The durability of the acting president’s political base comes down to this:
He is who they would be if they were born rich.
They are who he would be if he were born poor.
To deny him is to deny themselves.
They love him because Donald Trump pisses off the people they hate. He is rude, crude, and socially unacceptable. He relies on his gut, not on book learning. Despised like them by coastal elites, he is the stone the builders rejected. Yet, God has made him the chief cornerstone (Psalm 118:22). They would like to win the lottery. Trump won the birth lottery. Whatever his sins, he is God’s and they are his.
Unless someone discovers a wedge for separating their identity from Trump’s, they are going nowhere.
Their faith is as fervently theological as it is political. Jeff Sharlet, author of “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power,” understands the type. So well, it seems, he can blend in at Trump rallies across the South.
The draw, Sharlet explains, is to bathe in the great man, in “divinity disguised as earthly provocation.” Trump’s shtick is less refined than Ann Coulter’s. The once-Trumper conservative pundit throws out offensive, red-meat provocation to her audiences too. When there is blowback, she tosses her blonde hair, rolls her eyes, and sighs. It was just a joke. Get over it. Wink-wink.
Sharlet observes at Vanity Fair:
Which is how racism works at a Trump rally, just like the president’s own trolling—signal, disavowal, repeat; the ugly words followed by the claim that it was just a joke followed by a repetition of the ugly words. Joking! Not joking. Play it again, until the ironic becomes the real.
For Christian right believers, Trump is King David, “a sinner nonetheless anointed.” Or the Queen Esther of their imaginations, and destined to save Israel. “A vessel for God,” according to former congressman Zach Wamp, a member of The Family (from Sharlet’s 2008 book).
It is a movement rife with conspiracy theories. Apocalyptic even. Filling in the syllogistic blanks here, Trump’s followers believe homosexuals are pedophiles. Democrats support the “gay agenda.” Ergo, Democrats are pedophiles. And sex traffickers or worse. (Google Pizzagate, if you’ve forgotten.)
“Perverts and murderers,” a woman in Bossier City tells Sharlet. Another rally attendee tells him many socialists are literal cannibals. The Devil is around every corner. A spiritual battle is silently waged.
They come to access secret knowledge about it dispensed by Trump in code only the enlightened may interpret. The last shall be first. Trumpism is a kind of gnostic heresy for the 21st-century, as Sharlet sees it:
Gnosticism, which dates at least to the second century A.D., is the path Christianity did not take, its texts destroyed as heretical, its ideas mostly forgotten until the 1945 discovery in Egypt of 13 ancient books in a sealed clay jar. Or maybe not so much forgotten as woven over the centuries into countless conspiracy theories, the deep-seated belief that there exist truths they—there is always a they in gnosticism, from the bishops and bureaucrats of the early church, coastal elites of the ancient world, to the modern media peddling fake news—do not want us, the people, to perceive.
Trump also benefits from a different heresy, the Prosperity Gospel or “name it and claim it” Christianity. And from another twisted syllogism: God showers blessings on those who please him — conveniently, on “send your prayers to God and send your money to me” preachers. Trump is gilded success incarnate. Ergo, Trump pleases God.
Accessing secret knowledge is the appeal of both Trump and the QAnon conspiracy. Every Trump tweet is code — weird capitalization, misspellings, and all. “The truth is right there in what the media think are his mistakes. He doesn’t make mistakes,” explains Pastor Dave who follows Trump from rally to rally like Deadheads did for years. It is all part of Trump’s plan to defeat the Deep State. They. The ancient Enemy.
What for Sharlet cinches the quasi-religious, quasi-mystical character of the Trump cult is Diane G. They met in Sunrise, Florida. A converted Never-Trumper, Diane possesses the zeal of the born again.
“Trump is not my God,” says Diane. “But God put him there.”
