Clinical social worker: "With the Trump Bible, one must consider dementia"

Fascism is a type of political religion. Donald Trump is preaching the religion of fascism.

History has repeatedly shown that fascism and other forms of political religion almost always end in widespread violence and destruction. With his promises and threats of “bedlam” and a “bloodbath,” Trump, the dictator in waiting, has basically guaranteed such an outcome if he “wins” the 2024 election. And that outcome is perhaps just as, if not more, likely if he were to be defeated by President Biden.

Over the last few months, Donald Trump has escalated his claims of god-like prophet-messiah status. He has declared that “Jesus Christ” and “God” chose him to win the presidency and defeat President Biden in the 2024 election. He has promoted a video online declaring that “God made Trump” – again elevating himself to near superhuman status as a force of destiny and divine retribution against his and the MAGA movement’s enemies. The corrupt ex-president has taken to comparing himself to Jesus and just announced that he is selling his own Trump-branded version of the Bible with “exclusive” content. Even for those of us who are not Christians, Trump’s behavior is obscene and absurd to the extreme.

On this, Amanda Marcotte told this powerful truth in a recent essay here at Salon:

The teachings of Jesus Christ were always a poor fit for Republicans. They're just way more into decimating Social Security than they are into loaves and fishes. What Trump offers when it comes to Christianity is what he offers his followers in every other aspect: permission to stop pretending to be good people. His gift to them is his shamelessness. Through Trump, his followers can realize their fantasies of being unapologetic bullies. This is the same schtick as MAGA members who claim to be "patriots" while attacking the rule of law and democracy. Trump tells them what they want to hear: You can be a Christian without compassion….

Replacing the real Bible with Trump Bibles is a too-perfect symbol of what has happened to evangelical Christianity. The mistake is in believing Trump's followers are confused or ashamed about their devotion to a godless creep who laughs at true believers. In Trump's hands, the Bible is not a text for prayer and reflection, it's just a weapon. It's much easier to beat people down with a book if it's closed.   

Ultimately, once God is invoked, and a malign actor such as Donald Trump anoints himself as a type of prophet, messiah, or Chosen One, there can be no compromise, negotiation, or consensus politics within a real democracy. Religious crusades (or specifically with the union of Christofascism, Trumpism and today’s Republican Party and larger “conservative” movement as a form of political religion), almost by definition are winner-take-all all to the extreme. Such extremism is an existential threat to American democracy and the good society.

In an attempt to better understand Trump’s Christofascism and the threat to democracy, I recently spoke to a range of experts.

These interviews have been lightly edited for clarity and length: 

Katherine Stewart is the author of “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism."

Most of the people who follow Trump don’t expect him to behave like a religious person. They are not going to hold him to account for his heresies or irreligious pronouncements, because they don’t truly believe he is religious anyway, and they don’t care. For them, religion is far less about religion than identity, so they have no interest or concern about whether Trump is blasphemous or not. For a good number of those who lend their support to the Christian nationalist movement, professed faith in the literal word of God is little more than performative. To be sure, some do have familiarity with some parts of the Bible, but their religious identity has become entwined with signaling in-group membership and loyalty to their chosen leaders.

What is curious is how some people still insist on interpreting politicized religion through an individual lens: as men’s and women’s search for meaning or as an effort to grapple with the mysteries of the cosmos. We need to be clear: For leaders of the Christian nationalist movement, along with many followers, the politics comes first, and the religion is tailored to its needs like a cheap suit.

As far as Trump himself is concerned, these statements are just further evidence of his bottomless self-pity and narcissism. It would be nice to think that we live in a world where that would cause people who claim to support religious motives to think again, but for too many Trump supporters that is just not the case.

Add in how Trump is now profiting from the sale of Bibles and it is a masterclass from a grifting insurrectionist demagogue on how to win votes by conflating a fundamentalist religion in which he does not believe with a Constitution he has attempted to undermine. Patriotic bombast in a profit-making package.

Robert P. Jones is the president and founder of Public Religion Research Institute. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller "The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future," as well as "White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity."

For the approximately two-thirds of Americans who identify as Christian, this is Holy Week, a solemn time of participation in worship services that evoke self-evaluation and repentance ahead of the holiest day on the Christian calendar, Easter Sunday. In the midst of this sacred week, the presumed Republican candidate for president, Donald Trump, has committed acts that in any other era would have created an outcry among serious Christians across the spectrum.

On Holy Monday, Trump compared himself to Jesus in a Truth Social post. This was not a one-off comparison. They echoed the claims he has made in other settings, such as his speech to white evangelicals at the National Religious Broadcasters annual meeting last month. There, Trump evoked the theological language of substitutionary atonement to describe himself as their savior. Trump claimed, "I’ve been very busy fighting and, you know, taking the, the bullets, taking the arrows. I'm taking 'em for you. And I'm so honored to take 'em. You have no idea. I'm being indicted for you…."

On Holy Tuesday, Trump began hawking a $60 “God Bless the USA Bible," posting this message on X: "Happy Holy Week! Let’s Make America Pray Again. As we lead into Good Friday and Easter, I encourage you to get a copy of the God Bless The USA Bible.” The book binds, within its brown leather cover, the text of the King James Version of the Bible (preferred by white evangelical Protestants) along with the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the Pledge of Allegiance, and a handwritten chorus of Lee Greenwood’s song, “God Bless the USA,” which Trump regularly plays at rallies. This new venture — that includes a royalty deal collected through the same company handling his $400 gold sneakers — is a tangible, monetized embodiment of Trump’s white Christian nationalism.

