost when you’re driving and never wanting to admit being lost so you double down and make things worse. But then again, the easy answer is this is just cultish behavior." Another commenter said: "They tend to be authoritarians. They believe they are right because they are in a position of authority, i.e., white, esp. white male. Being right can be largely unrelated to facts to them. It's the evangelical way which is why his infidelities don't bother them, authority wins."
ok cmon guys all i did was click the link you gave me
I don't think it can be mentioned enough that Jeremy Peters is friendly enough with white supremacist transphobe Ann Coulter to attend her book party and casually touch her on her bare arm. Would you expect fair minded fact based reporting on trans issues from such a man?
The Cult of Trump by Steven Hassan is a book about "the persuasiveness, not cultishness, of Trump, written by a cult expert," according to an interview with the author. Hassan said:
My definition of a destructive cult is an authoritarian pyramid-structured group, with a section in recruitment and mind control on the people it recruits and indoctrinates to be dependent and obedient. So, for me, the designation of “cult” includes Trump being a malignant narcissist, which is the stereotypical profile of cult leaders. I parallel his behaviors with people like Jim Jones, L. Ron Hubbard, and other cult leaders.
The overall formula of a cult is that the members are indoctrinated into a black-and-white, all-or-nothing, good-versus-evil version of reality, where they are not thinking for themselves, they’re not thinking with their consciences, they’re cut off from other forms of information that question their indoctrination. In fact, they’re explicitly punished if they listen to the other side.
He added: "A lot of people are going to wake up one day from what they were supporting with Trump and realize how they have been taken. At that point, there’s going to be a lot of upset, angry, ashamed, and embarrassed people."
In April 2020, Chauncey Devega interviewed Hassan for "The Truth Report." Hassan explained that "Trump was trained to be a magical thinker as a child" because of his association with the church of Norman Vincent Peale. "It’s been described as a type of solipsistic reality where Trump defines his own world and what is real or not...In this way of thinking, if Trump says the coronavirus pandemic is just going to somehow get better then it is going to happen. And when that does not happen, then Trump can deny ever saying such a thing, blame the Chinese, the Democrats or anyone else, instead of just saying he was wrong." Although "right now it is premature to say that Donald Trump leads a death cult," Hassan said, as in that type of cult the president would be "telling the followers to kill themselves" or saying "it does not matter if those people who are not in the death cult die," his cult would be a death cult when "the coronavirus pandemic overwhelms the health care system." But even confronting the death of family members and friends may not prompt people to leave the death cult, as "the cult part of their psyche is going to say it was their time [to die]. If Trump’s followers are religious, they will simply rationalize it as the dead are going to a better place in heaven."
In June 2022, Hassan was interviewed by Chauncey DeVega. He said: "My thesis was completely confirmed after Jan. 6 [2021] and all the efforts by the GOP to avoid being held accountable for their role in Trump's coup attempt." He reflected:
"As I began to do the research for my book, it became very clear to me that he would not have been elected president if not for the thousands of new apostolic reformation ministers supporting him and then telling their millions of followers to believe in Trump as someone doing the work of God. They represent a right-wing Christian religious movement that does not believe in equality under the law, or in civil rights for women and those not of their faith. These right-wing Christian leaders want to destroy any type of organized effort to advance liberty and freedom and knowledge. Trump as a cult leader and authoritarian is a perfect fit for their beliefs."
Regarding Trump's power over Christians, Hassan said:
"The biggest single bloc of true believers are the members of right-wing Christian fundamentalist churches and other groups. These are authoritarian religions where the members believe that their pastor is an apostle who is directly connected to God and getting direct revelations.
If the pastor says, "God wants Trump," you're going to believe in Trump. If the pastor says, "God gave me a revelation where we are now following Ron DeSantis. God's taken the blessing away from Donald Trump," then those people are going to blindly follow DeSantis. Why? Because they're already in a mind-control cult."
Hey, here's a 2024 update on the Gov. Ron DeSantis administration in Florida:
Wow: The Florida official who sent letters threatening TV stations for airing pro-choice ads has filed a declaration in federal court stating that (1) DeSantis' office directed him to send them, and (2) he resigned rather than sending more. s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25...
Ashley Smith is the cofounder of the "Reopen NC" movement. Her husband, Adam Smith, posted Facebook Live videos on May 22, 2020 that threatened: "But are we willing to kill people? Are we willing to lay down our lives? We have to say, ‘Yes.’ We have to say, ‘Yes.’ Is that violence? Is that terrorism? No, it’s not terrorism. I’m not trying to strike fear in people by saying, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ I’m gonna say, ‘If you bring guns, I’m gonna bring guns. If you’re armed with this, we’re going to be armed with this.’" He added, as Raw Story put it, "that he feels called by God and by his understanding of the Constitution to prepare for a violent showdown." He calls himself a "constitutionalist" and said that the lockdown situation "is a test. This is seeing if we are ready to accept the mark of the beast, if we are ready to accept this New World Order system they want to implement over humanity."
