The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump by Sarah Posner

Episode Date: October 21, 2020

Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump by Sarah Posner Sarahposner.com “In terrifying detail, Unholy illustrates how a vast network of white Christian nationalists plotted the authoritarian takeover of the American democratic system. For anyone wondering what a second Trump administration might bring, there is no more timely book than this one.”—Janet Reitman, author of Inside Scientology Why did so many evangelicals turn out to vote for Donald Trump, a serial philanderer with questionable conservative credentials who seems to defy Christian values with his every utterance? To a reporter like Sarah Posner, who has been covering the religious right for decades, the answer turns out to be far more intuitive than one might think. In this taut inquiry, Posner digs deep into the radical history of the religious right to reveal how issues of race and xenophobia have always been at the movement’s core, and how religion often cloaked anxieties about perceived threats to a white, Christian America. Fueled by an antidemocratic impulse, and united by this narrative of reverse victimization, the religious right and the alt-right support a common agenda–and are actively using the erosion of democratic norms to roll back civil rights advances, stock the judiciary with hard-right judges, defang and deregulate federal agencies, and undermine the credibility of the free press. Increasingly, this formidable bloc is also forging ties with European far right groups, giving momentum to a truly global movement. Revelatory and engrossing, Unholy offers a deeper understanding of the ideological underpinnings and forces influencing the course of Republican politics. This is a book that must be read by anyone who cares about the future of American democracy.Reporting Fellow with Type Investigations. My investigative reporting and analysis on the religious right in Republican politics has appeared in Rolling Stone, The New Republic, Vice, HuffPost, The Nation, Mother Jones, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The American Prospect, Talking Points Memo, and many other publications.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks this is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we appreciate you guys tuning in being part of the show the show as it were another podcast. Wow. Uh, you know, we just sit around some days and we're like, it's another day. Should we do another podcast?

We're like, yeah, let's do one. And then we have these brilliant minds that show up these great authors. The right, the, they write the most brilliant books they write, uh, you know, from some of the greatest newspapers out there. And, they show up and they show and they give us all this knowledge and we're smarter because of it so what you should do if you're really really smart now this is just for the smart people out there you want to take and refer your family's relatives and everybody go to the cvpn.com or chrisfosspodcastnetwork.com subscribe to all nine podcasts you can take and do that it's free too for an unlimited time it'll be free So you want to rush over and grab that while it's still available. The other thing you can do is you can watch the video versions of all these wonderful conversations we're having on youtube.com

fortune.chrisvoss. Hit that bell notification button. You can also follow me on goodreads.com fortune.chrisvoss. We're trying to build in a nice little book club there if we can and everything else. So that should be good. Today, we have a most exceptional, brilliant author on. She is the author of the book Unholy. Unholy. That didn't come out quite as much as I practiced it. Unholy, Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump by Sarah Posner. And Sarah is with us today.

She's got an incredible bio here. She's a reporting fellow with Type Investigations. Her investigative reporting has appeared in Rolling Stone, Vice, The Nation, Mother Jones, The New Republic, HuffPost, and Talking Points Memo. Her coverage and the analysis of politics and religion has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the American Prospect, Politico, and many other outlets. She graduated from Wesleyan University. I'm not sure if I got that right, but she'll correct me if I'm wrong,

and has a law degree from the University of Virginia. Her story, How Trump Took Hate Groups Mainstream, published before the 2016 election, won a Sidney Hillman Foundation Award. Welcome to the show. How are you, Sarah? Thanks for having me, Chris. Awesome. So did I get that right on the Wesleyan University? Yeah. I went to Trump University and Betsy DeVos Public School, so I'm not good at spelling

