Second coming of Donald Trump — dangerous beast slouches towards Washington to be reborn

During his first run for president in 2016, the morally depraved grifter Donald Trump was forced to pick as vice-president the Indiana governor Mike Pence – who does not socialise with women or attend events where alcohol is served unless his wife is present – to win over Christian evangelicals.

By 6 January 2021, when Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol in Washington to prevent the peaceful handover of power to Joe Biden, some of them held up crosses and waved signs saying, “Jesus saves” while chanting “Hang Mike Pence” as the vice-president ran for his life.

The November election in the US is a high-stakes gambit for Trump, who will either end up as America’s Führer or in jail, but it is also an existential challenge for the white evangelical Christian nationalist movement that has thrown in its lot with him.

This year, evangelicals delivered the Republican nomination to Trump by voting for him in overwhelming numbers in the primaries.

Millions of evangelicals see Trump’s four pending criminal prosecutions, 88 indictments and multiple civil charges not as the mark of a sociopathic criminal who believes he is above the law, but of a martyr crucified by a corrupt state.

Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor-Greene has compared him to Jesus Christ (and Nelson Mandela).

https://youtu.be/LIIPdmPMwCo?si=wQI-iwLBCLbmO2C4

 

Since he came down the Trump Tower escalator in 2015, Trump has given whiter, older and more rural America the hope of “taking back” a country they felt was slipping away. 

Spooked by a black president, resentful of globalist elites and fearful of America’s transformation into a truly multiracial and multicultural society, they became easy fodder for extremist charismatic pastors, Fox News, social media conspiracy theories and Trump, the biggest BS artist of them all.

The disputed origins of the Covid pandemic, the lockdowns that shuttered churches and businesses, the vaccine mandates and Trump’s “defeat” in November 2020, drove an already conspiracy-minded crowd with a persecution complex even deeper into an alternate reality.

It also triggered an epidemic of mental illness. People draped in the American flag now stumble around the fringes of Trump rallies claiming to know things, like those who took the Covid vaccine have metamorphosed into a non-human species called Borg Genesis and are enslaved by Big Pharma.

Two-thirds of the Republican Party have succumbed to the mass delusion that Trump won the 2020 election.

Political crosses to bear

The political radicalisation of the pulpit, decades in the making but reaching a crescendo of partisanship in the era of Trump, is recounted in a piece of compelling reportage by Tim Alberta in The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.

https://youtu.be/OwqAs99nPo0?si=kee2m9UsQ7dMJSYZ

Alberta’s father was the long-time pastor of an evangelical Presbyterian congregation, Cornerstone church, in a suburb of Detroit, where Alberta observed how the growth of extremism undermined his father’s life work.

“To some evangelicals,” he writes, the purpose of the Church is to “own the libs” with “an aggressive, identitarian conservatism.”

One small example: at an evangelical event, Charlie Kirk, the Trumpist leader of Turning Point USA, proposed the death penalty for Joe Biden and called for “an amazing patriot” to bail out the deranged man who brutally attacked and nearly killed the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with a hammer.

Kirk is a mainstream figure, a frequent speaker at gatherings of the Southern Baptist Convention.  This week he said on TV that if you vote for the Democratic Party, you can no longer call yourself Christian.

This was clearly insulting to the overwhelmingly Christian black community. Civil rights lawyer Sherilyn Ifill pointed out that 87 % of black voters voted Democratic in 2020.

To see how far the sickness extends, witness Michele Morrow, the 2024 Republican nominee for superintendent of North Carolina’s public schools. She is a former nurse who has home-schooled her five children and worked as a missionary in Mexico – you couldn’t find a better example of a wholesome, all-American wife, mother and super-achiever. 

On her website, she promotes herself as a “lifelong Christian conservative”.

Then CNN’s Jake Tapper revealed that Morrow’s social media activity included posts calling for the televised execution of former president Barack Obama by firing squad, dreams of killing Joe Biden and the use of the hashtag #DeathToTraitors for a dozen political enemies including Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci.

From whence comes this blood lust, especially the popular fantasy of executing leaders of the Democratic Party?

