This diary’s title comes from a New York Times opinion this morning by Frank Bruni: Trump’s Final Battle Has Begun
“When it comes to manipulating the information space, getting inside people’s heads, creating alternative realities and mass confusion — he’s as good as anyone since the 1930s, and you know who I’m talking about,” said Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of the 2021 book “The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.” Rauch characterized the stolen election claims by Trump and his enablers as “the most audacious and Russian-style disinformation attack on the United States that we’ve ever seen” and questioned whether, under a second Trump administration, we’d become a country “completely untethered from reality.”
Reality is messy. Reality is complicated. Reality, as Stephen Colbert famously said, “has a well-known liberal bias.” And this is precisely the point: Reality contradicts the conservative mantras.
Trump really did lose in 2020. But it goes far beyond Trump and and his 30,000+ lies. Slavery really was an unredeemable horror for Blacks. Anti-abortion laws really are killing women. Gender dysphoria really exists. Same-sex marriages really work. Racism really is systemic in the United States. Jews really don’t control the world (if we did, we’d do a better job!). The economy really is doing much better under Biden than under Trump. The Earth (which really is 4.5 billion years old, give or take) really does revolve around the sun.
I put that last point in to make it clear that denial of reality is far more than a simple political tactic. For several centuries, the Catholic Church had the power to deny the reality of the heliocentric solar system, and used that power to have people burned at the stake (Giordano Bruno in 1600, for example) who proved otherwise. The Catholic Church lost that ability in part because the Protestant Reformation broke its hold on Europe — but now we see fundamentalist Protestants trying to gain similar power in order to deny reality, from repeated court challenges to teaching the science of evolution to the current banning of books that show reality in conflict with their religious views on sex. The current Speaker (Squeaker) of the House, Mike Johnson, once successfully forced taxpayers to fund Noah’s Ark, a creationist denial of reality.
Trump is appealing to these religious radicals by making common cause with them. The Atlantic has an excellent article (behind a paywall) by Tim Alberta — My Father, My Faith, and Donald Trump — in which he writes:
What I couldn’t understand was how, over the next couple of years, he became an apologist for Trump’s antics, dismissing criticisms of the president’s conduct as little more than an attempt to marginalize his supporters. Dad really did believe this; he believed that the constant attacks on Trump’s character were ipso facto an attack on the character of people like himself, which I think, on some subconscious level, created a permission structure for him to ignore the president’s depravity.
Albert’s father had been senior pastor — and founder — of his evangelical church. Preparing to retire, he hired Chris Winans to replace him. Then Winans tried to address the reality of global climate change:
A month into the job, when Winans remarked in a sermon that Christians ought to be protective of God’s creation—arguing for congregants to take seriously the threats to the planet—people came to Dad by the dozens, outraged, demanding that Winans be reined in.
Preaching reality — even when backed by scriptural references — was unacceptable to these Christians. I say “these Christians” because there are plenty of Christians who accept the reality of global climate change and who are moved to correct it, in many cases because they believe their religion and their god commands them to do so. But they are not the ones seeking power today in order to enshrine their denial of reality into the law of the land.
I have argued any times before that any revealed religion will inevitably come to into conflict with reality’s challenges to their revelation. Some will work out a way to acknowledge the reality and work out a way to live with it, but there is a long sordid history of denying that reality and enforcing that denial at the point of the sword and the barrel of the gun. Reality, however, will not be denied, and the longer it takes to accept that, the worse it will be when reality inevitably wins.
Trump is anything but religious. To him, his evangelical backers are nothing but yet another group of suckers he can con into helping him avoid accountability for his actions. Here is Alberta again:
Trump had run in 2016 on a promise that “Christianity will have power” if he won the White House; now he was warning that his opponent in the 2020 election, former Vice President Joe Biden, was going to “hurt God” and target Christians for their religious beliefs. Embracing dark rhetoric and violent conspiracy theories, the president enlisted prominent evangelicals to help frame a cosmic spiritual clash between the God-fearing Republicans who supported Trump and the secular leftists who were plotting their conquest of America’s Judeo-Christian ethos.
Trump is, if anything, pushing this theme even harder as the country gears up for the 2024 election. DeSantis, Trump, Iowa's evangelical voters and Christian-focused policy:
The former president repeatedly has framed himself as a defender of Christians. In September, at a summit run by the Concerned Women for America conservative Christian action group, Trump used stark language. "This election will decide whether America will be ruled by Marxist, fascist, and communist tyrants who want to smash our Judeo-Christian heritage; or whether America will be saved by God-fearing, freedom-loving patriots just like you," he said.
And as the headline noted, Trump isn’t the only one. DeSantis is doing the same. (We will pass over the irony of a committed Catholic pandering to the evangelicals, many of whom share Luther’s hatred of Catholics.) As are almost all the other contenders for the Republican nomination.
We are not just in a political battle for the survival of our country. We are in a religious battle for our souls.