and all that stuff. So you wrote this book, Unholy. That's what I was looking for right there. It's like the Gene Simmons kiss, Unholy. So you wrote this wonderful book, this brilliant insight. Give us your plugs on where people can find you on the interwebs and learn more about you and the book? So they can find me at the type investigations website, type investigations.org or my own personal website, sarahposner.com. Uh, they can follow me on Twitter. Uh, my handle is just at Sarah Posner, uh, just one word and, uh, no underscores or anything. And, uh, yeah. And

so that's where they can, uh, find, um, my recent writing, my recent thoughts on, especially on Twitter, my recent thoughts on this, that, and the other thing. There you go. You write for a lot of great papers and, and, uh, news outlets, I guess they don't say papers anymore, do they? You can tell how old I am, right? Right. Right. So, uh, what motivated you to write this book? Well, I've been covering the religious right for a long time and the intersection of religion and politics. And during the 2016 campaign, I covered the Republican primary and in particular, who out of that field of 17 candidates was the religious right going to get behind?

And at the same time, I was also covering why or how these openly white supremacist neo-Nazi groups of the alt-right were backing Trump. And so that all kind of came together when he got the nomination and all of those groups got behind his candidacy in the general election campaign. And the book grew out of some of the reporting that I had done over the course of the campaign, but also reporting that I had done during the first two years of his presidency. Yeah. And so give us an overview of the book. What's the broad scope of it? So the big through line or takeaway from the book is that the Christian right and the alt right came together to support Trump because of their shared hostility to civil rights. And there's obviously like a lot more to the book than that. But those are the that is the

draw for both of those groups. Trump is a strong man. Trump is opposed to various elements of our democracy, both our democratic values, like civil rights and human rights, and our democratic institutions, like an independent judiciary or a free press. And these are features, not bugs. They don't support him in spite of his foibles on these fronts. These are the things that they actually like about him. Do you see any changes as we go into the electorate, you know, the election here? Geez, we're down to two weeks. Can you believe it? It's crazy. Do you see any changes where they're going to give up? They're like, well, maybe this is a bad choice. We should probably move on. Not among white evangelicals.

I think the interesting demographic in terms of watching how they're going to go in the election are white Catholics. So when we talk about the religious right, we're talking about a coalition of white evangelicals, white Catholics, and white mainland Protestants. Now, white evangelicals, they are the ones who, 81% of them voted for Donald Trump in 2016. I was looking at a poll this morning showing a dead heat in North Carolina between Trump and Biden, but 82% of white evangelicals are still going to vote for Trump in North Carolina. So I think we've seen a little bit more movement among white Catholics. We haven't seen a ton of movement from white evangelicals. They're very dedicated to the idea that Donald Trump is a savior of sorts, anointed by God to come save what they perceive

as a Christian, a white Christian America at a very critical juncture in its history. So to them, all of the things that he does, the fake news, the conspiracy theories, the ramming through the judicial nominees, all of these things are positives. These are not negatives for his base. Wow. So did you see yesterday, I guess he was in my, my home city, Las Vegas. Uh, he actually fronted a hundred bucks into a collection plate. I was kind of surprised he did that. Cause he's so cheap. Oh, on Sunday. Right. Yeah. I was like, I was like, somebody got money in that, dude? Wow. You probably took it out of the campaign stash.

So let's get into the book. What were some of the things that you found as you wrote the book and you did your research? So since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, we have seen a very disciplined and consolidated religious right that has gotten behind the Republican primary candidates for their, for their loyalty to a bunch of different litmus tests. Obviously, opposition to legal abortion, opposition to same-sex marriage or LGBTQ rights are really big things. But another element of that is the candidates have to be able to tell their story, their salvation story, their story of how they came to Jesus, their story of what their Christian faith means in terms of policy and governance and how it affects the way they see their role as a politician. So, of course, Donald Trump ticked off zero of those boxes, right?

