Donald Trump promises to be a dictator on “day one” of his presidency if he wins the 2024 election. On Monday, Trump demolished his rivals in the Iowa Republican caucus. He is now one step closer to being the Republican Party’s nominee (which is virtually a fait accompli at this point) and then challenging President Joe Biden for the White House.
As I previously warned in an essay here at Salon, Trump will not just be a regular and common political thug dictator. So what type of dictator god king will Donald Trump be if he takes power in 2025? He will be like one of the Old Gods from ancient times: vengeful, destructive, and a force for pain, punishing and smiting “non-believers” and others who have “transgressed” against him and his most faithful followers. Dictator God King Trump will also, like the god(s) of old, force his “enemies” into exile.
The Christian right supports Donald Trump and the MAGA movement because he has promised them great and special power and authority over American society.
After his victory In Iowa, Trump (who has previously called Black and brown people “poison” in the blood of the nation and said that Democrats are “vermin”) continued to make such threats, telling his followers, “And we’re gonna have to deport. We’re going to have to have a deportation level that we haven’t seen in this country for a long time, since Dwight Eisenhower, actually.” It is estimated that a million Hispanics and Latinos were deported during the infamous “Operation Wetback." Trump and his agents are promising to deport many more “illegal aliens” and “criminals,” meaning Black and brown people.
Invoking the Alien Enemies Act, declaring martial law, ending birthright citizenship, using the military to occupy majority Black and brown cities, and banning the First Amendment and Constitution, Trump has also threatened to exile and imprison and do even worse things (i.e. death) to leading Democrats including President Biden, special counsel Jack Smith, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and the judges and other law enforcement officials attempting to hold him accountable for his obvious crimes.
In keeping with his belief that he is a type of Chosen One and messiah, Trump continues to test the faith of his MAGA followers. Like many other parts of the United States, Iowa was experiencing dangerously cold weather on Monday. Instead of showing care and concern for his MAGA flock, Trump told them to vote for him even if it means they get sick and die.
Last week, Trump boasted that his followers would walk on glass for him. Trump is, again, correct. Never to be forgotten is how Donald Trump and his first regime engaged in acts of democide and other forms of mass death through a willfully negligent response to the COVID pandemic, which killed at least 1 million people in the United States. Instead of punishing Trump and his Republican Party, the MAGA people and other right-wing voters rewarded the ex-president and his party for inflicting such suffering and death upon the country.
But like any other cult leader and/or fake populist who is claiming divine status, Trump also professes his very special and sacred love for his followers. In a recent fundraising email, Trump literally said:
I’ll never stop loving you.
Why? Because you’ve always loved me!
You stuck by me every single time the Radical Left tried to KICK ME DOWN.
Even when they took my mugshot at the Fulton County Jail.
I felt your love even when they RAIDED MY HOME.
Through all the HOAXES, WITCH HUNTS, and FAKE INDICTMENTS, you never left my side!
True MAGA Patriots like you are the only reason I’m still standing.
Trump’s MAGA people love him in return.
How have evangelicals and other members of the Christian right responded to Trump’s claims of being the Chosen One, a man on Earth who is anointed by “god” and “Jesus Christ”? A few leaders among the Christian right have correctly declared that Trump is, by definition, committing sacrilege and blasphemy. These critical voices are in the extreme minority among the Christian right both in Iowa and across the country, however. To that point, Trump won an overwhelming majority of White evangelical voters in Iowa. Nationally, Trump’s support among the Christian right has only grown during his presidency and beyond.
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Right-wing evangelicals and other members of the Christian right were not forced, tricked, or manipulated into supporting Donald Trump and his neofascist MAGA movement. Theirs is a strategic alliance based on an alignment of interests, goals, and a craven desire for unlimited power.
As sociologist Samuel Perry summarized in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, in response to the 55 percent of self-described white evangelicals and white born-again Christians who supported Trump in Iowa:
Once again, the whole “Well, it’s a binary choice, either Trump or a Democrat” excuse has always been BS. Every chance evangelicals have had to pick someone else they choose Trump. They love Trump; he is the leader they want. And that is more damning than any book or documentary.
Perry’s observation echoes Robert P. Jones, founder and president of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), who in a recent conversation, explained the relationship between Trump, MAGA, and the Christian right in the following way:
What does Trump mean by MAGA, "Make America Great Again"? It is nostalgia for some a mythical past "golden age." They want a return to 1950s America when White Christians were the unquestioned dominant force in the country. Conservative white Christians want that America back. There is also this incorrect narrative that evangelicals held their nose and voted for Trump. But there is really no evidence for that. White evangelicals support Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric and his anti-black rhetoric and all those related racial grievance issues. They were breathing comfortably and freely when they pulled the lever for Trump in both 2016 and 2020….
As I document in The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy, most white evangelicals sincerely believe that God designated America to be a promised land for white European Christians. That is not a joke to them. If a person sincerely believes such a thing and the country is changing and is not in agreement with that vision, it opens the door to political extremism and violence to secure that outcome. Many conservative White Christians truly believe that they have a divine mandate and entitlement to the country.
The historical record clearly shows that white evangelicals have long had an instrumental, rather than principled, relationship to democracy.
Ultimately, the Christian right supports Donald Trump and the MAGA movement because he has promised them great and special power and authority over American society and life. As demonstrated by his Supreme Court appointments and other policies during his first regime, Trump has mostly delivered on these promises and bargains.