Selected tweets from a 5 June 2019 thread:
But they don't confront you on the street and tell you about Xenu and thetans and how they'll charge you half a million dollars you don't have to give you superpowers, but it's okay, you can also pay for the superpowers through slavery.
The tiers of Scientology are designed to turn off people who would definitely sound the alarm at the really ridiculous stuff, while conditioning the people who remain to accept it without question, on the basis of what they've already accepted.
Trump does not care about the people who won't go along with his lies, except to the extent that we are a threat, individually or singly. He is not trying to convince us. He is not trying to reach us. He sees us as irrelevant and wants to render us completely so.
The thing about a loyalty test is it's not just a query, not just checking to see if loyalty is there. It's a way of reinforcing it. Passing the test means you're invested in your own continued loyalty, whether because of a good feeling you got for praise, or the price you paid.
The people who surrendered their senses to Trump on day 1, who accepted and defended or repeated his lies about his inauguration, took a step into an alternate reality of his construction, just as people who rise through a tier of Scientology do.
Yes, thank you! That actually tripped a lot of these thoughts, when it happened, but I didn't have the time or clarity of thought to sit down and put them in order.
We're at the point he can put out a video contradicting him and say it proves him right.https://t.co/eI4hEOOcn5
So he's trimmed this thing down to the absolute bare minimum. No finesse. No dazzle, just razzle. He'll say "Here's a video showing not skub." and slap up a video of skub, and count on his believers to sort themselves out from the herd.
And this is because Comey had made him president, which meant Comey had the power to swing a presidency, which meant Comey *terrified* him. He needed to know: did you do this out of loyalty? Are you mine? Can I control you? Do I own you?
Trump is gambling that when push comes to shove, he will have enough people he can rely on, enough power that is 100% his, to defeat whatever obstacles come his way. Whether this means winning at the ballot box, skewing the ballot box disregarding the ballot box, he'll try.
So, for those waking up, Donald Trump is embracing the idea that he’s considered a messiah. It’s a phenomenon inside apocalyptic Christianity that began within the evangelical community and the New World Order fad of the 1990’s. pic.twitter.com/iUeLQ7aH5P
As someone who grew up in apocalyptic evangelicalism, it’s a familiar concept and sadly the logical conclusion of a narrative that’s been fermenting since the 1970’s.
A lot of this begins with Francis Schaeffer’s How Should We Then Live? which claimed liberalism was destroying society and Hal Lindsay’s The Late, Great Planet Earth which profited off pushing Book of Revelations hysteria.
The Christian Right embraced these ideas as a means to profit and get involved in the political sphere. It worked better than blatant segregation, this hinting at minorities as being agents of Satan, a lesson Jerry Falwell learned.
There’s a bunch of stuff too with Ronald Reagan being an occultist who believed himself to be an instrument of a benevolent god who was using him to fight Satan and bring a new kingdom of Heaven on Earth.
In the 1990’s Republicans pushed New World Order narratives embedded in apocalyptic evangelicalism to hurt Bill Clinton’s standing, thus creating a new narrative that liberals were working with evil forces to destroy America from within.
This narrative not only hurt Democrat’s, but inflamed white supremacist extremists who now believed they weren’t racists, they were fighting a war to save America, they were Christian patriots, a new army of God’s.
With Obama, the narrative changed. It grew into the idea that Obama was a foreign Manchurian candidate, possibly the very antichrist himself. The rumors were everywhere and evangelicals became convinced by Fox News and Glenn Beck the final battle was nigh.
So. If Obama is the antichrist, the head of the New World Order, the easy jump is to Trump, his opposite, being the messiah. It’s a giant, incomprehensible mess of narrative and myth and generational manipulation. And it’s as dangerous as it gets.
By the way, this is the key to understanding the QAnon nonsense. It’s written like a combination of Nostradamus and Revelation. It’s the incomprehensible narrative necessary to explain Trump as infallible and an otherworldly champion.
By the way, this is the key to understanding the QAnon nonsense. It’s written like a combination of Nostradamus and Revelation. It’s the incomprehensible narrative necessary to explain Trump as infallible and an otherworldly champion.
This death cult mentality has driven US politics for years. They don’t want peace in the Middle East. They don’t want a drawdown of the military as they think it’s necessary for the literal Battle of Armageddon. Why invest in infrastructure and programs if we’re going to die?
