A “multipronged assault”
Last week, I questioned the sufficiency of the “comically long” list of MAGA “nightmare scenarios” the Biden campaign is planning for that could arise leading up to and in the aftermath of the November election. We witnessed live on Jan. 6 the lengths to which MAGA Republicans would go to maintain power. Even then it took many months of investigation to uncover the plotting Trump’s confederates did not put on public display. It’s likely that people without criminal minds are not devious enough to anticipate all the ways Insurrection 2.0 might unfold.
This time, the prospect of jail time if he loses increases Trump’s incentives for instigating mayhem. As with stochastic terrorism, his followers don’t require explicit orders from the chief to know what he wants.
From Daily Beast (via Yahoo Finance):
Maria Bartiromo didn’t even bother to wait for the 2024 election to pass before suggesting it could be stolen.
During an on-air conversation Wednesday morning with Republican National Committee chairman Michael Whatley, the MAGA loyalist Fox Business Network host suggested President Joe Biden can’t reasonably expect to win the 2024 election when his policies don’t seem to resonate with voters. She highlighted Wall Street Journal poll that found Donald Trump leading Biden in multiple swing states, using the question as a set-up to boost a new conspiracy theory about Democrats being forced to manipulate the election in order to help the president win re-election.
“How does Biden win?” Bartiromo asked the RNC chairman. “Republicans are talking about the potential of an election that is tampered with. Republicans are warning there is a Biden order—executive order—which allows illegal immigrants and felons to vote.”
Bullshit, of course. The executive order Bartiromo references means to remove “significant obstacles” to voting many Americans face. Especially nonwhite Americans.
The order makes no mention of undocumented immigrants nor does it expand the right to vote to any groups previously unable to do so. The president does not have any authority to extend the right to vote to undocumented immigrants, and a 1996 federal law expressly prohibits non-citizens from voting in federal elections.
Sarah Posner, author of “Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind,” writes Trump is “is dangerously priming his voters for a repeat of his multipronged assault on the 2020 election results and the peaceful transfer of power.”
At a campaign rally in Wisconsin on Tuesday, Donald Trump decried President Biden for issuing a White House proclamation of March 31 as the annual Trans Day of Visibility, which this year happened to fall on Easter. “What the h— was Biden thinking when he declared Easter Sunday to be trans visibility day?” Trump complained, to loud boos from the audience. “Such total disrespect to Christians.”
The former president omitted that Biden has observed Trans Day of Visibility on the same day every year of his presidency, and the overlap with Easter was purely coincidental. Instead, Trump turned from stoking fears of Christian persecution to another campaign trail favorite: predicting his election victory. “November 5th is going to be called something else,” he said. “Christian visibility day, when Christians turn out in numbers that nobody has ever seen before.” The crowd reacted, of course, with raucous applause.
As with Bartiromo, the former huckster-in-chief is selling what they’re buying. He’s feeding their persecution complex. Writes Posner, “After all, in the minds of Trump loyalists, if Christians (that is, Trump’s loyal base of white evangelical Christians) show up on Election Day in unprecedented numbers, how could he lose?” They cannot unless the election is stolen by THEM.
Most Christians do not share evangelicals’ paranoia, Posner explains. For the others, Trump is signaling “that they make themselves available to defend him against a possible loss.”
The tenor of his speeches of late, especially those delivered to evangelical audiences, are built around a claim that Christian America has fallen into an apocalyptic hellscape, and only Trump can rescue it.
With their help. In Jesus’ name.
Trump’s declaration of Election Day as “Christian Visibility Day” is more than a get-out-the-vote technique. It’s a blaring alarm warning us that he could use his base’s persecution complex about the “radical left” and their messianic zeal for him to claim that any election loss must have been “rigged” not only against him but against them, too. As Jan. 6 showed, that zeal can easily turn into terrible consequences for the country.
I can’t help linking evangelicals’ persecution complex to a regional insecurity complex that lingers among many southerners (especially the less educated) a century and a half after the defeat of the Confederacy. The South and Jesus will rise again.
Update: Regarding Trump’s unscrupulousness and his MAGA followers’ “How could we lose?” hubris, it occurs to me that Pickett’s Charge was Lee’s folly because he thought his southern boys were invincible. Via the American Battlefield Trust: “Pickett was asked years following the war what caused the assault to fail. He responded rhetorically, ‘I’ve always thought the Yankees had something to do with it.’”
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