With his escalating threats to become America’s first dictator and God King, Trump is now promising the Christian right even more power in exchange for their continued allegiance. Trump, as detailed in Agenda 47 and Project 2025, will make right-wing Christianity America’s de facto state religion. These Christian authoritarians will also stand empowered by Trump and his regime to impose and enforce their beliefs across society as a de facto type of American Taliban or morality police as seen in Islamic countries such as Iran.
Trump has promoted the theme of Christian persecution in the past, but is elevating it again as these legal issues mount…
Ramping up his authoritarian rhetoric, Trump pledged in the Iowa speech to institutionalize an authoritarian crackdown of the same sort he falsely accuses the Biden administration of implementing. “Upon taking office, I will create a new federal task force on fighting anti-Christian bias to be led by a fully reformed Department of Justice that’s fair and equitable,” he promised. “Its mission will be to investigate all forms of illegal discrimination, harassment and persecution against Christians in America.”
In another speech, in Reno, Nevada, he pledged to go after colleges and universities for running afoul of his “religious freedom” edicts. “If colleges and universities discriminate against conservatives, Christians, Jews, anybody,” he said, “we are going to take away their tax advantages, grants and endowment.”
Lies about the persecution of Christians are very familiar to Trump’s base….
One needs to look no further than Trump’s efforts during his first term, combined with his 2024 pledges to govern like a dictator, to see the authoritarian steps he is taking when it comes to “protecting” his base’s religious freedom. He is leaving little doubt that he will do whatever it takes to retain the loyalty of the base that has stood by him through an insurrection, two impeachments and now multiple criminal indictments. He is saying loudly and clearly that as part of his broader disparagement of the rule of law, he would shred everyone else’s rights in the name of his loyalists’ “freedom.”
Public opinion polls show that these so-called right-wing Christian “values voters” are so dedicated to Trump, their savior and prophet, a man who has repeatedly shown himself to be demonstrably evil, that they now believe that a president’s morality and behavior do not matter. Thus, in many ways, Trumpism is the new religion of today’s Christian right and Donald Trump is their godhead and savior.
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In a new essay at the New York Times, Michelle Goldberg explains:
Trump’s rise has been accompanied by a collapse in trust in many American institutions once valued by the right, including the F.B.I. and the military, and that loss of faith extends to many religious authorities. As [Tim] Alberta, the son of a conservative evangelical pastor, documented, preachers who’ve balked at parts of the MAGA agenda have been abandoned by many of their congregants.
From this wreckage has emerged a version of evangelicalism that sometimes seems like a brand-new religion, with Trump at the center of it. As Ruth Graham and Charles Homans reported in The New York Times this week, in Iowa, the percentage of people tied to a congregation fell by almost 13 percent from 2010 to 2020, one of the sharpest declines in the country. “As ties to church communities have weakened, the church leaders who once rallied the faithful behind causes and candidates have lost influence,” they wrote. “A new class of thought leaders has filled the gap: social media personalities and podcasters, once-fringe prophetic preachers and politicians.” Trump captured the spirit of this movement when he shared a video on his Truth Social site titled, “God Made Trump.”
The American mainstream news media is largely responding to Trump’s crushing win over his rivals in Iowa as somehow an example of shocking behavior by those good hardworking, common sense white Christians in the “heartland” of “real America." But none of this should be surprising to serious observers of American history and politics.
As author and legal scholar Elie Mystal has so sharply and accurately described, “the white media” views the world through a lens and collective set of biases and commitment to protecting White privilege, generally, and white racial innocence and the many other small and big lies of Whiteness, specifically. In the case of Trump and the Christian right, this means a willful ignorance and denial of the role that race, the color line, and white supremacy play in American (and global) Christianity.
As the 2024 election approaches and Trump’s criminal trials bear down on him, he will escalate his hate sermons and claims of divinity and unlimited power. Trump’s MAGA followers and the other neofascists are listening very closely to what he is preaching and commanding as shown by the growing number of politically motivated acts of violence, thuggery, and intimidation against Democrats, liberals, and others deemed to be “enemies” of the movement to end America’s multiracial pluralistic democracy.
In a new column at the Atlantic, Tom Nichols tells this truth about the real motivations driving Trump’s MAGA people and other supporters:
Such hopes were always the thinnest of reeds: The Republican base actively embraces Trump’s grievances; it emulates his pettiness; it supports his childlike inability to accept responsibility. These voters are not sighing in resignation and voting for the lesser of two or three or four evils. They are getting what they want—because they, too, are set on revenge.
These voters are not settling a political score. Rather, they want to get even with other Americans, their own neighbors, for a simmering (and likely unexpected) humiliation that many of them seem to have felt ever since swearing loyalty to Trump.
A lot of people, especially in the media, have a hard time accepting this simple truth. Millions of Americans, stung by the electoral rebukes of their fellow citizens, have become so resentful and detached from reality that they have plunged into a moral void, a vortex that disintegrates questions of politics or policies and replaces them with heroic fantasies of redeeming a supposedly fallen nation.
No one should have that much power in America — but Donald Trump does.
There are less than ten months left to stop Trump and his plans to be America’s first dictator. The American people and their responsible leaders are rapidly running out of time to save their democracy and nation – and they are most certainly not acting with the speed, dedication, earnestness, and levels of commitment necessary to stop this impending disaster. The “urgency of now” in this time of democracy crisis is in many ways “the urgency of yesterday” (and last month and last year…and decades prior) and those Americans who believe in real “we the people” democracy must increase their efforts accordingly because if they lose to Trump and his forces there will be no “do-overs” or “resets” like in a videogame. This is real life.
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