If you want to learn more about QAnon, try this episode from Patrick Farnsworth's "Last Born in the Wilderness." It's the August 12, 2020 episode: "Jared Yates Sexton: QAnon — A License to Fascistic Impulses." If you only have one minute, listen especially to 10:30 – 11:30. "QAnon is an interactive supernatural New World Order," Jared Yates Sexton says, which "gives people who are powerless the sensation of having power, which is part of a cult."
The antisemitism of the QAnon conspiracy theory — always latent in its fantasies of elite blood-drinking cabals — has also become much more open. As the A.D.L. has reported, one of the most popular QAnon influencer, GhostEzra, “is an open Nazi who praises Hitler, admires the Third Reich, and decries the supposedly treacherous nature of Jews.”
Andrew Napolitano, a former judge who is now a judicial analyst at Fox News, argued in an opinion piece published by Fox on Sept. 5, 2019 that Trump simply has too much power.
"This question of presidential power is not an academic one. Nor is it a question unique to the Trump presidency, as it has risen numerous times before Trump entered office. But the audacious manner of Trump's employment of presidential powers has brought it to public scrutiny.
* * *
After years of faithless Congresses legally but unconstitutionally ceding power to the presidency, we have arrived where we are today — a president who spends unappropriated funds, raises taxes, defies courts and changes immigration laws on his own. I have written before that the Republicans who rejoice in this will weep over it when a Democrat is in the White House. No president should have unconstitutional powers."
This is what seems to be driving away a small but meaningful number of Republicans: not just that Trump is doing things like ripping children from their parents’ arms at the border, but that so much of the Republican electorate loves him precisely because of it. You can be disgusted at the venom coursing off the podium at one of Trump’s rallies, but the real horror is in the crowd, lustily cheering every insult, every lie, every call to hate.
If you’re one of these Republican defectors, you probably realize that Trump didn’t create the ugliness that has driven you away; he merely revealed it. A healthier party would have spat him out like a piece of rancid meat. Instead, it swallowed heartily and proclaimed this the best thing it had ever tasted.
Anthony Scaramucci, who famously lasted only days as Trump's WH Communications Director, referred to Trumpism as a "cult" in November 2019:
“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” - Chinese Proverb
I, along with many of my fellow Americans, made a mistake in not abandoning @realDonaldTrump sooner. But today is the next best day to leave the cult. Let’s fix this together.
Jeff Sessions, who was elected Senator in 1996 and held that seat until he made the mistake of accepting the role of Attorney General in Trump's White House in 2017 (which Trump allowed him to hold for less than two years), now wants his Senate seat back. Avi Selk notes that Sessions' 1996 campaign ad had mentioned "fundamental values" and "a God in heaven who orders the universe." In Sessions' 2019 campaign ad, by contrast, "the only higher power mentioned...is the president."
At an August 2019 press conference about his trade war with China, Trump yelled, "I am the chosen one!" He subsequently tweeted that he had been joking and that he would have "No more trust!" for the media who had suggested otherwise. He also claimed that he had been smiling, although the video shows that he was not smiling. In November 2019, however, Rick Perry appeared on the "Fox & Friends" TV show saying that he recently provided Trump with "a one-pager" with information about Old Testament kings with the comment that, "You know, you said you were 'the chosen one.' And I said, 'You were.'" Co-host Pete Hegseth said that supporters "feel precisely the way Rick Perry does," saying that they "dismiss" reporters' information about Trump's personal failings, since "God has used imperfect people forever, because we're all imperfect, but what he [Trump] has withstood is unlikely really what any other mortal could understand." Co-host Rachel Campos Duffy appeared to try to dial this back, attributing a more orthodox theological statement to Trump supporters (or so it seems, from context): "They also say, 'I don't need a savior, I already got one.'"
This kind of thing is what you see in authoritarian states with cults of personality and state media, not democracies. pic.twitter.com/lVgY1okRgy
Of Perry's "chosen one" comment, Jay Parini wrote: "This notion has been going around the administration like a strange virus, infecting Sarah Sanders and Mike Pompeo as well. I don't have any easy answers, and it worries me to see evangelicals who do." Anthea Butler said, "Perhaps what the Trump era has laid bare is how nakedly church leaders' support of him is about political power."
Former Minnesota Congressperson Michele Bachmann said in April 2019 that "we will, in all likelihood, never see a more godly, biblical president again in our lifetime." She said in October 2019 that Trump "understands the difference between good and evil. We have not seen a president with greater moral clarity than this president," and that his likely impeachment has "almost biblical implications."
