Far-right pastor Lance Wallnau is incredibly upset over the burgeoning controversies regarding Donald Trump's nominee for Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth. No, he's not angry about reports that Hegseth paid off a woman who accused him of rape, or about the repeated adulteries and other marital cruelties detailed in a 2018 letter his mother wrote to him. Nor is Wallnau concerned with the growing pile of stories suggesting Hegseth has a severe drinking problem. Wallnau's just mad that an email detailing some of these issues exists.
"Mom, don't write a letter like that to your son!" he whined straight into the camera. "Don't write it and send it in an email someone could intercept and put in the New York Times."
Wallnau, a close Trump ally whose robust social media presence helped drive the mob on January 6, isn't just mindlessly defending Trump's nominees. He's especially gung-ho about Hegseth because the two men are deeply entwined with the Christian nationalist movement, which believes the purpose of the U.S. government should be to enforce far-right Christianity on not just Americans, but the whole world. It's not just Hegseth's tattoos that indicate his allegiance to this theocratic ideology. He recently joined a church run by Doug Wilson, a proud Christian nationalist who argues "secularism is a hollow construct" and should be replaced by a government-run according to the dictates of "evangelical Protestantism." Using Trump to grant control of federal powers — especially those that can be enforced with guns — is central to this plan.
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On Thursday, Marianna Sotomayor wrote in the Washington Post that Trump's policy agenda will face the obstacle of "narrow and ideologically fractured majority" Republicans have in the House. The GOP only has two more seats than Democrats. Getting all 220 to take votes on Trump's radical plans will be hard, if not impossible, as many represent purple districts and could easily lose in 2026 if they march in lockstep behind Trump.
But that doesn't bother the Christian nationalist leaders who back Trump, because the plan was always to reduce Congress to a ceremonial body and concentrate all the power in the hands of the president. During the campaign, much attention was paid to the disparate policy ideas in Project 2025. Less discussed was the overarching theme of the plan, which was to turn the presidency into something very much like a dictatorship. Russell Vought, the architect of Project 2025, is a Christian nationalist who believes the federal government's job is to impose a "biblical worldview" by fiat, which means sidestepping the House, whose members face biennial accountability with voters.
The plan was always to reduce Congress to a ceremonial body and concentrate all the power in the hands of the president.
Trump has now appointed Vought to run the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Don't be fooled by the boring name. The office holds unbelievable power because it's about controlling the purse strings for the whole government. As Thomas Zimmer explained at Democracy Americana, Vought argues that the law or separation of powers should not constrain him and the president, because this is a "post-constitutional moment." Vought has an elaborate and nonsensical rationale blaming the left for this development, but what matters most is his conclusion: the right is now entitled to blow past legal constraints and enact their will however possible.
At the center of this scheme is an effort to replace the existing federal bureaucracy with "an army of people who have a biblical worldview" and a willingness to "lead with reckless abandon." Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk are toothlessly threatening the jobs of federal employees on Twitter. Vought, however, will have real power at the OMB to "put them in trauma," as he threatened in a recent speech at the Center for Renewing America. The goal, he said, was to make their work lives so miserable that they are "traumatically affected" and forced to quit. Unlike Musk and Ramaswamy, however, Vought doesn't pretend this is about saving money. He plans to refill those jobs with Christian nationalists. In sum, the conspiracy theory of the "deep state" was concocted so the right could justify creating a real "deep state," one that is geared towards remaking America in its Christian fundamentalist worldview.
Trump's first pick for Attorney General, Matt Gaetz, went up in smoke as details from a sex trafficking investigation into the former Florida congressman kept being leaked to the press. His current nominee, former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, isn't raising as many hackles, despite her threats to arrest prosecutors for enforcing the law against those who attempted to overturn the 2020 election. But new reports show Bondi isn't just an election denier, though that's bad enough. People for the American Way discovered she's extensively tied to Christian nationalist leaders.
Two of the people Bondi has worked with — Wallnau and Trump's favorite minister, Paula White — are part of the New Apostolic Reformation. Matthew Taylor, a religious studies scholar who follows this movement closely, told Salon in September that these folks believe they're "this vanguard that God had placed on Earth to bring about the Kingdom of God. They want a global revival and to take over whole societies and turn them into Christian nations." When she was Florida's attorney general, Bondi backed a constitutional amendment that would allow the state to fund religious groups with taxpayer money, but Florida voters shot it down.
As Taylor laid out in painstaking detail in his book "The Violent Take It By Force," while Christian nationalist leaders like Wallnau knew well enough to be physically absent on Jan. 6, their efforts at amassing and enraging the crowd were critical in making sure the Capitol insurrection happened. It's concerning that someone sympathetic to their cause would run the Justice Department. We've already witnessed an uptick in right-wing domestic terrorism and hate crimes, and it's bound to get worse if Christian nationalists believe they have a sympathizer to their cause controlling all federal law enforcement.
Recently, far-right preacher Eric Metaxas gloated that Donald Trump will "go scorched Earth on the satanic bureaucracy that is the Deep State." This moralizing language conceals, however poorly, a deeply immoral agenda: to replace respectable civil servants with bug-eyed fascist ideologues who oppose the most basic values of our country, such as religious freedom, equal justice, and democracy. The consequences could be dire. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of Health and Human Services is scary enough, but the Project 2025 goal is to replace HHS doctors and scientists with people who believe prayer works better than vaccines. Trump's promise to pardon Jan. 6 offenders is scary, but scarier still is the possibility that the DOJ is staffed with people who don't think it's a crime if it's done in the name of Christian nationalism. And, of course, we should all be terrified that Trump is still pushing to put control of the military in the hands of a man whose church teaches that modern democracy should give way to theocracy.
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