That Trump has turned Holy Week into an opportunistic carnivalesque grift is not surprising given his character and the financial crunch he is facing from his legal troubles, but it should be appalling. Christian theology has a word to describe those who claim the attributes of Jesus for themselves and who treat sacred things with contempt and disrespect. It’s blasphemy. And the failure of Christians, especially white evangelical Christians to whom Trump is pandering, to speak out against such disgrace during the holiest week of the Christian year is a measure of their captivity and complicity in the denigration of both Christianity and our nation.

Paul Djupe is a political scientist at Denison University and the editor of the Religious Engagement in Democratic Politics series at Temple University Press. He is also the co-author of "The Full Armor of God: The Mobilization of Christian Nationalism in American Politics" and co-editor of the new anthology, "Trump, White Evangelical Christians, and American Politics."

It’s Christian holy week, so what better time than to keep the persecution narrative fully stoked? In a recent Truth Social post, Trump allowed a supporter to suggest that his legal plight is comparable to Jesus’s suffering on the cross. This has been Trump’s play since running for president in 2015: appealing to Christians who feel out of power with a promise to restore them to their believed rightful place. But Trump’s centrality to this narrative has changed drastically. Early in his presidential bid he was seen as the Christian Right’s bully – their protector in politics. As legal and political pressure mounted, Trump became the story, the proxy for how a fallen world treats Christians. He was called anointed by God and he even toyed with the idea in 2019 that he, himself, was the Chosen One.

In the last year, with indictments piling up, he has been reinforcing his martyrdom, suggesting that he is “taking the arrows…for you and I’m so honored to take them, you have no idea.” He will continue to draw comparisons of his plight with Jesus’s persecution through to the election. He doesn’t stop there, but paints an apocalyptic scene in which his enemies are coming for Christians (“The radical left is coming after all of us.”) and only he stands in the way of broadscale persecution or even a “bloodbath.” There are so many problems with this language, but the most problematic is that the expectation of persecution serves to justify extreme measures to protect their basic rights and liberties up to and including violence. Such connections are being reinforced all over the Right, such as by Charlie Kirk who recently said, “If this election doesn’t go our way, the next day we’d fight.”

Hal Brown is a clinical social worker and was one of the first members of the Duty to Warn group. He has extensive expertise in working with multiple personality disorder (now called dissociative identity disorder) and police stress.

It has always puzzled objective observers, both mental health professionals and others, how many of Trump's lies, exaggerations, and acts of self-aggrandizement were done with him knowing full well that he was pandering to his cult, and how many he actually believed. If he believed even half of them, he'd be considered delusional. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, let's say all of this was performance art. Now with the Trump Bible, one must consider dementia as a cause since ⅓ of all people with dementia end up experiencing delusions. If you listen to his 3-minute spiel for the Bible where Trump seems to deviate from the teleprompter and ad lib you can see indications he actually believes some of what he is saying. For example, does he really think he has many Bibles in his house? His sales pitch for Trump Bible where he meanders into stream of consciousness suggests he may be delusional.

If Trump has even the slightest notion that he is some kind of Jesus-like deity he has become unmoored from reality. Whether this is due to psychosis, dementia, or a combination of the two can't be determined without a complete neuropsychiatric assessment that would include not only extended interviews with Trump and much more extensive testing than the MOCA test but also Melania who presumably would interact with him in unguarded moments and could be asked for other signs of dementia.

Another aspect of early dementia is an increase in signs of poor judgment. Poor judgment can sometimes precede memory loss. It isn't as extreme as somebody wandering off from a facility in the winter wearing only their pajamas. Somebody who is always garrulous and tends to go off on tangents when speaking may do this more frequently. They often lose their train of thought when speaking. People with early dementia can demonstrate a pattern of inappropriate decisions or actions which will ultimately be self-defeating based on their personality but not realizing that there will be predictable consequences that will hurt them.

Decision-making includes three components: courses of action, uncertain events and consequences. When you consider Trump's decision to market a special Bible just before Easter there are his narcissism and money-making inspired aspirational reason for doing this which has to be contrasted with foreseeable negative ramifications. A person who isn't cognitively impaired should be doing a cost-benefit analysis asking themselves whether the benefit will outweigh the cost. They should be able to weigh how uncertain the consequences of an action are. Trump with his narcissism would find it hard under normal circumstances to accept that there might be a final straw where one of his attempted grifts backfires on him, after all he's gotten away with so much. Trying to hawk a $60 Trump Bible may be an indication of the poor judgment of early dementia exacerbated by narcissism that in the end may boomerang back on him. 

Rick Wilson is a co-founder of The Lincoln Project, a former leading Republican strategist, and author of two books, "Everything Trump Touches Dies" and "Running Against the Devil: A Plot to Save America from Trump - and Democrats from Themselves."

There’s no doubt Trump is a snake oil salesman trying to make a quick buck selling overpriced Bibles to unwitting Christians during the holiest week of the year. But it’s also a clumsy attempt to sell himself as a God-fearing Christian because he’s rightly terrified that his criminal case for paying off a porn star and the E. Carroll lawsuit are making evangelicals rethink their support for him. It's just another example of Trump showing he’s willing to do or say anything to make a buck or grab a vote.