Right. So like he's. Yeah. And especially the box about being able to talk about his faith. I mean, he not only could he not coherently talk about his faith, but he also couldn't cite Bible verses. He couldn't, you know, second Corinthians, all of that. So, so what you saw during the primary campaign was notwithstanding the reluctance of a lot of the religious right leadership, not all of it, but big chunks of it to get behind Trump. A lot of them backed other candidates like Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio. But what you saw was the base was very

enamored of him. And I think that that is in large part because he speaks to a lot of cultural touchstones for them that may not be explicitly Christian, but tie in or biblical, but tie in with the way the prosperity gospel culture has changed American evangelicalism. So to the extent that he could talk about his wealth or his perceived wealth or his supposed wealth, and talk about himself in these kind of superhuman terms. Like when you see him talk about how he overcame coronavirus, for example, that is very much a sort of prosperity gospel way of talking about it because only the true believers and the faithful have riches and great wealth and health bestowed upon them by God. That's why it's sometimes called the health and wealth gospel.

Interesting. Prosperity. So I think the base was sidling up to him before the leadership was. And I think a lot of the stuff that other people were appalled by, the nativism, the racism, the anti-immigrant diatribes, you know, early in his primary campaign. These, again, were positives for a lot of white evangelicals who felt like previous Republicans had been too soft on immigration, had been too cowed by political correctness um and so eventually the leadership caught up with the base and now the leadership too uh is is on board with the idea that that donald trump is was chosen by god or god's hand is on him and he's leading america at this critical juncture in its history how much of the base believes that because their leaders told them that as opposed to they just bought it like about him being anointed yeah anointed by god yeah well i think that just come like like they're just like yeah we kind of think he is or was there enough preachers pushing it i think there were enough

preachers pushing it but i also think that it's so common, particularly in Pentecostal and charismatic communities, to believe that God ordained certain people for certain roles in politics or society, that it was sort of ripe for that kind of organic growth, the organic growth of that kind of belief in the base. But there were certainly leaders who were pushing it early on i give you that uh he probably is an angel but at this point it's an angel of death economic destruction and and sickness yeah exactly but no that's interesting the prosperity thing i never really i remember we put that together we had the senior editor dan alex Alexander on yesterday. And we talking about the Forbes list and the Forbes file and stuff on him.

And, and, uh, you know, the whole, is he really worth what he says he is? Right. And, but, but it's interesting, you know, the bragging day issue, like you mentioned of, of him being worth billions and talking about money. Uh, and, and over the show we've, we the show, we've talked about how, you know, the differences about how there's the white churches and then there's the African-American community churches and how they were separated years ago by the Civil War and racism

and civil rights, et cetera, et cetera. And does your book get into talking about why that separation is there or what black communities think as opposed to white evangelicals? My book really focuses on the American right and particularly the religious right. So basically the problem. The historic political activity that led us to this moment with Trump. So one of the chapters of the book looks at the origins of the modern religious right. You know, when we're talking about them, obviously, there's

always been sort of a right wing evangelicalism and right wing Catholicism in the United States. But when I'm talking about the religious right, it's the movement that came together in the moral majority in 1979 and supported Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 and has basically been hinged to the Republican Party ever since, that this became an organized political movement, not because of abortion and the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973, but because of school desegregation and rules that the IRS put in place on private, you know, private schools that were 501c3s, that were tax-exempt organizations, putting their tax exemption at risk if they did not comply with certain rules intended to desegregate schools.

The religious right coalesced around this, around the idea that the government was imposing these rules, what they called at the time quotas, which they weren't, they weren't quotas, as an infringement on their religious freedom. And so you see the roots of a lot of our current political and legal battles in that sequence of events where they see the government as the enemy of their religious freedom by the government requiring them to comply with civil rights laws and rules that the rest of America has agreed are the kind of rules that we want to live by in a democratic pluralistic society. So for example, the idea that after same-sex marriage, the government might come after organizations that oppose same-sex marriage, or the idea that it's a violation of the cake baker's religious freedom to make him bake a cake for a same-sex couple or for a gay wedding. Speaking to that point,

we've had a lot of discussions about the abortion issue and how it's the hot button that Betsy DeVos' organization, the Council of whatever, I forget. Council of National Policy, right. organization the council of whatever i forget uh national policy right and and and and how they use it as a hot button to get stuff done but are they more concerned about what's going on with gay marriage and gay people i mean i i you you talk a little bit about how they're really concerned about how you know they at one point um the attorney general, they were trying to get stuff passed where they could make it so that you could discriminate against having gay people in services of business with your accountant, et cetera, et cetera. Is that a bigger issue than abortion for them?

