Trump Is No Evil Genius
Behind Trump's facade: How Christian nationalism plotted a decades-long coup, weaponizing fear, faith, and fake moral outrage to reshape the United States.
Donald Trump is not some political mastermind that is orchestrating the coup we are witnessing. He’s only the face of a movement that has been steadily working toward this aim since the Civil Rights movement.
The push toward Christian nationalism has long been a force in American politics. The “U.S.” was founded on enslavement and genocide while masquerading as freedom seeking and liberty loving so we can’t be surprised to see how it is evolving. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind, indeed.
Calling this “Trump’s America” is giving him far too much credit.
In the 1950s-1960s, white Christians opposed desegregation so they started Christian academies, which were private schools where they could continue to practice their racism under the auspices of religious freedom. These schools became the incubators for the Tucker Carlsons of the world — a bunch of bigots indoctrinated into a perverted version of Christianity that is nothing more than white supremacy masquerading as Christian love. They also used this opportunity to create tax shelters, claiming that their human hate factories should be tax free since they were religious in nature.
In the 1970s, a particularly evil man known as Paul Weyrich realized that it would be a lot easier to mobilize a Christian base to vote by frothing them up around abortion because trying to convince them that segregation was A Good Thing was a harder sell. That’s right. Christians didn’t care about abortion at all when Roe v. Wade was established. In fact, many Christian leaders spoke out in favor of it and took the position that it was between a woman and her doctor. It wasn’t until Weyrich capitalized on this with his pal Jerry Falwell that they began to use false outrage to activate Christians into the “moral majority”. Their goal was to get the evangelical voter in the booth by framing their political concerns as “family values”.
In the 1980s and 90s, they moved into culture wars and with the Reagan administration, they were able to successfully fuse together fiscal conservatives and religious conservatives. Then, they began frothing up their base with culture wars such as the Satanic Panic where there was suddenly this widespread belief that there were Satanists doing all manner of evil shit. By stirring up fear and a false sense of moral superiority, the men behind the curtain were able to shore up even more support from their base. This coincided with the rise of the Christian Coalition, Pat Robertson’s organization that focused on local politics and the establishment of the Family Research Council which was James Dobson’s organization focused on “traditional family values”. (Side note, when I was a teenager, I had a bumper sticker that said “focus on your own damn family” proudly displayed on my car).
The Satanic Panic was successful in that it provided a template for moral panics that would recur later. By capitalizing on the fear and uncertainty people experienced around things like women in the workforce, changing family values and more secular influences, they were able to activate their base. The framework for moral panic is as follows:
Claims of hidden threats to children (save the kids, anyone?)
Skepticism toward mainstream expertise (psychology, medicine, education)
Portrayal of political opponents as not just wrong but evil
Calls for greater parental/community control over institutions
If this all sounds familiar, it’s because it is . . . it is the same playbook they are using even now to ruffle up their base. Pro-life, anti-vaxx, COVID-19, school choice, pizzagate, the woo to q pipeline1.
In the 2000s-2010s, the tie between religious conservatives and political power became even more entrenched. George W. Bush started a faith-based initiative that channeled a ton of funding to religious organizations — the Alliance Defending Freedom was founded, along with the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society. I’m sure those names are familiar to you as they are deeply entrenched within today’s right wing.
It was at this time that evangelicals really cemented themselves as part of the institutional infrastructure. They became part of the system–crafting policy, grooming leaders, influencing (i.e. infiltrating) the courts. They focused away from fighting outside opposition and instead turned toward reform of the institutions, making them into the image of the fake white Jesus they support.
This period saw religious conservatives build substantial institutional infrastructure for developing policy, training leaders, and influencing courts. Their focus on insider reform of government institutions was a long game strategy and we can see today that it has paid off. They groomed, handpicked and elevated their choices to positions of power. It’s how we ended up with Amy Coney Barrett, a wholly unqualified and inexperienced judge, on the SCOTUS. She is a Commander’s Wife who has traded in her green robes for black ones.
This all inevitably led to where we are today: in 2014, the Supreme Court expanded religious exemptions for businesses and in 2022, Roe was overturned and of course, the Heritage Foundation released Project 2025. However, none of this came out of nowhere. In fact, it was easy to see where it was headed if people were paying attention. Project 2025 is not new; it’s just the latest iteration of their long-term agenda.
They have been setting the stage for the Christofascist coup we’re experiencing today for DECADES. They played the long game. They knew that with enough time and pressure, they would eventually get to this point and all they needed was the right false idol to elevate and to mobilize their base because remember, no republican could win a single election without the support of evangelicals.
Trump is that person.
Who better to mobilize than a gross caricature of everything the evangelicals have come to love? This is not hyperbole because if you’ve ever been in a mega church, you know what I’m talking about. The Bishop of the first church I ever went to and worked in had the same tailor as Deion Sanders. He and his wife both drove cars worth 5 times what I made a year and they lived in a veritable mansion. In Christianity, to be wealthy is to be chosen. Evangelicals are trained in church to never blame their leaders; when one of the visiting pastors who used to come to that church divorced his wife and married another woman the next day, he wasn’t reprimanded. He was allowed to “teach” and his new wife (affair partner) became the new “first lady”. When pastors had “moral failings”, the congregation was told not to gossip but to pray. The only moral failing worthy of a person being held accountable was when someone was suspected of being gay. An adult male youth pastor dating a girl in high school and then marrying her immediately after graduation was fine, obviously.
Trump is no mastermind.
He’s most likely a Russian asset who has been compromised so deeply that he’s got no more autonomy than Pinocchio before he became a real boy. He’s not behind this coup–he’s just the useful idiot that was able to froth up the brainwashed masses into action. He represents everything they worship–fake, vulgar, racist, sexist and defiant. They wrap this grotesqueness in an American flag and call it patriotism then stick a Bible in its hand and call it God’s will.
Trump is–at best–a figurehead. He is a vulgar, rancid, cheeseburger-fueled chump who can’t even read a full page briefing. He is a bumbling, rumbling pile of putrid flesh poured into a cheap suit and sent out to do a song and dance.
Trump is the errand boy of these evil Christian nationalists who do want to go back to a time where they thought America was great–a time when Brown and Indigenous people could be slaughtered at will, when Black people were in chains and when women were in the kitchen.
Don’t give him so much credit.
See Stanley Cohe’s work Folk Devils and Moral Panics for more.
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So so important that we understand how we got here! Thank you, Xochitl!