Donald Trump is charged with 91 felonies in multiple criminal trials and is facing the reality that he may have to serve hundreds of years in prison if convicted for his obvious crimes. His strategy to escape these consequences is to delay the proceedings until he can be elected president – and as promised, declare himself dictator. As part of that strategy, Trump and his attorneys are arguing that he is above the law like a king or emperor because while president he supposedly had the unlimited power to do such things as command that his political rivals be murdered and take bribes in exchange for pardons and other political favors.
In a parallel argument, Donald Trump is now telling his followers that he is the Chosen One, a messiah or prophet of “god” and “Jesus Christ” who is a tool of destiny, which means he is outside of human law.
On Wednesday, the United States Supreme Court agreed to hear Trump’s petition arguing that he has immunity from the law for any crimes committed while president. The so-called experts were flummoxed by this decision. Ignoring what the Trumpocene has wrought and exposed about the country’s failing democracy and ascendant neofascism, these “experts” continue to have misplaced and unearned faith in “the institutions” and “the system.” Trump’s MAGA people, members of the Christian right and other cultists who believe that their Great Leader is divinely inspired may see the Supreme Court’s decision as one more example of prophecy and “god’s will." Thus, to hold Trump accountable under the law is a form of persecution and blasphemy.
In reality, the Supreme Court’s decision to give serious consideration to Donald Trump’s authoritarian claims of “presidential immunity”, and by doing so to imperil the centuries-long American democratic project, is not the work of “god”. In reality, these are the machinations of right-wing extremist Supreme Court justices who are willing to engage in a judicial coup on Trump’s behalf, the same man who appointed three of them to their current positions.
In an attempt to make better sense of Trump’s claims of personal divinity, his fascist plans and “Christianity," power over the Christian right, and what may come next in the country’s democracy crisis, I recently asked a range of experts for their thoughts and insights.
This is the second of a two-part series.
Peter McLaren is Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is one of the architects of critical pedagogy and recipient of numerous international awards for this work in education. He is the author of over forty books, and his writings have been translated into twenty-five languages.
Americans don’t appear to care about the demise of democracy, the suspension of the Constitution and subversion of our political system and I don’t think it is because they have been struck numb by Trump’s flabby grandiloquence but because of Trump’s great swindle of fulfillment — his fake promises to the American people that he will make America great and prosperous again (well, at least for white “legacy” Americans). In another time, in another place, Trump would be forced to wear a coxcomb cap, don striped tights and dance a supplicant jig before his puppet master in the Kremlin who clearly benefits from America’s free fall into infantile helplessness.
"That Trump has put democracy on the slaughter bench of history by turning fear into a state religion is not something that crosses the minds of many Americans."
The fidelity to Trumpism by his base has a lot to do with the ways in which media technology have fostered present-day ideological affiliations and are forcing the remaining remnants of American democracy into a political dumpster filled with the stinking rot of Trumpism. American fascism is a type of blended plutocracy where the global scope of capitalist rationalization is seamlessly integrated into the bureaucracy, technology, hierarchy, and institutional and political structures, whose power is camouflaged by the banality of its appearances and especially because it is draped in the fleshy propaganda of freedom and democracy.
That Trump has put democracy on the slaughter bench of history by turning fear into a state religion is not something that crosses the minds of many Americans. I think in some ways they look forward to it all tumbling down. And that’s because the inhabitants of Trumpworld live in a bubble of invincible ignorance and motivated amnesia about America's past, its beginnings, its history. A significant part of this crisis of history has to do with the overwhelming impact of media technology in our daily lives. We live in a post-digital universe where intuition clashes with analysis, where gut instincts collide with personal narratives, where conspiracy theories dance with critical theory, where corporations, lobbyists and networks of billionaires commandeer nearly all dimensions of institutional life, that sacred ground demanding not just clear-headed thinking, but the exquisite finesse of nuanced information processing.
The algorithmic clustering of social media content and groups, the remediation, recontextualization reframing and reposting of mainstream news stories, often amending them with clickbait, sensationalist commentary that amplifies and mainstreams xenophobia, produces imaginary others so loathsome that they can be viewed as legitimate targets of opprobrium and violence — such as George Soros or undocumented immigrants — is part of a social media infrastructure that has helped Trump demonize his enemies as “rapists” and “murderers” from “sh**hole” countries, not to mention vilify his political opponents. Each time he attacks immigrant others or members of his political opposition, he is revered as the avenging, punishing God of the Old Testament, or a martyr burned at the stake by a corrupt legal system controlled by the Democrats. However one cuts it, online Trump worship has off-line consequences and right now the far-right and Christian nationalists have the advantage, although they have not yet won the day. Trump recently proclaimed himself a “dissident” which enables him to falsely proclaim a kinship with real-life dissidents such as Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, or Nelson Mandela while disguising his naked lust for power.
Trump and “god” and “Jesus Christ”? Trump has pledged to reshape the United States into a crucible for dictatorship. He has told his followers, “I am your retribution” and “I am being indicted for you.” This is the messianic language of a mad dictator. Trump knows that when he is perceived as a messiah figure, it is not in the same spiritual modality, classification, religio-historical context or paradigm as Jesus of Nazareth. I mean, he got away with calling dead soldiers "losers" and those who died In World War II at Belleau Wood “suckers.” It’s hard to imagine Trump as a God-fearing man of faith. More to the point, he is seen by his base through the prism of countercultural heroes such as a knife-wielding Rambo, or Max Rockatansky, the shoulder-padded road warrior hero with a thousand faces, the high-octane vigilante crossing the wasteland, shaping the iconography of the dystopian frontier with his marauding adventurism.