In November 2019, not long after Attorney General William Barr referred to the "organized destruction" of secularism that has allegedly "marshaled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values," Thomas B. Edsall made this observation:
The reality is that Barr is not only selling traditional values to conservative voters, some of whom are genuinely starved for them, he is also marketing apocalyptic hogwash because, for his boss to get re-elected, Trump’s supporters must continue to believe that liberals and the Democratic Party are the embodiment of evil, determined to destroy the American way of life.
Presidential historians ranked Lincoln as the nation’s greatest president, and Trump as one of the worst in a 2017 survey...But ordinary Republicans, in a 53-percent-to-47-percent majority, favor Trump over the Civil War hero, according to a survey conducted by the Economist magazine and polling site YouGov.com.
Most white evangelicals say that Jesus will return within their lifetimes. (That is: In a 2010 poll, nearly 60 percent of white evangelicals said Jesus would return by the year 2050.) A Mother Jones article by Stephanie Mencimer explained: "The most blatant appeal to this constituency came when Trump made the controversial decision to move the American embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a long-desired goal of evangelicals who see it as fulfilling a biblical prophecy necessary in securing the Second Coming. What may be less obvious is how Trump’s disdain for international governing bodies like NATO also dovetails almost perfectly with End Times theology, whether he realizes it or not."
Also according to Mencimer: While "Trump’s self-created crisis in Iran seems to have no relationship to any sort of coherent foreign policy or geopolitical plan for the future," it resonates for evangelicals. "The administration has struggled to provide evidence of any imminent threats from Soleimani, but the timing for the assassination was certainly fortuitous for someone looking to mobilize evangelicals." Indeed, "Trump announced the killing of Soleimani just hours before appearing at the launch of his campaign’s Evangelicals for Trump coalition in Miami." And thus: "A few days after the killing of Soleimani, [megachurch pastor Greg] Laurie made a YouTube video with Don Stewart, author of 25 Signs We Are Near the End, to discuss Iran and the End Times. 'The scenario that the Bible predicted, seemingly so impossible,' Stewart promised, 'is now falling into place.'"
In 2024, the U.S. Secret Service became aware of an Iranian plot to assassinate Trump in revenge for Soleimani's killing. Trump posted to his social media platform that he endorsed collective punishment for the entire country: "If they do 'assassinate President Trump,' which is always a possibility, I hope that America obliterates Iran, wipes it off the face of the Earth..."
On July 22, 2024, an anonymous account began sending Trump campaign documents to Politico. On August 9, Microsoft reported that Iranian hackers had "sent a spear phishing email in June to a high-ranking official on a presidential campaign," and the next day, the Trump campaign acknowledged that it had been hacked.
"NewsNation’s Katie Pavlich had asked the president to respond to Iran’s personal death threats against him as he calls for regime change amid ongoing, and increasingly deadly, protests against Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
“Well, they shouldn’t be doing it but I’ve left notification, anything ever happens, we’re going to blow ... the whole country is going to get blown up,” vowed Trump, who has been the reported target of Iran before following his 2020 order to assassinate top Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani."
HUGE scandal if true. Laura Loomer got Marco Rubio to throw two Iranian women with green cards in ICE jail to be stripped of status and deported, claiming they were related to Qasem Soleimani.
Official documents provided to @dropsitenews.com appear to show they are NOT related; they're innocent.
Jonathan Chait, regarding "the cruelty is the point":
For many of Trump’s policy actions, the cruelty is the point. But for some of his more trivial episodes, the stupidity is the point. The gleeful rejection of objective truth, throwing oneself fully into Trumpism, is a marker of tribal loyalty.
Trump obviously has no reason to credit Kansas rather than Missouri with hosting the Super Bowl champions. The point of defending it is to demonstrate that the Trump cult can create its own reality and needn’t make any concession to external truth.
I know we’re used to it, but there is no rational or coherent explanation for any of this. There is no strategy, or political genius. There is just a delusional pathology in which he says whatever comes into his head at any moment, determined entirely by his mood, which is usually bad. * * * The key thing, however, is that none of this seems to matter to the supporters of the president. For them, the pathology seems to be the point.
"Kakistocracy" is a word for rulership by the worst people.
News -- President Trump told network anchors during a private lunch today that he will award Rush Limbaugh with the Medal of Freedom, one day after the prominent political radio host announced he has advanced lung cancer.https://t.co/Entc5UTXKm
Sarah Posner explained in Unholy (2020): "The evangelical publisher Stephen Strang, who owns the widely read Charisma magazine, which promotes the careers of televangelists like White and a widening circle of self-styled prophets and revivalists, wrote in his hagiography, God and Donald Trump, that Christian leaders believe Trump is a 'chosen vessel used by God despite his flaws.'"