I think that they're equal. I mean, obviously, the religious right has been working to overturn legal abortion for many, many, many years. They're about to get that. They probably have already without Amy Coney Barrett, five votes potentially, but now like they've got, if they can get Amy Coney Barrett confirmed to the Supreme Court, they're basically going to be in a position for Roe v. Wade to be overturned. We have no doubt about that. But you have to remember what they did before they embarked on this multi-decade effort to stack the court with justices who would be opposed to Roe, that over time, they chipped away at Roe.

They made it harder to get an abortion. They, you know, imposed these rules or these, you know, passed these laws that would impose restrictions on who could get an abortion or where you could get an abortion or at what phase in your pregnancy you could get an abortion. A similar thing is happening after the Supreme Court's decision in 2015 in Obergefell v. Hodges, which was the ruling that legalized same-sex marriage. That is another row for them, right? So they would love to eventually overturn that decision. But in the meantime, let's chip away at it. So maybe a gay couple can get married, but it would violate the religious freedom of a florist, in their view um for the couple to be able to go to the florist and say can you do the flowers for our wedding um and that would be required under many state

and municipalities non-discrimination laws that prohibit discrimination in public accommodations uh but this is the sort of thing that they're trying to chip away at chip away at like oh can you know can an accountant say no to doing the taxes of a of a of a gay couple because they oppose same-sex marriage on religious grounds so these are the sorts of things that we're going to see another case that the supreme court is going to hear this term is whether it violates the religious freedom of a foster care and adoption placement agency run by Catholic Social Services for the city of Philadelphia to say, well, to get a contract with us to place foster kids, you have to agree to abide

by our non-discrimination law in Philadelphia, which prohibits discrimination against people based on sexual orientation or gender identity. And so because Catholic social services won't place children with same-sex couples, this is the legal dispute now. So all of these things obviously relate to marriage, right? So you chip away at what being able to get married means if you can't adopt children or you can't just go to any store and get the flowers or the cake or the accountant that you want it's just astounding to me uh we don't want to have abortions so you'll have children you don't want so you have to put them in adoption clinics but then we won't let gay people adopt them so the they'll probably just suffer and some sort of adoption thing.

What's that old movie, Oliver? You're going to suffer that way. What's interesting to me, jumping back, we were talking about desegregation and segregation. I didn't know until recently with some of the discussions we've had with authors that the voucher programs is actually a racist idea and a concept that they came up with after, I think, the desegregation of the South or the Civil War or the Civil Rights era. Where they're like, hey, we don't want our kids going to school with black people. And they came up with a voucher program.

That's the core of what that, I didn't even know that. Well, a lot of these disputes, like I said, you know, the dispute of whether can the federal government make private tax-exempt schools comply with these laws and, you know, to raise it as an issue of religious freedom. A lot of these things are just sort of covers for just opposing school desegregation. And vouchers was a sort of similar thing. Yeah, the PR thing or the PC thing was really interesting, too. Like the one thing I started seeing in 2015 was all the people who supported Trump going,

yeah, PC is bad. I mean, I still see it to this day. I'm like, geez, man, I mean, maybe you're a closet racist, but can you at least be decent to people around their face? And they're just so joyous. How much do you really feel this is a blowback from having them having to be under the load of Obama for eight years? Oh, my God, what a horrible thing. Yeah, I mean, right. So I think that what you see over the course of our history, right, right, or in terms of civil rights, you know, our steps forward and blow back and steps back, you know, nothing, you know, the moral arc of the universe, you know, is long, but it bends towards justice as, as the old saying. So yeah, I do think that, you know, the religious right grew out of this hostility towards school desegregation back in

