Trump is scrambling to find his religion again
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The Republican National Convention in Milwaukee was Donald Trump’s official coronation.
Trump has promised to be the country’s first dictator. At a rally in Michigan several days ago, Trump praised China's Xi Jinping as a “brilliant man" who rules over 1.4 billion people with his "iron fist." Trump then said such authoritarian leaders make President Joe Biden look like a “baby.” Trump’s promise to be America’s first dictator is not hyperbolic or idle. He has plans to achieve such a goal as detailed in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, his own Agenda 47 and elsewhere.
Donald Trump has also repeatedly shown that he is a megalomaniac with a god complex. The personal is very political for authoritarians and demagogues. As such, Trump’s political project reflects his personality defects and other great deficiencies in character, values, and behavior. Such personalities, especially if they are charismatic, attract similar people. The MAGA movement and other such neofascist and fake populist movements are a prime example.
But Donald Trump’s coronation at the Republican National Convention was not “just” a fascist spectacle for his personality cult to show its unending loyalty to him. It was also a type of political-religious ceremony where Donald Trump was even more fully made into a hero who was sent by “God” to be a martyr-warrior-prophet for militant right-wing “Christianity” and its increasingly violent behavior and hostile attitudes towards secular pluralistic democracy and society—and modernity itself. After the unsuccessful attempt on Trump’s life last week in Butler, Pennsylvania, these cult-like beliefs have hardened and the threats of violence (both explicit and implied) and paranoia against some imagined “they” who are “persecuting” Trump and his MAGA people have greatly increased.
The Democratic Party and other pro-democracy Americans must prepare themselves for a political battle that will take place on those terms. This is not the terrain or realm of “normal politics” or the horserace that the mainstream news media and its pundits are fixated on despite years of evidence that those frameworks do not apply in the Age of Trump.
For Donald Trump, his MAGA people, and the larger Republican-fascist movement and project, the 2024 election is a type of holy war where no quarter or mercy will be given to the enemy. The “unity” that Trump and the other MAGAfied Republicans and the larger “conservative” movement and neofascist campaign want is obedience and surrender by those Americans who oppose them.
In a new essay at Talking Points Memo, Sarah Posner, author of “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism,” explains:
Less than 24 hours after Donald Trump survived an assassin’s bullet in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, Jack Posobiec, the far-right conspiracy theorist and MAGA rabble-rouser, tweeted a Bible verse. “The bullets were fired at 6:11pm,” Posobiec, who is Catholic, wrote. “Ephesians 6:11.” The Bible verse, which reads, “Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes,” is key to the spiritual warfare that Christian nationalists have made the centerpiece of Trumpian politics. They pit Trumpism against democracy in a cosmic showdown between the godly and the demonic, believing they are on a divine mission to save a debased America from the evil left, with Trump as God’s battle commander.
Here, Posner focuses on the 2024 Republican National Convention as a site where Trump was elevated above being a mere mortal and into a fascist messiah:
At the Republican National Convention, Trump loyalists lined up to declare a miracle had saved God’s chosen one. “The devil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle,” Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina said Monday night. “But the American lion got back up on his feet and he roared!” MAGA star Marjorie Taylor Greene added, “Two days ago, evil came for the man we admire and love so much. I thank God that his hand was on President Trump.” Arkansas governor and former Trump White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, “God Almighty intervened, because America is one nation under God, and He is not done with President Trump.”
Other Republicans were even more explicit about how the assassination attempt proves that Christians are locked in spiritual warfare against evil enemies. Tucker Carlson, whose floundering post-Fox career has been revitalized by his outsized presence at the RNC, told a Heritage Foundation gathering on Monday that the assassination attempt proved “there is a spiritual battle underway,” and warned that forces that are “against Trump” are “hoping to eliminate” Christians, a statement amplified on the Christian Broadcasting Network. T rump campaign spokesperson Caroline Sunshine, appearing on Fox News on Tuesday, called the left “godless,” and then cited Ephesians 6:11 and the need for Trump supporters to “put on the full armor of God.” In her convention speech Wednesday night, Kimberly Guilfoyle, the fiancée of Donald Trump Jr., proclaimed “God has put an armor of protection on Donald Trump.”
As political scientist and religion scholar Paul Djupe explained to me in a recent conversation here at Salon, the “armor of god” is more than a Biblical metaphor or allusion. In the Age of Trump it is increasingly literal "the full armor of God, therefore, enables proud resistance to outsiders and assertive advocacy for their own views."
In a recent survey of self-identified Christians, almost two-thirds of respondents agreed that “The final battle between good and evil is upon us, and we must stand with the full armor of God.” That justifies, in their minds, all sorts of extreme behavior and policies. They appear to be following the Inverted Golden Rule: Do unto others what you expect them to do to you.
This helps explain why Christian nationalist elites portray the left in wildly hyperbolic terms. If the left is engaged in the widespread persecution of Christians, then that justifies the right of Christians to fight back and fight dirty.