Companies like these oil and energy giants are the architects of the current societal crisis. In this economy, they have worked together to undermine the healthcare system, scuttle reform, and ensure lower wages among American workers. Partnered with the Republican Party, they have created an anti-future death cult dedicated to immediate profit and gain at the expense and sacrifice of the future. This partnership has resulted in unbelievable consequences, including a dilapidated national infrastructure, fractured social connections, and the twisting of reality.
The Republican Party has aimed to reduce access to education and the impact of the curriculum:
Since desegregation, white supremacists have attempted to wipe out public education in favor of private schools where African Americans can still be barred from the halls. The wealthy and corporate interests prefer a defanged curriculum that hides their past crimes and manipulations in favor of making students more susceptible to their marketing and propaganda while ensuring they’re incapable of understanding government or civic duties.
"These companies and political bodies," Sexton writes, do "trust experts," but "undermine them as to keep their intentions clandestine in nature. As early as the 1980's energy companies like Exxon were warning of 'potentially catastrophic' climate change, a concept they still deny now, four decades later. The companies were well aware that they were peddling poison and ushering in destruction on a truly global scale."
This brought us to where we are now in the 2020 pandemic:
They manifested an America ripe for manipulation and control, but doomed them to a society teeming with a virus they can’t believe exists and facing an extinction they can’t believe will come. The people they’ve affected, the people they’ve trained not to trust experts or educators, are in the streets demanding the right to die so they can return to work that is designed to exploit and lessen the quality of their lives.
Jeff Sharlet, author of "The Family,"wrote for Vanity Fair on June 18, 2020 that people at a Louisiana rally thrilled in a relatively new "white power" hand gesture, a "kind of coded message, a sense of possessing knowledge shared only by a select few. It’s Möbius strip politics, Trumpism’s defining oxymoron: a populist elite, a mass movement of 'free thinkers' all thinking the same thing. They love Trump because he makes them feel like insiders even as they imagine him their outsider champion." Many of them believe the president "is on a mission from God to expose (and destroy) the hidden demons of the deep state." Jesse Lee Peterson, a pastor, "calls Trump the Great White Hope because, he says, 'Number one, he is white. Number two, he is of God.'" Another rally attendee put it: "God is using him...He’s the chosen one to run America."
A rally attendee that Sharlet spoke to described Democratic politicians as "demons. Not even human"; this man once spent 33 days in jail for threatening to replicate the Pizzagate assault on another pizzeria in the neighborhood. He pled guilty to threatening: "I’m coming to finish what the other guy didn’t. I’m coming there to save the kids, and then I’m going to shoot you and everyone in the place." He claimed that his preacher told him, "You did a good thing." He came to the rally wearing a homemade "GOT TRUMP?" shirt and a plastic mask with Trump's face on it.
Sharlet writes:
The gospel of Thomas — the doubting one — does not, of course, reside with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in your King James. But then, Trump doesn’t read the Bible. He doesn’t need to. Rule books are for losers. Reading is for losers. The gospel of Trump, like that of Thomas — noncanonical, antiestablishment — is gnostic, a form of secret knowledge reserved for the faithful, a 'truth' you must have the eyes to see in order to believe.
Gnosticism, which dates at least to the second century A.D., is the path Christianity did not take, its texts destroyed as heretical, its ideas mostly forgotten until the 1945 discovery in Egypt of 13 ancient books in a sealed clay jar. Or maybe not so much forgotten as woven over the centuries into countless conspiracy theories, the deep-seated belief that there exist truths they — there is always a they in gnosticism, from the bishops and bureaucrats of the early church, coastal elites of the ancient world, to the modern media peddling fake news — do not want us, the people, to perceive.
People wearing shirts saying "TRUMP'S TWEETS MATTER" believe: "Every tweet, every misspelling, every typo, every strange capitalization — especially the capitalizations, says Dave — has meaning. 'The truth is right there in what the media think are his mistakes. He doesn’t make mistakes.' The message of the shirt to Dave is: Study the layers. 'Trump is known as a five-dimension chess player,' Dave says later. And he’s sending us clues."
And yet another rallygoer insists that the Democrats are "raping and pillaging Haiti!":
It’s too terrible to speak of. She turns away, to the happiness of a small circle of new friends she’s made at the rally, a whole family decked out in Trump wear. But she keeps coming back. “The truth and the lies,” she says. I don’t know what she means. She turns away again, returns again, her eyes watery. “I’m going to say it,” she decides. But she can’t. She walks away. Her friends seem worried. She comes back, leans in. “They eat the children.” She shakes with tears. Her friends nod.
