Known for his improvised & volatile performances, #Trump is now ending many of his rallies w/ churchlike ritual & casting his prosecutions as persecution.
“The great silent majority is rising like never before & under our leadership,” #Trump recites from a teleprompter in a typical version of the script. “We will pray to God for our strength & for our liberty. We will pray for God & we will pray w/God. We are one movement, one people, one family & one glorious nation under God.”
The meditative ritual might appear incongruent w/the raucous epicenter of the nation’s #conservative movement, but #Trump’s political creed stands as one of the starkest examples of his effort to transform the #GOP into a kind of #ChurchOfTrump. His insistence on absolute #devotion & #fealty can be seen at every level of the party, from #Congress to the #RNC to rank-&-file #voters.
"On the 2024 campaign trail, the religious undertones employed by Trump and his allies have grown more apocalyptic — even messianic — as his legal troubles have mounted. …
The bottom line: 64% of Republicans view Trump as 'a man of faith,' according to a November poll by Deseret News — more than his former vice president and vocal evangelical Mike Pence."
"What matters here is that Trump and his supporters are leaning heavily into the Christian nationalist message, that he was not only anointed by God to lead, but that God wants Trump to smite his enemies and create a new version of America that is, if not quite a theocracy, at the very least a country in which Christians rule for Christian purposes and everyone else is allowed to be here only with their sufferance."
As Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes, the attempt of strongmen wannabes like Donald Trump (and Mussolini and Hitler et al.) to deify themselves and claim divine sanction grows only stronger when they feel threatened — as Trump does from multiple indictments.
And many of us are willing to buy the ridiculous claim and ignore the historical lessons, as the Iowa caucus reminds us.
"Where Jesus said, 'I am the resurrection and the life,' Trump declares, 'I am your retribution.' How can anyone who claims to follow one of these men support the other?
The answer, according to The New York Times, is simple: Trump supporters have redefined Christianity. For them, it has little to do with religion, and even less to do with Christ. Christianity is now just another synonym for MAGA."
"As the article makes clear, while church membership in the United States has been declining, many of those who no longer associate with any church still consider themselves Christian—though they seem to be a very different sort of Christian. …
These are people for whom 'Christian' is a label."
"It doesn’t mean they have any interest in understanding the tenets of Christianity as a religion: It means they follow Trump. And it helps to explain why so many pastors are willing to trade Jesus for Trump when standing at the pulpit."
"It is mind-boggling to think that after seven years of Trump’s divisive lies and stochastic vitriol, his fascist tendencies ('Lock Her Up!' 'I’d like to punch him in the face!') Iowa’s white Christians, supposedly followers of the teachings of the same man Martin Luther King staked his life and rhetoric on, are driving the Trump bus back into the center of American power."
"How grotesque is America is today, that white-bread midwestern Christians turn away from the idea that MLK urged, of infusing secular politics with love, and toward the hate-filled rhetoric of a man who by 2021, had logged more than 30,000 lies in just four years in office - not counting The Big Lie about the 2020 election that shredded the trust between citizens that is the basis of any democracy."
Tim Alberta, son of a pastor of an evangelical church and author of a new book about the collapse of white US evangelicalism to nationalism, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, speaks with Mona Charen. He tells her that Trump's white evangelical supporters began by making a transactional arrangement with him.
For some, however, that transactional arrangement is now "a full fledged Trump idolatry complex." For others, Trump is the savior figure because "the barbarians are at the gates, and we need a barbarian to protect us."
White evangelicals have cast their lot with him and their identity is totally bound up with him. Alberta states,
"They’ve gotten to a place where they feel increasingly as though attacks on Trump’s character are an attack ipso facto on their character. And therefore, they now have closed ranks and rallied around him and defended him in ways that they never would have earlier."
"I think what what we’re dealing with here is a competing religion, which is the religion of America, the religion more specifically, of an idealized traditional Judeo-Christian conservative America in which the values, and the demography, and the kind of cultural hierarchy, were more recognizable. That is in many ways a sort of competing religion inside of the evangelical movement."