In a speech at the Turning Point USA Believers’ Summit on Friday, Donald Trump implored audience members to vote in the 2024 election, assuring them that, if he gets a second term, “it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.” In four years, he reiterated, “you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.”
Even Fox News host Laura Ingraham recognized the anti-democratic promise that his supporters “won’t have to vote anymore” had created problems for Trump. In an interview with the former president on Monday, she encouraged him to clarify his statement, yet he continued to repeat it multiple times. Taken together with the rest of Trump’s speech, in which he cast himself as a divinely protected savior of his supporters’ vision for America, and falsely portrayed Kamala Harris as a ruthless persecutor of patriotic believers, his doubling down on his promise to “fix” it sends an unambiguous message. It is the most definitive statement to date of his intention to implement the Christian nationalist autocracy sought by his most ardent believers.
These comments are particularly incendiary to an audience steeped in rhetoric that the Christian America that God intended is under siege from secular leftists.
Trump made false claims that the Biden-Harris administration “weaponized” the government against Christians, and picked up on an attack circulating in right-wing media that Kamala Harris is anti-Catholic. That smear dates back to Harris’ time as senator and her 2018 questioning of Trump judicial nominee Brian Buescher. Harris had questioned whether Buescher’s membership in the Knights of Columbus, a fraternal Catholic organization that vociferously opposes reproductive and LGBTQ rights, would impede his impartiality as a judge. At the time, the pro-choice group Catholics for Choice defended Harris, arguing that the Knights of Columbus was no apolitical charity as conservatives claimed, but “brazenly used” its status “to pour money, effort and influence into political contests and policy debates.”
When Harris ran for president in the 2020 Democratic primary, conservatives resurrected the questioning to charge that she had engaged in anti-Catholic bigotry. Since Harris announced her bid for the presidency last week, right-wing media has resuscitated this attack, even though Harris has served under Joe Biden, a committed Catholic. “She is without question one of the most aggressively anti-Catholic career politicians in American history,” wrote an editor for the conservative nonprofit CatholicVote. A staff writer for the Federalist claimed that “she has a long history of anti-Catholic bigotry that not only hurts pro-lifers but also faithful papists.” In his speech, Trump claimed Harris had “viciously attacked” judicial nominees because they were Catholic, and claimed she is “really militantly hostile toward Americans of faith.” He also claimed that Harris “wants to forcibly compel doctors and nurses against their will to give chemical castration, drugs to young children” and wants to force “every public school in America to let men into women’s and girls’ locker rooms.”
In short, “the Harris agenda is an agenda for national destruction,” he said. “The Trump agenda is an agenda for national renewal and greatness.” These comments are particularly incendiary to an audience steeped in rhetoric that the Christian America that God intended is under siege from secular leftists. The Believers’ Summit was billed as “a testament to our commitment to see the body of Christ rise to its calling in this pivotal moment in history. We are dedicated to seeing believers not just defend their faith, but to put it into action, ultimately turning our nation towards the Lord.” Speakers included Christian nationalist author and revisionist historian David Barton, Christian right author and podcast host Eric Metaxas (also a prominent promoter of Trump’s stolen election lie) and Doug Wilson, the extremist pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho. Wilson explicitly promotes theocracy, or what he has called “a network of nations bound together by a formal acknowledgement of the lordship of Jesus Christ,” rejecting civil government as “demonic” and “satanic.”
In the wake of the attempted assassination of Trump earlier this month, TPUSA’s founder, Charlie Kirk, promoted the claim — echoed in rightwing media and at the Republican National Convention — that Trump had been spared because he wore the “armor of God.” Kirk had picked up on a tweet from Jack Posobiec, who has called for the overthrow of democracy and declared anyone on the left “un-human,” claiming that God had protected Trump as an anointed figure in a cosmic battle between good and evil. On Friday, Trump thanked supporters for their prayers: “I stand before you tonight thanks to the power of prayer and the grace of almighty God.”
To assure the audience that he would defend them from supposed persecution of Christians by the left, Trump reprised his promise to create “a new federal task force on fighting anti-Christian bias and its mission will be to investigate all forms of illegal discrimination, harassment and persecution against Christians in America.” This is another way of telling his followers that they will be able to impose their ideology — against abortion, against LGBTQ freedom, against anything they consider part of the “woke” or “globalist” agenda — on the grounds that freedom for others, whether in the bedroom, examination room or classroom, is “anti-Christian.”
Democracy is not a priority for those who would be “turning our nation to the Lord.”
The question of just how literally to take Trump’s assurance that Christians “won’t have to vote anymore” is almost besides the point. Long before 2028, Trump is promising his supporters in the religious right that he will bring about the Christian nationalist government that they seek. And democracy is not a priority for those who would be “turning our nation to the Lord.”
The triumphant rollout of Harris’s presidential campaign has left Trump and his allies running scared. But he’s also playing a dangerous game with a base that has been hearing a great deal of very hot rhetoric about godly versus demonic forces, and about their political adversaries being “un-human.” Trump is trying to capitalize on all this hate, casting it as a religious war, and hoping to ride it to authoritarian rule.