This same person believes that the random incorrect capitalization in Trump's tweets are a form of Gematria. She explains: "Anything capitalized, we add up as a number." She says Trump's messages are all about "spiritual warfare" and something Q calls "The Great Awakening."
In 2018, Kaitlin Bennett gained 15 minutes of fame by open-carrying an AR-10 rifle at Kent State University. In September 2020, she tweeted: "Donald Trump isn't just my President. He's my KING!" She was hawking "Trump is my KING" T-shirts.
It seems that, at Liberty University, "in the face of allegations of Falwell Jr.'s inappropriate comments and behavior, the school's board of trustees opted to take no official notice for at least a decade," Ashlie Stevens wrote. She finds the proper metaphor to be — rather than Cyrus — the golden calf.
In November 2020, after the election, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman told Wolf Blitzer on CNN: "This is not a political party. This is a cult." He pointed out that the Republican Party had no platform in 2020. "They're all afraid of the cult leader," he said.
In 2024, former RNC chair Michael Steele said that the chair of the RNC is supposed to "organize and coordinate every state party and the territories of the United States who are in the Republican family, and you are to provide them the platform from which you will launch a platform to talk about what the party believes in." But since "we don’t have a platform," Steele continued, that gives some context to revent events. Donald Trump suggested that his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, could be chair of the RNC, and Lara Trump said that if she gets the job, "every single penny will go to the number one and the only job of the RNC, that is electing Donald J. Trump as president..."
(The theme of fear can be seen in the book A Very Stable Genius.
“Donald Trump’s party,” Jamie Raskin writes in Unthinkable (2022), from the present-tense perspective of January 6, 2021, “operates like a religious cult and couldn’t give a damn about the Constitution or democracy.”
On May 6, 2021, Sen. Lindsey Graham said on Fox News: “Can we move forward without President Trump? The answer is no. I’ve always liked Liz Cheney, but she’s made the determination that the Republican Party can’t grow with President Trump. I’ve determined we can’t grow without him.”
Late last month, one of the accused Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists told a D.C. judge that she didn’t recognize his authority and was making a “divine special appearance.” Another one of the accused streams a solo religious service each week that he calls “Good Morning Sunday Morning.” A third runs a 65,000-subscriber YouTube channel where she shares Bible verses and calls herself a “healer of deep inner wounds.” ... leaders of major denominations and megachurches, and even President Donald Trump’s faith advisers, were absent that day [January 6, 2021]. For such people, their faith is individualistic, largely free of structures, rules or the approval of clergy.
* * *
Americans who have Christian-nationalist beliefs who do not attend church are more likely to have voted for and support Trump, compared with those who attend more regularly, said Paul Froese, a sociologist at Baylor University who published a paper on the topic in January.
For such people, Froese’s paper says, affirming a kind of “mythical or even sacred” Christian nationalism can become a key part of their religious observance, one that comes from sources outside traditional church.
Judge Reggie Walton said that having Trump and his allies testify would not necessarily help Dustin Thompson's defense, which plans to argue that Trump and others goaded his supporters to storm the Capitol. * * * Many of the defendants facing criminal charges for their role in the January 6 insurrection have tried to share blame with Trump or shift blame to him. While some federal judges have lambasted the former President, often not by name, and suggested he bears some responsibility for what happened that day, they also have said the defendants should be held responsible for their own actions. * * * "Just because the Pope says it," doesn't mean a Catholic can commit a crime, he [Judge Walton] said in court. "I'm not convinced."
Former Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-Va.) quit the Republican party because of the Trumpism cult, as he explained in 2022.
Evangelicals don’t think life is supposed to be good. They think life on earth is supposed to be a crucible that tests if you’re fit for heaven. If evangelicals take over society the quality of life for everyone is going to STEEPLY decline. Count on it.
Like if you think our society is obsessed with punishment NOW… these people literally think that death for a believer is a merciful release from a world of earthly sin. They think DEATH should be LOOKED FORWARD TO. They don’t want to improve society. They want apocalypse.
"There are no heroes on the Republican side at all. The Democrats do not understand how the Republican Party and MAGA works. It is a cult.
Members of a cult line up, they do their duty, they say what needs to be said, and they fight. They don't ask questions. Cult members follow orders. Cults are orderly. Cults can get a lot of things done. That is part of why the Republicans are so effective. The Democrats don't have that same cult gene and programming.
* * *
There would be a major uptick in violence from the right around this country if Donald Trump was indicted. He is their cult leader. They would see it as "the Deep State" going after their leader. There would be major violence.
