Trump’s Hardcore Following Is Ready for Its Next Stage

In the wake of the failed assassination attempt on Donald Trump on Saturday, Senator Marco Rubio tweeted “God protected President Trump,” marking a new chapter in an already convoluted and disturbing story. For years, Donald Trump, a real estate failure turned-D-list-reality-TV-personality, has enjoyed unbending support from the white evangelical community and a fawning, slavishly devoted base. His many, many faults had been overlooked, rationalized, and forgotten. In every way, from his politics to his personal life, he has demonstrated the exact opposite of the espoused conservative ethos.

And none of it mattered.

To put it simply, Trump created a cult to surround him. The creation of this cult capitalized on the lust for power within Right-Wing and evangelical circles, revealing that a deep need for control and profit had always driven their decisions despite all of the rhetoric about family values, small government, fiscal responsibility, and any of the accompanying nonsense. Over time, those same people came to define their very lives around Trump. They clothed themselves in MAGA wear, carried their devotion into their workplaces and public places as if they were delivering the gospel. And they prepared themselves for a showdown that Trump, the GOP, and the feverish Right-Wing media ecosystem prophesized was coming between Godly Good and Satanic Evil.

And here we are.

The problem is that, until now, that battle was largely rhetorical and imaginary. Members of the Trump Cult were told that any difficulty in Trump’s Administration, that any product co-opted by “the Woke Left,” that any cultural development which troubled them were signs of a shadow war that raged just below the surface of everyday life. The QAnon conspiracy theory, which took full hold of the Republican Party following the 2020 election, was useful in creating this structure and, for anyone willing to “follow the clues” and buy in to the fantasy full hook, line and sinker, meant that the imagined war had already begun.

Watching Trump pump his fist and tell his supporters to fight while blood trickled across his face only made that fantasy undeniably real and more pressing.

It isn’t hard to know what comes next. The most difficult part is reckoning with it, believing that the unbelievable is happening. Cults have a funny tendency to follow the same cycles. As they get stranger and stranger, as they believe crazy narratives about furniture retailers trafficking exploited children, they tend to become more and more concentrated around the true believers. This has happened over the past few years, resulting in a Republican Party that is less broadly popular and more radicalized. Then, when the cult leader inevitably breaks laws and is held accountable, the extremism grows because the imagined persecution becomes real.

Trump’s legal situation represented that point in the cycle. They had been told “the Deep State,” a modern version of the antisemitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion, controlled the levers of power and would stop at nothing to destroy their messianic figure. And then, it happened. Our legal system held Trump accountable for his many crimes. Or, at least, somewhat accountable.

The attempted assassination on Saturday is the next step on a dire road. The pure spectacle of the event is ready-made for this. We’ve all seen the video so many times we’ve already lost count less than 24 hours later. Trump is speaking, he grabs his ear, falls to the ground, and then emerges, bloody and defiant.

Secular Americans must understand this reflects, beat by beat, the deeply held mythology of how Jesus Christ, the original Christian martyr, was attacked and then resurrected. It activates a narrative framework that has always influenced how Christians and the Right have seen the world. And it will produce predictable consequences.

As we head into the Republican National Convention, we already see the transformation taking shape. Republican leaders like Rubio and a litany of commentators have already spun this event as the Christian God having spared Trump for a deeper purpose. In this case, it was to foil the plan of Evil and literally save the United States. This builds off a belief, among the Republican Party and evangelicals, that is now completely mainstream.

Since the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan partnered with the Evangelical Right, there has been a budding belief that the United States is God’s chosen country and will carry out a Revelation-style defense of liberty, freedom, and Good in the world. This fairytale has been traced back to the very Founding, where the Right Wing firmly believes that God not only inspired the birth of America but guided it through turmoil.

To this extent, Christian Nationalism, a new and disturbing movement, has grown, creating a structure for the Trump-influenced worldview to thrive. It doesn’t hurt that Christian Nationalism also rejects liberal democracy in favor of a new, theocratic system in which the Right should enjoy unobstructed power to carry out “God’s Will.”

Trump will be welcomed to the convention in Milwaukee as a wounded savior. It will result in a fervor the likes of which we haven’t seen in modern America. The political environment, which is worsening by the hour, will be framed as an apocalyptic showdown between Good and Evil that necessitates any means necessary. This strand of Christianity is driven by this persecution complex from its beginnings in Ancient Rome, and it colors every action and position. This event will throw gas on that fire, and we will hear calls for extreme measures that have been “vindicated” by the perils of the moment.

There will likely be reprisals in the meantime. Diehard MAGA supporters, as they have built their entire version of modern reality around Trump being a savior and their very freedoms hanging in the balance, will seek out emissaries of Evil wherever they can find them. What is unknown now is whether this will result in widespread violence following the Convention and as the campaign rolls on, or if it will remain isolated and sporadic. There are plenty of reasons to believe it could be either.

This coincides with an environment pregnant with awful possibilities. Social media is specifically programmed to prioritize disinformation, misinformation, and radicalization. There are many unknowns here and conspiracy theories inevitably fill the vacuum of ignorance. Add artificial intelligence and deepfakes to the equation, which are already prevalent the day after the attempted assassination, and you have a landscape that is poised to explode.

For years now, I have argued that we need to adjust our preconceived notions of reality itself. People desperately want to believe that politics is rational business. That Trump came down the escalator, knocked things a little loose, and all that’s left to do is move beyond him and restore order. Most people who study politics and elections have very little understanding of religious radicalism or its culture, much less the type of radicalization these moments produce. 

The perfect time to understand this is always yesterday. If we could have prevented this in the first place it would have been ideal. Heading into the 2016 election, we should have understood the ramifications of neoliberal globalism and how it affects everyone’s material conditions, as well as how Right-Wing ideology had contributed to a rise of extremism and escalating calamities.

We didn’t.

After that, we should have learned from those mistakes, taken a moment of introspection, and got down to the ugly business of confronting our preconceived notions and our own roles in how we arrived at this point.

We didn’t.

Crises can do one of two things. They can either get worse as people continue to deny their roles in it and the contributing factors that created the crisis in the first place. It rolls on, gains speed, and then the crisis compounds.

Or, they can be moments of clarity in which an overwhelmed person looks at reality as it is versus how it has appeared, and they determine that it is time for a reflection and change. Sometimes this necessary work is undermined because convenient fantasies, such as conspiracy theories, self-serving rationalizations or even cultish energies, soothe them and usher them forward to the next crisis. As a culture and as individuals, it has been the latter over and over again, speeding us to the precipice of abyss.

Heaven help us if that holds true once more.