the 1970s and 80s. And the sort of Trump era of the religious right grew in part, you know, not completely like there are other factors, too, but definitely grew in part out was the one running around looking for Obama's birth certificate and, you know, raising these questions about whether he was a, you know, a real American and all of that. And so he was the, and he was the candidate that the base chose, right? So like they didn't choose to go the route of let's have a bigger tent and make the Republican Party a bigger tent.

They chose, the base chose the route of let's have a smaller, more racist tent. I never really thought of it, but yeah, you're right. They basically said, you know, hey, we don't want to school with blacks and we don't want to go to church with blacks and let's just make our own party. I remember the gentleman's name, I just was watching him on MSNBC this morning. He's done an ad as a Republican. He was running the GOP. Oh, Michael Steele.

Michael Steele, great guy. He was running the Republican convention. And back when Obama won, you know, he sat down with the Republicans, and they kind of had this come-to-Jesus moment, if you will, to spare the irony. An autopsy. There you go. They call it an autopsy, right? Yeah, and he's like, you know, hey, man, we need to build a bigger tent here.

And wow, that went out the window fast. Yes, and that's exactly what I'm saying. So, like, they did that autopsy, and the autopsy recommended building this bigger tent, more outreach to minority voters, making the party more diverse and less just focused on anti-immigrant whites. And this is clearly not the direction that the base chose in 2016. And Trump hasn't seen a real erosion of his support in the base but obviously it's not really a message that has enabled him to really grow that base very much so you talked about how uh you know one of the things that were important to them was getting around these irs rules i know

there was a really prominent uh i think preacher or preacher school guy, and the IRS kind of went a little heavy after him. And that really caused a lot of... Yeah. Right. And so Bob Jones University was one of the early Christian universities to have its tax exemption revoked by the IRS because it had a policy banning interracial dating on campus. And they got it for a long time. And so you still hear activists in the religious right talk about that case, right? They'll talk about, well, remember Bob Jones, right? So like, this is why we need to see the government as being at odds with our religious freedom

because the government took away Bob Jones University's tax exemption, even though Bob Jones University claimed that the reason why they banned interracial dating was because they found it in the Bible. Yeah. And I believe Obama, I don't know if Obama's hand was in this, but I know during his administration, the IRS was kind of telling churches, hey, you've got to clean up your act. You can't, you've got to either pick a team.

You can't be politics and the thing. Am I correct on that? So there's a part of the Internal Revenue Code called the Johnson Amendment. And it basically says if you have tax exempt status, like most churches and houses of worship do, you can't use these tax exempt resources to campaign for a candidate, right? Because, you know, you don't get a tax exemption when you make a donation to a political campaign. So by the same logic, you can't use a tax exempt donation to turn around and campaign for a candidate or against a candidate. And it actually hasn't really been enforced that much. There've only been like maybe one or two churches that had their tax exemption yanked over that. But the religious right has made it another one of these, the government is against us and our religious freedom sort of issues. And so Trump early in his administration, first, he promised that he would get rid of the Johnson Amendment,

which he couldn't unilaterally do because it's part of a law. And so Congress would have to repeal it for it to be undone. But he issued an executive order directing the IRS not to enforce it. And so you've seen then now much more overt campaigning for Trump at churches or by church figures. And, you know, his his spiritual advisor, his personal pastor, Paula White, who's a televangelist, you know, there's you don't really see much of a daylight between her role as a preacher, televangelist and the role she plays being Trump's personal pastor and the role she plays as an official advisor to the white house faith-based initiative. So yeah, there's been a lot of blurring of the lines under Trump. So with them in there in the schools that they want to take and do, I know the best seat of us is a big hard on for her.