"The Republican fascists and the MAGA people and the larger right wing understand power in a way that the Democrats and today's so-called liberals and progressives and the left in America do not. They want to win at any cost. They don't care about truth, justice, "the American way" or even reality because they are part of a political religion. They've convinced themselves that God is on their side. They literally believe such a fantastical thing."
Walsh responded:
"The Republicans and Trumpists — as though there is a difference now — will lie, cheat and steal, which is why all of these so-called "good Christian men and women" embrace Trump. He is the personification of doing bad things to get what he wants. These "good Christians" see Donald Trump as a bad f**king man who's going to deliver them to the promised land."
An article by Sean Donovan on Medium explains how the fascist cult conception of "truth" is whatever others in the group believe. Stating ever-changing, contradictory things is the price of admission to the group. It's a continual loyalty test. They pledge allegiance to whiteness and to their pro-whiteness leader. Whiteness, in turn, is the very performance of this ongoing lie.
[Herschel] Walker’s story of religious redemption is “very much targeted to his base,” says Andra Gillespie, a political science professor at Emory University in Atlanta.
“The base includes white evangelicals,” she says, “And he’s rendering it in a pretty evangelical way, and talking about how those mistakes were part of his path.”
88% of evangelical Christians voted for Herschel Walker, not Warnock, the candidate who has devoted his adult life to Jesus Christ. Let that sink in.
See also: Trump's "Unholy" Week: Theology and politics take center stage, Diana Butler Bass, Substack, March 30, 2023. She writes: "I recently spoke with a journalist about Trump’s increasing use of theological and apocalyptic language to describe himself. This was especially obvious in his Waco speech when he referenced his current campaign as the run-up to the “final battle,” a clear allusion to the Battle of Armageddon in the Book of Revelation." And: "A large number of white evangelicals — one poll says 50% — believe that Trump is 'anointed' by God to be president — in the same way that David was anointed to be King or Jesus was anointed to be Savior." And: "Some observers have said that it is a cult. I’ve come to wonder if it is mass religious delusion."
"'Prolonged exposure to Trump is injurious to intelligence and fatal to principles,' said Mac Stipanovich, a longtime Republican consultant in Florida. 'It is like a disease. You are exposed to it, become infected and succumb to it. The people I know who I once thought well of who have now lost their minds are legion. It's depressing.'"
— Trump Is Lying About Another Election Being ‘Stolen’ From Him — The One Still A Year Away Trump’s last effort to undermine an election led to 140 injured police officers and five police deaths on the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol by his followers. S.V. Date, HuffPost, Oct 7, 2023
"MAGA isn’t interested in winning elections or connecting with Americans outside of their base. Trump and the coalition that supports him are anti-democratic. As I’ve written previously, they’ve essentially given up on winning free and fair elections. Trump’s rhetoric is particularly explicit, telling his followers in speeches that they don’t have to worry about voting and should focus on watching Biden voters and sharing memes that call for the arrest of poll workers. Trump and the GOP have also stopped talking to voters outside of the MAGA Cinematic Universe, and that conversation has become so extreme and so insular it’s difficult for anyone else to follow, even if they’re interested in what MAGA has to say." — "Opportunity knocks once in a lifetime: Election Day is one year out. Here are five opportunities we can take advantage of." Melissa Ryan. Ctrl Alt Right Delete. November 5, 2023.
Because Trump, for all his flaws, is charismatic—a kind of Borscht-Belt-meets-televangelist style of speaking that mixes florid, Florida, and his native Queens. Yes, there may be long, rambling asides about his fixations, like hairspray, shower pressure, and sharks, but he knows how to take hold of a crowd when he needs to, how to lift them up in an orgy of hatred. There’s a ritualism present in his rallies that is not unlike an altar call at a megachurch; he’s about one step from the faith healing Jim Jones practiced in his early days, smuggling in animal innards to willing dupes who’d say they’d passed cancerous growths due to his touch.
His message is repulsive; it’s one of hate, of the stripping-away of human rights. It would reduce women to animals in this country, would induce a wave of mass deportations that would cause unimaginable torment. It would be the end of democracy as we know it here in America—the end of choice.
To some people, though, the end of choice is a relief from suffering.
— Talia Lavin, "On Cults, Part 2: Follow the Leader," The Sword and the Sandwich, June 11, 2024
Source
D. Andrew Ferguson, Brian Jelke, Don Morgan, Mark Plemmons, and Jarrett Sylvestre. Villain Design Handbook: Kingdoms of Kalamar. Mundelein, Ill.: Kenzer and Company, 2002. p. 42.