Her story is tortuous, involving Haiti and the Clintons. They are but actors in a deeper conspiracy:
She points to the kabbalistic discipline of alphanumeric codes known as gematria, in which numbers and letters are treated as interchangeable. “The numbers tell us certain things,” she says. “And the capital letters”—the tweets, just as Pastor Dave had told me in Louisiana. “Anything capitalized,” Diane says, “we add up as a number.” Such codes are a baseline of conspiracy theories going back centuries. To Diane and other Q believers, this does not disprove the system; it is evidence of how deep runs the struggle. “Two thousand years,” says Diane. Christianity, roughly speaking.
Sharlet wonders if Diane is an outlier. One woman’s delusions, he thinks. “They eat the children,” she told him, shaking with tears in her eyes. But Google her ravings and, “holy shit—Diane is far from alone.”
The Trump rallies Sharlet experienced are a more paranoid version of the Whole Life Expos I attended while assembling “Mantra-preneur,” my unpublished, mock-New Age magazine from the mid-1990s. Strike space aliens and angels. Insert They, brown-skinned criminal aliens, and pedophiles. It is the same dysphoria. The same search for secret knowledge from a mystical past. Same dark, centuries-old conspiracies and hopes for miraculous transformation. Plus escape from the American carnage Trump says surrounds them.
I wrote in 1993 about the impulses driving the New Age movement. Seekers felt disconnected from the modern world and had retreated into a mystical, less-threatening past:
People are desperate for something in which they can believe. Communities have disappeared, replaced by subdivisions and condominiums. Terrorism and human rights abuses are more visible than ever. Anything you eat, drink or breathe might produce cancer. Science has reduced life to a cold set of mechanistic principles, demythologizing the world and stripping life of the meaning our myths once conveyed. The world seems to be coming apart and we are powerless to stop it. Nothing feels right anymore.
Is it any wonder people need something, some way to get control in their lives, some way to overcome our sense of powerlessness and paranoia? (Empowerment has become a hot term lately, both in enlightenment and legislative circles.) But in the absence of feeling that we can affect changes in our lives, we find solace in the notion that that power might exist somewhere else. It is as if we awakened to find ourselves locked in the trunk of a car careening down a mountain road. We desperately need to believe someone is behind the wheel. Even a diabolical someone is more comfort than no one at all.
[…]
In New Age thinking, more benign conspirators pull strings behind the scenes. The government may be hopeless and Jesus may have lost credibility, but our alien mentors, spirit guides and secret circles of Wise Guys are directing humanity to a brighter future. A host of channelers, gurus, practitioners and facilitators have selflessly come forward to guide us into their empowering presence. Stripped of our myths by science, people have scrambled frantically to reconstruct the interior landscape from a pastiche of mystical icons – from pyramids to crop circles to UFOs – and a faith in beneficent higher beings that reassures us that someone is in control, even if that someone is not us.
Politics is not a linear spectrum but a circle. Trump and QAnon traffic in some of the same conspiratorial fantasies I found among the New Age faithful decades ago. Trumpers need to believe someone beneficent is secretly steering a world that appears out of control. But the Trump cult treads a darker path driven by its own dysphoria. Trumpers too feel the world they knew coming asunder, their grip on the white, Christian America God intended demographically slipping away. Slipping, along with the ability of people who look and believe as they do to dominate it.
But in Trump there is redemption. Sharlet finds:
Only the truly initiated—Dave, Diane, QAnon—know the name of “The Storm” that’s coming, but nearly all of Trump’s devotees can read the signs, red flares over blue seas: A CNN crew arrested on camera, live, in Minneapolis; in New York, a viral video of a riot cop flashing the O.K. symbol; and in Washington, following a gas processional, the president of the United States marching through the sterile aftermath to hold aloft a Bible, upside down—a sign? A signal?—its red ribbon dangling along his wrist like a snake’s tongue.
Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.
And so the Trump faithful gather again tonight for a Trump rally in Tulsa, Okla. — 19,000 indoors, no masks required, and maybe 100,000 milling about outside — in defiance of “experts” and a pandemic virus that so far has killed 120,000 Americans. Defiant, like the priests and ministers who held services confident their faith would shield them from harm. (I stopped counting dead pastors at 50.) Defiant, like parishioners without masks claiming insurance in “the blood of Jesus.”
The foreshadowing is like Act 1 of a comet-strike movie.
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Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.