But is it, is it that they just don't want to be mixed with gays and black people and they don't want their kids being raised with them or interacting or dating with them? Or is it more about just keeping them from the sins of the world by keeping them in the theology sort of school system, you know, not teaching about science and so yeah i think it's complicated and i think that it goes back to some supreme court decisions a little bit earlier in the 1960s that that came during the same period when schools were desegregating so in 1962 and 1963 the supreme court struck down mandatory prayer and bible reading in public schools oh yeah i said you you cannot, it violates the establishment clause of the first amendment to, you know, require kids to pray or read the Bible, you know, by officially by the teacher in public schools.

And this really fed this conspiracy theory among fundamentalists and evangelicals that public schools were anti-Christian or communist or secretly teaching your kids about communism or Islam. I mean, I mean, there's always kind of a new permutation of this conspiracy theory that that public schools or like some in the religious right like to call them government schools are trying to indoctrinate your children with anti-christian ideas whether that's you know getting rid of um you know enforcing the separation of church and state by getting rid of mandatory school Bible reading or prayer, or in their view, you know, it's anti-Christian to teach about certain topics. And this has spilled over not only into

issues of school prayer, but just the whole idea of what America is that quote unquote government schools don't teach that America is a Christian nation. They teach the myth of the separation of church and state. There's a lot of sort of complicated culture war touchstones here that all play a role in all of this. But, you know, one of the things I talk about in the book is how school curricula in the same time period in the 1970s also became a touch point for the religious right, where they claimed that curriculum changes that were intended to teach kids about diversity and racial equality were actually anti-Christian and needed to be taken off the school curriculum. So public schools have for a long time been sort of the hot zone for a lot of these culture war issues. That's amazing, man. And now I see it more from what you're talking about what's in the book i see it more when i see like you know i think donald trump or donald trump jr put out the other day they're they're gonna stop christmas i didn't hear anybody say christmas

now i hear it every day and you're like you hear it in march who are you hanging out with yeah right i mean like the war on christmas is maybe one of the more ridiculous um uh culture war battles that uh that they fight but it's all it's all sort of related to the same idea that this more diverse pluralistic you know whether racially or religiously more pluralistic nation is a threat to what they perceive as the Christian nation. And Donald Trump is saving that Christian nation for them. I mean,

I think that Eric Trump was on the campaign trail for him last week and even said that his father had literally saved Christianity, which is obviously the most ridiculous thing to say. But yeah, they really believe that he is this messianic figure who has come and he's unafraid to combat the fake news and the political correctness and all of these things that are keeping them down and uh so it's because he's in politic and it's because he's anti-democratic small d democratic that they see him as this um heroic figure it's crazy and and i mean do they kind of see him as an angel of destruction, like an Old Testament sort of thing? Yeah, so you hear, I've interviewed people who, you know, so this is something that Lance Wallnau, who's an evangelist, who has been a Trump backer from, you know, dating back to the primaries, or Rodney Howard Brown, who's a televangelist in Florida,

they'll use the term wrecking ball. He's a wrecking ball because that's what needs to happen to kind of rebuild everything because the liberals have so destroyed America that we need to have this wrecking ball come in and just mow it all down and start over. So when they're saying the cities are burning and all that kind of crap because you know i i hear that from people they're like the cities are burning and you're like no not uh just check your instagram on some cities and it's going really well but they're probably more so referring to the you know the satanic uh i don't know teaching science and big bang theory and stuff like that i guess more so than anything well i do think that

there's a history there of looking at um civil rights protests by black people as being violent and dangerous it's also a racial so there's definitely a racial trope going on there um but also that cities um are you know, more liberal, and therefore, you know, all of this is sort of in the in the mix here, that cities are more liberal, and therefore, more prone to that kind of chaos, and uncertainty and violence that only conservatism and law and order, as Trump likes to say, can restore. So it's very much sort of like city versus not city kind of ideology, along with this idea that civil rights protests are, you know, against law and order, that they're inherently violent.