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Trump has lifted the United States out of time by making himself a non-temporal, celestial and eternal signifier – the Chosen One – who follows a messianic path, but in different guises.
Advocates pushing for a Christian-centric nation seek to enact a fundamentalist Christian theocracy, directly undermining the foundational tenets of religious freedom and separation of church and state. Integralist Catholics, for instance, fundamentally reject the principles of liberal democracy, aiming to reinstate the authority of the Church in societal affairs to unite the secular and spiritual realms — readers of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale would understand well what this means as the Church may be compelled not only to legislate for the state through punitive measures but also to act as a surrogate state, considering itself entirely transcendent and beyond the state's authority, and relying upon divine grace to prevent reason from becoming corrupted.
Donald Trump made his fateful connection with millions of others by recognizing how enthusiastically they respond to his cruelty, his racism and his embitterment and his ability to provoke the mainstream guardians of US propriety and civility.
This was his great insight: that he has just the right type of charisma to laser-focus a generalized rage against the decline of American life into a political weapon through artful slander, personal maliciousness, self-aggrandizement, and the ability to mesmerize the public with lies, lies so ridiculous that they could only be perceived as truthful.
His malignity and psychopathology seem to attract followers when these same characteristics should repulse people.
Trump is to democracy as the MG-42 machine gun (known as Hitler’s buzzsaw) was to the safety of Allied troops during WWII. After all, he has ripped a hole in American politics in which the chaos agent candidate will act out a vengeance presidency while palming off on America’s tried and true ‘swindle of fulfillment’ designed to make consumer citizenship the reigning hegemony (as opposed to educating for critical citizenship and social justice).
Dr. Lance Dodes is a former clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a training and supervising analyst emeritus at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute:
By now it is very old news that Trump is an apparent sociopath whose efforts to present himself as a godlike savior is no more than a long con intended to hide his goal of gaining power and control and to conceal his absence of a normal conscience. His recent claim to be the savior of Christianity is remarkable only for the fact that anyone falls for this transparent lie. Christianity is centrally about love for one’s fellow man and is the direct opposite of Trump’s life of abusing, cheating, lying, and obvious racism. That religious people don’t see his statements that he is suffering to save others as transparently dishonest manipulation and obvious blasphemy, is a measure of his ability to convince others to ignore their own eyes. This capacity for deceiving others is the same as other psychopathic tyrants who have been able to seize power via the “Big Lie” technique of endlessly repeating their claims of greatness while inventing others to blame for the troubles from which people suffer.
In the current version, Trump echoes Hitler’s blame of non-Christians, calling upon ancient bigotries to advance his personal agenda. Needless to say, the plan to invent enemies to blame while presenting oneself as the savior against them has a long history of tragic success. The obvious manipulation of public perception would be ridiculed out of existence if it did not have the support of others eager to have power who, while not necessarily evil themselves, are willing to put aside their own consciences to ride the coattails of the psychopath. It happened in Germany and can happen here. The vulnerability of human beings to being manipulated by conscience-free liars is universal.
Paul Djupe is a political scientist at Denison University and the editor of the Religious Engagement in Democratic Politics series at Temple University Press. Djupe is the co-author of "The Full Armor of God: The Mobilization of Christian Nationalism in American Politics," "The Evangelical Crackup? The Future of the Evangelical-Republican Coalition" and other books, and co-editor of the new anthology "Trump, White Evangelical Christians, and American Politics."
While Trump’s rhetoric may have been particularly packed with Christian persecution narratives given that he was speaking to the choir this week at CPAC and the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) International Christian Media Convention, I think this will be a feature of the campaign for the next eight months. With nearly half a billion dollars in judgments against him and having been, as he said to the NRB, “indicted more than Al Capone, the great gangster,” his critical mission is convincing his supporters that his legal troubles are the result of political corruption from, as he describes it, a communist (and therefore atheist), evil, sick administration. He will try to continue reinforcing the corruption claims by arguing that only he can reestablish the rule of law. Only he stands in the way of the persecution that will rain down on Christians, hordes of criminals flooding across the border, the mutilation of children, and more, were he to lose. “I believe it’s doomed,” Trump said of the U.S.
The rhetoric surrounding Trump’s bid has escalated significantly as his legal perils are totalizing. 2024 truly is at least his final battle as he faces the revelations of the courts and the public. He claimed as much in front of CPAC, calling November 5, 2024 “our new liberation day” and “for the liars, and cheaters, and fraudsters, and censors and imposters who have commandeered our government, it will be their Judgment Day.” At this point, there is no gray area, no goodwill on both sides, only an apocalyptic battle between the forces of good and evil. And he isn’t the only one promoting such a vision. For instance, Prophetess Kat Kerr was on Capitol Hill this week speaking “on behalf of Trump,” who God “picked, anointed, and appointed” as president, suggesting that she was surround by a million angels “ready to waste this place.”
Whether battle is in the spiritual or physical realms, a large portion of Trump’s base believes that warfare is ongoing and they need to stand with the full armor of God. In this vision, Trump can either be fully good or evil and the fact that the indictments are coming from the forces of evil serves to explain away his “persecution.” With right-wing activists calling for the end of democracy, suggesting that the Democratic Party is incompatible with Christianity, and labeling Biden as one of the Four Horsemen of the apocalypse, I don’t know that even jail time for Trump is going to shake up his base. Only another convincing loss could possibly intervene by proving the prophets wrong yet again. In the meantime, the apocalyptic worldview is in full effect, and I believe they will wait for revelation to run its course.
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