Peter Wehner, a speechwriter for three Republican presidents, described in Atlantic magazine how the church has “exacerbated divisions, fuelled hatred and grievances, and turned fellow citizens into enemies rather than friends.”

Trump, with his vengeful and mocking attacks on those he regards as his enemies, is a fitting messenger for such a movement.

It is a brand of Christianity that most South African Christians would not recognise – that is, those who follow the teachings of Jesus Christ, of embracing love for one’s neighbour, social justice, tolerance, and concern for the poor and the marginalised – not to mention basic decency.

The cult of Christian nationalism

Many American Christians object to the term Christian nationalism being used to describe churches that cross over to partisan political activism as an attempt by liberals to tarnish them all as fanatics.

But Mathew Taylor, a scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies, has a message for his fellow Christians:

“Okay, maybe it stings a little when someone – perhaps unfairly – labels you a Christian nationalist. I get that Christian power in America is on the decline, and that hurts your sense of what America should feel like, but there is a very dangerous radicalisation of Christians going on in the United States today.”

The conservative New York Times columnist David French’s thoughtful commentary drew a distinction between those who legitimately base their political activism on their Christian faith and the “illiberal authoritarians who want to remake America in their own fundamentalist image” – the Christian supremacists.

These are the people that Trump is in league with – the most extreme strand of Christian supremacists, such as Lance Wallnau, the founder of the “Seven Mountain Mandate” which instructs Christians to “conquer all aspects of government and culture for God”.

Going by a remark he made last week, Wallnau does not believe “the left” are even people at all: “I think you’re dealing with demons talking through people.”

Wallnau was one of the first Christian leaders to endorse Trump in 2015.

His associate Jim Garlow, the leader of the New Apostolic Reformation Church, advised Trump in the lead-up to the 6 January insurrection and is close to several Republican lawmakers.

Weeks before becoming the Speaker of the House of Representatives last October, Mike Johnson was on a prayer broadcast with Garlow speculating that God might punish America for collective sins such as the rise of LGBTQ youth (and lamenting the fact that one in four high school students identified as “something other than straight”).

In his book, The Case for Christian Nationalism, Stephen Wolfe, a former Trump administration official, argues that Christians should be able to rule the whole of society without majority consent, because “the earth belongs to Christians.” 

Non-Christians, he says, may be entitled to justice, peace and safety but “are not entitled to political equality.”

These are not the mutterings of a crazy lunatic wandering in the wilderness.

Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump. (Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Since Trump’s 2016 election victory, Republican legislatures, courts and even school boards have been radicalised in a campaign to implement extremism at a local level.

Thousands of book titles have been banned and removed from libraries and school history syllabuses modified to whitewash slavery, reinvent the slave-holding founders as abolitionists and fit the narrative that the US was founded explicitly as a Christian nation.

Trans kids have been barred from sports and subjected to inspections in locker rooms.

Laws have been passed to promote the teachings of the Bible in public schools.

The most damaging stain on public policy is the rollback of women’s rights.

In 2022, the most radical Supreme Court in a century – thanks to Trump’s appointment of three hard-right justices – consigned to the dustbin the landmark 1973 Roe v Wade judgment that affirmed a woman’s constitutional right to a say over her own body.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Roe v Wade: Anniversary of overturning highlights access to abortion problems in SA

Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organisation was the court’s most consequential judgment. By allowing conservative states to apply a religious standard to when life begins, they knowingly denied millions of women the right to an abortion, even (sometimes) if they become pregnant through rape or incest.

Dobbs opened the door to an ever-greater onslaught on women’s choices, including an aggressive push to withdraw approval for the so-called abortion drug, mifepristone, moves towards a national ban on abortion and even attempts to curtail birth control. 

A male Republican lawmaker in Arizona argued last week that women wouldn’t need contraceptives if they weren’t so promiscuous.

Last month Judge Tom Parker, the Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court – an adherent of the Seven Mountain Mandate – ruled that frozen embryos should be considered children, leading to the suspension of IVF fertility treatments in the state.