And I would imagine homosexuality is mixed all in there. Like the other day, someone pointed out to me that part of the Pelosi trope of hitting her is, you know, San Francisco liberal, which is a wink and a nod to that trope of you know the that never occurred to me i just thought she were bashing liberals being jerks and i was like oh wow okay you know um so it's interesting do you do you see the is there anything that's going to break the back of this whole relationship with trump and and christians where they wake up and they go, yeah, this is a bad road we got on.

Or does he have to either pass away from many heart attack strokes or be imprisoned or, I don't know, maybe he'll be a martyr at that point. I mean, I think that you'll see the occasional person who says, I voted for him in 2016, but now I can't put up with him anymore. He's a liar and he's a misogynist and he's terrible. But when you look at the polling data, I mean, white evangelicals, I mean, apart from just Republicans in general, white evangelicals are his most loyal followers. And so when you have them believing that God anointed him or God's hand is on him and God put him in office for this particular time, and then you see the enthusiasm

with which they're treating his ramming through of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, you see it comes into view how much they are an anti-democratic small d movement that their minority view, right, because like their opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage and for religious exemptions for people who oppose same-sex marriage, this is a minority view among Americans, right? This is not shared by the majority of Americans, but they're willing to use these anti-democratic small d means to install a Supreme Court justice so that they can have it be the law of the land regardless. And so they see Trump because he's not worried about the political fallout of him doing this.

Like another Republican president might be like, maybe this isn't the best move right before the election because it might lose me some votes. For them, it's more like he doesn't care. He cares so much about us. He doesn't even care about the political fallout. And we know that he's on the right side because God's hand is on him they're definitely in that feedback loop and that's how i mean yesterday he he he did this fascist thing where he yelled at uh one of the reporters right calling him and saying you know

you need to be a criminal you're in jail and and just i i just sat there and went, man, in some old world of America, that guy would be off the boat right then. But what do I know? So let me ask you this, because they're talking more about how white women are the ones, the suburban women, are the ones that are really starting to vote and move against him now. They kind of bought into him in 2016 2016 and now they're kind of moving away from him and the one thing that's still strong is college non-college males white males who go for him and and i kind of had an understanding of that that male sort of thinking i come from the 60s and and early 70s where you know there was a lot more of that toxic

masculinity and more and more i've i'm looking at as toxic masculinity what's going on with these guys because i know what they want they want they want to be able to beat their chest they want to be able to walk around and grab everybody and be the sexist pigs they want to be and and and uh you know all things male well not i don't want to say all things male because we're changing that sort of modicum hopefully but you know they want to go back to the 60s and the 70s where i don't know it was it was mad men i suppose might be a good reference and uh and and like you say they they they get excited by him being able to do that in his in his prosperity and they they

think well i could do that someday too that's the world i want to have which is probably a dying well it is a dying thing that isn't going to last um so do you do you see maybe some of the uh white women uh suburbanites changing or are they gonna i mean because i i've actually heard and i'm sorry i didn't let you finish on that one but i've actually heard that some of the white women now are are secretly talking CNN and they're like, I'm not going to tell my husband how I'm going to vote, but it's not going to be for Trump. I don't know what you think. Well, I think a sure sign that Trump's internal polling says that he's doing badly with women is his campaign stop, I think it was last week where he talked about how much the women love him. Right. So like every time he says something like that, you know, it's born of a like a panic attack because their polling shows that he's doing poorly with women.

I think all the public polling shows this enormous gender gap, like amazingly, you know, a bigger gender gap than there was when we had a female presidential candidate in 2016 and Hillary Clinton. So yes, I think that Trump is very much damaging himself with his just horrible misogyny, his, as you say, his toxic masculinity. He's damaging himself with women. I would be very curious, and I think that the polling doesn't get down to this granular level of detail, but I would be very curious about white evangelical women in particular, and to what extent they've given up on him. Because toxic masculinity is also a very serious problem in evangelical culture.