I’m sorry for bringing over a screenshot but this is the bubble they’re living in right now
this is their closing message
the pulse of right wing America, everyone
Where It's All Heading: The Fascist Right Post-Trump: Watching parts of the Right grow weary of Trump might be hopeful, but without needed change the situation will only worsen. Jared Yates Sexton, Dispatches from a Collapsing State, Oct 10, 2025
Friends, it’s a cult. MAGA is a cult. Please—for God’s sake, after a decade—accept this.
Accept it, internalize it, and then decide what you think America should do.
And as you think about that, think about all the other cults you’re aware of, what they did, and how they ended.
"After referring to the Texas Democrat as “a wolf,” a “demon,” a “snake” and an “enemy,” the two talked about what they hope becomes of Talarico.
“I pray that God kills him,” Haymes said. “Ultimately, that means killing his heart and raising him up to new life in Christ.”
Potteiger concurred. “Right, right,” he said. “We want him crucified with Christ.”
Haymes repeated that he wants “death and new life” for Talarico. “And if it would not be within God’s will to do so, stop him by any means necessary,” he said.
At one point, the podcast host said Talarico “is the kind of guy you pray imprecatory psalms against. And I mean that actually.” An imprecatory psalm is a biblical song or prayer that invokes God’s judgment, curses or destruction upon enemies.
“Yep,” Potteiger said in response.
* * *
Talarico, a 36-year-old rising star in the Democratic Party, has clashed with President Donald Trump over his vision of progressive politics rooted in his Christian faith. He has argued that the religious right has distorted Christianity, and emphasized Jesus’ teachings about helping the vulnerable and welcoming strangers versus drilling down on divisive issues like abortion." (HuffPost, March 24, 2026)
Moodie says the Epstein class, the people who believed they were "losers" if they didn't hang out with Epstein, were "devoid of morals, integrity, vision." "And let's call it what it is," Sexton replies. "It's a cult." It went from self-help to sex trafficking. How did it happen? Look at Donald Trump as an example: He hates himself, that's why he gold-plates everything. "You play a character that tries to be what you aren't because you don't want to be you because you don't like you. But here's the problem: You always have to pay a higher toll. You have to hurt people. You have to hurt yourself. You have to hurt the world." You might numb out for a while, but ultimately you can't escape. "You look in the mirror and what's looking back? It's fucking you. And you know who you are. You know what you're not. You know that this performance and this consumption — It's not only hollow...It's disgusting. It's embarrassing." (Jared Yates Sexton, talking to Danielle Moodie, We're Reaching the Moment of Truth: The Check-In with Jared Yates Sexton and Danielle Moodie, April 15, 2026, see 40:30 — 43:00)
They voted for MAGA. Now they want out: For some Trump voters, leaving MAGA is a psychological ordeal. A new support group is trying to help.
Chauncey DeVega, Salon, April 28, 2026
"...my background is in cult trauma and recovery. While I'm not opposed to organized religion or expressions of faith, I'm pointedly interested in the co-opting nature of coercion; how language and emotions are manipulated by bad actors to blur the lines of consent." (Bethany Leger)
"The “Great American State Fair” currently “operating” in Washington, D.C., is a perfect metaphor. Shabby. Low-rent. Slapped together and literally crumbling by the minute as unenthusiastic performers dodge pieces of the stage falling from the ceiling. AI art that was whipped together so haphazardly that it’s obvious the person producing it didn’t try past the first attempt to fine tune the images. In one of the tents sits a fitting reminder of the convergence of the myth and the reality, a baptizing pool for attendees to dedicate themselves to a God we have to assume is a MAGA fan and supporter in the Christian Nationalist vein. Trump devotees have traveled there by the dozens, found no air conditioning or support, and have been left, like the woman in the video below, on the verge of sickness before taking a quick dip in the pool and being given medical attention.
Holding onto the illusion of the myth even as it flickers and dies is an act of pure desperation. I would hope that this woman and others like her would reconsider their devotion to a man who would subject them to this kind of thing, but I also spent years attending one MAGA rally after another where people adorned in his cheap merchandise were left to cook in the heat or to walk miles and miles in uneven and uncaring terrain because Trump and his crooked allies so obviously hold disdain for anyone who would buy their grift.
Because that’s all that’s left. Finally accepting the reality means not only giving up the illusion of MAGA but also discarding the lie that has been sold to Americans now for 250 years, to one ancestor after another, to our parents, our friends, our neighbors, our communities, every single one of us. It is the type of psychic pain that we would do almost anything to avoid. Including performing belief when no belief remains."
Wow -- RNC video: "On June 14th, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, 'I need a caretaker,' so God gave us Trump."
It only gets more unhinged and culty from there.