There are even moves to outlaw pornography and State Senator Dusty Deevers of Oklahoma, an avowed Supremacist, wants to make it illegal for single consenting adults to sext each other.

A Heritage Foundation speaker recently floated the idea of banning “nonconsequential” casual sex, to much mirth on social media. Not a great vote-getter in an election year.

James Talarico, a former middle school teacher and a Democratic State Representative in Texas, spoke out after the Texas Senate passed a bill that would require the posting of the Ten Commandments on the wall of every classroom in the state: 

“Let me be very clear, there is nothing Christian about Christian nationalism; it is the worship of power – political power, social power, economic power, in the name of Christ, and it is a betrayal of Jesus of Nazareth.”

While the right might feel they are triumphant in the culture wars that were ignited by the Roe judgment 51 years ago, they are, to mangle the words of Bob Dylan, losing the war while winning every battle.

The extremism is a massive turn-off for younger Americans, especially women, even in red states, where they are deserting the church as their elders die off. 

A Pew survey found that the number of Americans who identify as Christian has dropped from 90% to 63% in the past three decades, most precipitously among white evangelicals.

If you can’t beat him, join him

Trump, who says he wants to be a dictator on day one, and Christian nationalists who want to shackle the whole of society to their interpretation of the Bible as the word of God, are now joined together with the same goal: an authoritarian or quasi-fascist state.

Trump says he wants to round up 18 million undocumented immigrants and to invoke the Insurrection Act so that he can deploy the military to crush street protests if he wins.

Backing him up is Kevin Roberts, the president of the right-wing think tank, the Heritage Foundation, who is known as the “cowboy Catholic” because, when he was head of Wyoming Catholic College, he handed all graduating students black cowboy hats like the one he wears.

Roberts, who thinks he is doing the Lord’s work by smashing “woke” left-wing elites, wants to “institutionalise” Trumpism by turning the rally raves into coherent policy.

Roberts has harnessed about 100 of America’s sprawling billionaire-funded right-wing organisations to produce a blueprint for a second Trump administration under the title “Project 2025.”

Its earliest and most telling intervention will be the destruction of the so-called “deep state”, for which they have assembled a LinkedIn network of up to 20,000 pre-vetted individuals ready to take the reins of government by displacing the career civil servants who will be purged.

The New York Times’ Carlos Lozado, who ploughed through Project 2025’s 887-page Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise”, concluded that the authors are less intent on dismantling the deep state than capturing it and wielding it as a tool for “concentrating power and entrenching ideology”.

The author Andra Watkins, who grew up in a Christian nationalist church, warned on Salon that Project 2025 is more than just a blueprint for conservative government: it is a manifesto for Christo-Fascism.

And that’s just the parts we know about. 

Roberts admitted to the podcast host and former Trump advisor Seb Gorka that some sections of Project 2025 have to remain secret: “There are parts of the plan we will not share with the Left,” he said.

Defending white civilisation

Those who believe that Democrats are alarmist for warning that Trump wants to do away with 237 years of American constitutional democracy need only take note of the authoritarian big men he celebrates and seeks to emulate.

Trump’s soft spot for Adolf Hitler – according to his ex-wife Ivana, he kept a copy of the Führer’s collected speeches, My New Order, next to his bed (and was the only book he ever read!) –was recently confirmed by his former Chief of Staff, John Kelly. 

He said Trump told him that Hitler had “done some good things.”

Trump’s use of Hitler’s phrases, like accusing Latino immigrants of “poisoning the blood of America” or of not being people (Untermensch) are directly cribbed from Hitler’s speeches that he used to watch on VHS.

His bromance with Russian President Vladimir Putin has more to it than just fawning hero worship. Putin has already tried to help Trump win the presidency twice – and this time he is not even trying that hard to hide it.

Trump’s pro-Putinism has exposed a deeper visceral connection between the Russian leader and the faithful. 

Many identify with Putin not just as a strongman but as a gay-hating white Christian who wrestles tigers and rides horses bare-chested like John Wayne across the Steppe.

They view his values as closer to theirs than the effete cultural liberals of woke, urban America.

Hungary’s authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who was palling around with Trump at Mar-a-Lago two weeks ago, is the dictator of the month. 