And if you feel like you've been the victim of toxic masculinity or some kind of spiritual abuse as a woman, and I wonder if you look at Trump and say, yep, that seems kind of familiar and not really. So, but I don't think, I don't think I've seen a poll that breaks down the gender gap within religious groups, which would obviously be extremely interesting. Attention pollsters, do it. You and I are going to be reading the results afterwards going, what the hell happened?

Of course, now it might take a couple of weeks from what I'm reading. What are some other aspects of the book that can encourage them to go out and buy it that maybe we've missed? Well, I think that if you wonder how we got here, how Trump is still president, how he survived the impeachment, and why his dalliances with Russia and with Putin leave his base cheering on for more, this book has all of these things, right? So I talk about

2016. I talk about the early years of his presidency. I go into the history of the racism in the religious right and how the precursors to the alt-right back in the 70s and 80s were enmeshed in this growing movement. And then I look at how his administration is carrying out this theocratic agenda through policy and personnel and why this is part of a global movement towards greater authoritarianism and especially greater authoritarianism with sort of a Christian veneer on it. Wow. We're really screwed if these guys take prayer.

I think I saw you talking about one of the reasons that the Christians are okay, the evangelicals are okay with the Putin connection. Do you want to talk about that a little bit, maybe? Yeah. So these were some of the most anti-communist people, right, during the Cold War, right? They viewed communism as an anti-Christian threat to America, but specifically an anti-Christian threat to America. And then after the fall of communism, when you saw the rise of autocrats like Putin, but particularly his invocation of Russia's Christian past, obviously Orthodox Christianity as opposed to evangelicalism, but still, and his willingness to wage similar culture wars in Russia as they were

waging here. So efforts to criminalize homosexuality, for example, in Russia. These were things that they admired Putin for as opposed to raised questions about Putin. And so there are American figures in the religious right who are very much working with and connected to autocrats like Putin or Viktor Orban in Hungary or Bolsonaro in Brazil because of how they overlay their authoritarianism with christianity and with opposition to lgbtq rights

and abortion that's just scary and we saw hungary fall its democracy is pretty much dead at this point right yeah yeah democracies can die i think that's the biggest thing that people don't realize right now um is that is that that's how it dries i mean we're all running around drunk going yeah there's nothing you can stop american democracy and stuff and then one day it's over and you're like what happened and you know we've seen that in the past and everything else so uh it's a great book everyone should check it out um you're going to learn a lot you're going to understand you know like you say it's not a black and white sort of thing and i'm not talking about race here it's not a monolith of like why do white evangelicals like trump it's very complicated in depth and i think until all of us

start really understanding what's going on and what it's all about um because i remember my initial arguments with people after the election were like, no, the people just wanted jobs. And you're like, no, man, this goes way deeper than that. Right, right. Exactly. There you go. Well, it's been wonderful to have Sarah on the show.

The book is called Unholy White. I'm sorry. Unholy Why White Evangelicals Ws worship at the altar of Donald Trump. Boy, I'd like to see what's going to finally make that stop. Thanks for being on the show with us, Sarah. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you. Guys, where can they check you out on the interwebs too as well, Sarah?

Type investigations.org, Sarah Posner.com, or on Twitter at Sarah Posner. There you go. Check her out, guys. And for my audience, be sure to check out the video version of this on youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss. Hit that bell notification. You can also go to amazon.com forward slash shop forward slash Chris Voss. You can see all the books of all the wonderful authors who've been on the show. And also refer the show to your friends, neighbors, relatives.

Go to the CBPN or Chris Voss Podcast Network. Thanks to Manish for tuning in. We'll see you guys next time.