Last Saturday, Donald Trump promised in a Truth Social post, “we will demolish the Deep State, we will expel the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the Communists, Marxists, and Fascists, we will throw off the sick political class that hates our Country, we will rout the Fake News Media, we will evict Joe Biden from the White House, and we will FINISH THE JOB ONCE AND FOR ALL!” The 2024 election, he wrote, “is our final battle.”
Trump’s use of “cast out” will provoke amens from his most loyal constituency: white evangelicals. That sort of term is commonly used by evangelicals, Pentecostals and charismatic Christians to describe the exorcism of demons. That could be in a personal situation, say, to cast out the “demon” of homosexuality from a family member, or on a bigger stage, to cast out demons, in the form of political adversaries, from Washington.
When Trump says “Communists, Marxists, and Fascists,” he doesn’t mean actual communists or fascists. He means Democrats.
Trump knows that these communities remain steeped in the fervent, right-wing anti-communism of the Cold War era, in which communism, socialism, and Marxism were deemed not only anti-American, but anti-Christian. After the fall of communism, leading figures in the movement reshaped their McCarthyist arguments to falsely accuse any liberal or progressive, such as former President Barack Obama and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, of being a communist, socialist and/or Marxist.
So when Trump says “Communists, Marxists, and Fascists,” he doesn’t mean actual communists or fascists. He means Democrats.
Conspiracy theories about Democrats’ supposed secret communist ties abound on the Christian right. David Noebel, a leading figure in developing curricula to teach evangelicals about the supposed clash between the “Christian worldview” and “secular humanism” and “Marxism-Leninism,” wrote in 2010 that “most Americans are totally unaware that the US House of Representatives crawls with a large, well-organized assembly of Socialist organizations.” These organizations, he claims, “quite literally comprise a Socialist Red Army within the very contours of the House of Representatives.” Even before Ted Cruz became a U.S. senator, he peddled the similarly laughable conspiracy theory that Obama learned how to be a communist at Harvard Law School, because “there were more self-declared communists on the Harvard faculty than there were Republicans.”
Trump’s evangelical base believes God ordained America as a Christian nation, that the Christian nation is under attack by internal, satanic enemies (including the so-called communists), and that Christian patriots must wage “spiritual warfare” against these demonic forces to restore the America God intended. Many of them also believe that God anointed Trump to save America at this crucial time in its history.
Since his first term, Trump’s evangelical allies have been laying the groundwork to transform this supposedly spiritual battlefield into a political one. At a 2019 National Day of Prayer event in the Rose Garden, Trump’s spiritual adviser Paula White said the White House was “holy ground,” that Trump was on an assignment from God, and prayed to “scatter” every “demonic network.”
Trump’s continued support from white evangelicals shows how much they share his zeal to destroy democracy.
A month later, White was on hand when Trump announced his 2020 re-election bid at a kickoff rally in Orlando, Florida. She prayed, “Let every demonic network who has aligned itself against the purpose, against the calling of President Trump, let it be broken, let it be torn down in the name of Jesus!” Later that year, when Trump was facing his first impeachment, White prayed on a conference call with evangelical Trump supporters that “any persons, entities, that are aligned against the president, will be exposed and dealt with and overturned by the superior blood of Jesus.”
After Trump lost to Joe Biden, mired the country in his stolen election lies and summoned a mob to Washington to violently prevent the peaceful transfer of power, his spiritual warriors remained at his side. For many, the run-up to Jan. 6 and the entire effort to overturn the election was nothing short of a holy war to save America from what they claimed was an illegitimate “deep state” of demonic forces that controls Washington. No wonder then that House Speaker Mike Johnson, who is similarly steeped in these Christian nationalist beliefs, says he is “all in” for Trump in 2024. Since 2020, Johnson has promoted Trump’s stolen election lie, participated in judicial efforts to subvert the election, and voted against certifying Joe Biden’s victory.
While Trump has in the past used similar language to last weekend’s Truth Social post, this one came amid growing awareness that Trump is unequivocally saying that if he gets a second term, he will rule as a fascist. His use, the previous weekend, of the word “vermin” to attack perceived domestic political enemies mimicked Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. His aides are promoting an authoritarian blueprint they have developed to allow him, in a second term, to weaponize the Justice Department against his political adversaries, carry out mass deportations, arbitrarily fire federal workers and install loyalists in government agencies who will obey his orders without question.
Trump’s continued support from white evangelicals shows how much they share his zeal to destroy democracy. To them, Trump is not a menace but a messiah — which tells us a lot about what they think the God-ordained Christian nation should look like.