When Trump toasted Orbán, he explained why he likes him: “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor. He says, ‘This is the way it’s gonna be,’ and that’s the end of it. He’s the boss.”

Kevin Roberts has praised Orbán as a crusading defender of Christian values against liberalism and globalism and protecting European civilisation from being overrun and replaced by immigrants from the Global South.

The historian Anne Applebaum has a closer reading of what Trump and Roberts see in Orbán. 

After being democratically elected, she says, he “changed his country’s political system so that he could never lose. He altered the media, courts, voting, threatened business, captured the state, did corrupt deals with Russia and China.”

This is the country that Roberts says is “not just a model for conservative statecraft, but the model.”

Sometimes they say the quiet part out loud. 

Speaking at the annual gathering of the Conservative Political Action Conference last month, the right-wing activist Jack Posobiec received a standing ovation when he declared: “Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely.”

The final countdown

Trump will once again do everything in his power to cheat, lie and suppress the vote. He will send his supporters to harass and bully election workers and his acolytes will devise myriad tricky schemes to circumvent the constitution. We have seen the movie before.

When he loses, he will be constitutionally incapable of conceding defeat.

Democratic lawyer Marc Elias, who is fighting more than 50 Republican voter suppression initiatives in court, believes that Trump’s desperation shows that he knows he can never win a majority of Americans: 

“January 6 showed us that when Donald Trump wants an insurrection, he will summon an insurrection.”

Trump’s remarks on 16 March that there would be “a bloodbath” if he loses – which he later claimed referred to job losses in the auto industry – were out of an old playbook.

There is always an ambiguity, a plausible deniability, when he traffics in violence. But the faithful hear and get the message.

Trump chose to hold his first campaign rally in March 2023 in Waco, Texas, on the 30th anniversary of the violent showdown between federal agents and the religious cult, the Branch Davidians.

He denied the obvious symbolism, but it was a nudge, nudge, wink, wink to Christian militia and paramilitary movements who see the cult members who died as martyrs.

Trump’s rallies open with him saluting a choir of inmates imprisoned for the violent attack on the Capitol on 6 January singing the national anthem. He calls them “hostages” though they are deemed by the FBI to be domestic terrorists.

He consciously deploys biblical imagery in his speeches, painting an apocalyptic vision of an America that has collapsed under Joe Biden into a hell of economic ruin overrun by murderous migrants. Doomsday will be at hand if Biden is re-elected.

Trump suggests that his second coming will lead to a New Jerusalem in America; a flowering in the desert and peace on earth, as well as bringing retribution down on all those who opposed, defeated or slighted him.

He concludes his rallies by promising a country “that’s greater than it has ever been before. God bless you all!”

David French warned in The New York Times that this has artificially raised the stakes in the election “to the point where a loss becomes an unthinkable catastrophe, with the fates of both church and state hanging in the balance. As we saw on 6 January 2021, this belief invites violent action.”

The polls suggest a very close race and an anxious seven months, with the outcome hinging on a few battleground states and whether floating voters understand the danger Trump represents and shake themselves out of apathy.

Many people with short memories of the damage he has already inflicted rationalise that the world didn’t come to an end the last time Trump was president.

But although he is a master of bravado, he can’t fool all of the people all of the time. 

He is so broke that the New York attorney general is poised to seize his properties, genuine conservative Republicans are deserting him, he has succeeded in delaying his criminal trials but they not going away, Democrats are surprisingly united and building up an impregnable ground game, and his performances are becoming more incoherent as the brain farts become more common.

Like the Wizard of Oz, he is being exposed as a fraud – a gigantic gaseous windbag in a girdle who is not even rich.

Rick Wilson, a former Republican operative, and author of Everything Trump Touches Dies, says Trump has already snuffed out the Republican Party. Now let’s see if he can achieve his greatest feat of all – driving the church over a cliff.

Those Christian nationalists and deluded foot soldiers who go down with him will have to answer for why they were conned by this man of all men, and why they chose power, division and hatred instead of working for a better humanity and building bridges – and how they ended up losing it all. DM