Religion scholar Anthea Butler has also emphasized the increasing role of violence in right-wing Christianity in the Age of Trump. In a 2021 conversation with me here at Salon she warned, “There's war imagery all through Biblical scripture. There are war songs that people sing in churches. This idea about battling for the Lord, whether we're talking about the Crusades or the Civil War or fighting communism and everything else, is embedded in our history. That language of war and fighting is being used to incite people now.
Most people in America do not want such violence to happen. The problem is that if you've got enough people who want such an outcome, who can make it hell for everybody else, and there are people in power who want to use the public to create decay and destruction, such violent language is going to be used to that end. Donald Trump knows how to push every one of these buttons.”
In hallways and corridors, delegates spoke of the Holy Spirit's presence, the precious blood of Jesus being upon them. A true battle between the forces of good and evil was already underway, one man told another as they walked onto the Fiserv Forum delegation floor.
Only days before, a gunman nearly took the life of former President Donald Trump. And nothing short of divine intervention kept Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, alive during that assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pa., Scott said.
“Our God still saves. He still delivers, and he still sets free, because on Saturday, the devil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle, but an American lion got back up on his feet, and he roared.” ...
The overt displays of Christianity were “not surprising,” said Peter Montgomery, managing director of Right Wing Watch who specializes in writing about religious discourse.
“Often, the overlap between the MAGA movement and the Christian nationalist movement is very large,” Montgomery told Raw Story. “Trump often plays to that. He knows that he got elected in large part because of the overwhelming support he got from conservative evangelicals, and he's counting on their support to put him back in the White House.”
The assassination attempt on Trump further imbued him with savior-like status — some of his followers consider him “ordained by God to be president,” Montgomery said.
Trump used “Scripture language” in his posts immediately after the shooting on Saturday, further fueling that narrative, Montgomery said.
“It was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. “We will FEAR NOT, but instead remain resilient in our Faith and Defiant in the face of Wickedness.”
Some speakers outside of the convention hall took the Christianity devotion to a more extreme level.
Violence undermines civil society and the larger political community. There are few if any ways of having civil disagreement and constructive compromise with those individuals and groups who will resort to violence if they do not get their way. Violence (as in “all power flows from the end of the barrel of the gun”) is in many ways the ultimate conversation stopper. Violence, especially in a society like the United States where a relatively small number of people have 1) a majority of the guns and 2) control an extremely disproportionate amount of political and economic power is an almost certain way for a true tyranny of the minority to take power.
When this tyranny of the minority is racialized, per the American right-wing and “conservative” movement’s fear of a “white minority” in a “majority” black and brown country (as though non-whites are a hive mind who operate in lockstep), political violence becomes even more likely. In reality, if current demographic trends continue in the United States, white people will still be the largest “racial group” but not the “majority”; historically, new “ethnic” groups are inducted into Whiteness to prevent such an outcome in the United States.
Malign actors such as Donald Trump and the other enemies of multiracial democracy know the power of white anxiety and white fear as seen in such new/old white supremacist antisemitic conspiracy theories like the Great Replacement Theory. Such malign actors are experts at yielding such white fears and white anxieties to get and keep power for themselves. When appeals to religion and “God” are added to this mix the challenge for democracy becomes even greater.
Faith is a belief in that which cannot be proven by empirical means. Per the Constitution, church and state are separate because there is no way to determine the truth and facts in a logical and reasoned manner when one is dealing with people whose truth claims and knowledge are rooted in “God” or other supernatural figures or unprovable and unfalsifiable claims and beliefs. Magic is antithetical to democracy and the types of reasoning and critical thinking it is dependent upon. How does a rational person even begin to reason with a person whose ultimate appeal to the truth is “because God said so!”
For that reason and many others, theocracy (or in the contemporary American context “Christian Nationalism” or any other form of religious nationalism) is antithetical to democracy and a cosmopolitan, diverse, future-oriented and prosperous society that respects the fundamental human rights of all people.
Given how civic education, specifically, and high-quality public education, more broadly, have been intentionally atrophied in American society by the neoliberal regime and its desire to create drones and compliant workers and consumers instead of actively engaged citizens who are capable of effectively challenging Power, these basic lessons about democracy (and democratic culture and what it requires) are increasingly not being taught to the American people.
Members of the mainstream news media, the responsible political class, and everyday Americans who are politically engaged and knowledgeable all too often assume that their values and beliefs are shared by all Americans. They are not. The Age of Trump and how tens of millions of Americans yearn for a strongman leader is proof of that fact.
Ultimately, Donald Trump and his MAGA people and the larger neofascist movement and their Christian extremist allies believe that they have a mandate from God.
In his essential book “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America,” Chris Hedges warned of the horrors that such beliefs can birth:
Radical Christian dominionists have no religious legitimacy. They are manipulating Christianity, and millions of sincere believers, to build a frightening political mass movement with many similarities with other mass movements, from fascism to communism to the ethnic nationalist parties in the former Yugoslavia. It shares with these movements an inability to cope with ambiguity, doubt, and uncertainty. It creates its own "truth". It embraces a world of miracles and signs and removes followers from a rational, reality-based world. It condemns self-criticism and debate as apostasy.
How will Vice President Harris and the Democrats defeat such a force? In the next few months, we will find out how and if such a thing is possible. The survival of American democracy depends on their success.
