The Decibel - Why Trump’s apocalyptic rhetoric has such wide appeal

Episode Date: June 5, 2024

Last week, former U.S. president Donald Trump was found guilty on 34 felony counts. In speeches and interviews following the decision, he used religiously-charged language and called on supporters to get revenge at the polls. This isn’t the first time Trump has utilized evangelical references, but his 2024 election campaign is increasingly relying on apocalyptic rhetoric.U.S. political analyst and author Jared Yates Sexton is on the show to explain the wide appeal of the religious right’s messaging, the intersection of evangelicalism and the Make America Great Again Movement and how a loss of faith in democratic institutions underlies the appeal of religious narratives.Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail]

I come from a very, very small town in rural Indiana, and I was raised up in the evangelical community, a really, really extreme branch of it. That's Jared Yates Sexton. It was steeped with conspiracy theories, apocalyptic imagery, you know, white supremacist panic and anxieties. Jared has since left the community he grew up in, but that upbringing taught him the power of religious storytelling. It creates a larger story that you start to exist in. You're involved in an extreme religious struggle between supernatural good and supernatural evil. And as a result, everything in your life takes on this sort of tinge.

Now Jared is hearing the same narratives again, this time from a very different source. For those who have been wronged and betrayed, of which there are many people out there that have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. 2024 is our final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers.

Donald Trump has increasingly been using religiously charged language, including in a speech after he was criminally convicted on 34 felony counts. You saw what happened to some of the witnesses that were on our side. They were literally crucified by this man who looks like an angel, but he's really a devil. Jared is a U.S. political analyst and the author of The Midnight Kingdom, a history of power, paranoia, and the coming crisis. Today, he's on the show to discuss how evangelicalism intersects with the Make America Great Again movement. I'm Nina Karaman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail.

Jared, thanks for being here today. Thank you for having me. Jared, since the guilty verdict, Donald Trump has given a number of speeches and interviews. What is the narrative that he's been sharing? Well, the narrative is sort of a number of speeches and interviews. What is the narrative that he's been sharing? Well, the narrative is sort of a multilayered narrative. And you'll notice it's not just him that's saying it. It's a lot of the Republican surrogates. It's a lot of the right wing media outlets. And it starts like this. America is being invaded by people from different countries. Right. This is an echo of what we call the white replacement theory,

the idea that there is a vast evil conspiracy being carried out to replace white Americans with immigrants that can be controlled by the Democrats as well as the sinister cabals that we're talking about. And so that has fundamentally transformed the country and created a state. We can call it the deep state, we can call it the new world order, whatever we're feeling comfortable with at the moment, like whatever resonates with people. And this is an evil plot to destroy America from within. It just so happens that Donald Trump is in the crosshairs right now. It just so happens that his legal troubles and political troubles are representative of a larger plot. And if he

falls, and this is what he keeps, you know, repeating over and over, and this is what the message keeps telling everyone. If he falls, if he doesn't win the election, if he faces legal consequences, they're not just coming after him. They're coming after everybody else. The next step is to come in, obviously take people's guns, shepherd them into concentration camps, and create the type of apocalyptic scenario that is warned about in the book of Revelation. So it is a larger white supremacist evangelical narrative. Okay, there's a lot there. And can we connect it back specifically to the trial, the verdict, the upcoming election? Like, what does he say specifically around those points? And how does that, I guess, fit into this bigger idea?

Well, so what we're being told right now is that the legal system of the United States has been corrupted beyond saving. It's been turned into a weapon by the deep state, which again is a nod towards this idea of a Jewish controlled apparatus. And the legal system has been completely bought out. They'll mention George Soros. You have a Soros-backed DA and the whole thing. The George Soros owns it, that he's the one that is funding all of this, which again is a wink and a nudge towards a Jewish-controlled system. And that it has been completely corrupted and it requires destruction and then a reconstruction. And the reconstruction needs to be helmed by Donald Trump and his allies and the Republican Party.

Basically, it is the idea of a failed state that needs a strong man to come in and recreate it. And this verdict and all of the other associated trials that he's facing, they are supposed to be evidence of a larger conspiracy that has come to pass. I guess what I wonder about this, because when we hear Donald Trump, you know, use specific words, say these things, is this like a conscious effort by him or is this kind of just regular Donald Trump hyperbole? You know, since he's come on the political scene, he's often said extreme things. Yeah, it's a combination of the two. Donald Trump's instincts rhetorically come from within him, right? He looks around at America and he sees a declining state that only he can make, quote unquote, great again. But there's also something that a lot of us who study this have

noticed, which is a lot of these speeches are studded with specific pieces of rhetoric. One of the things that happened when he announced his reelection campaign is he started saying, I am your retribution. And that is absolutely loaded with a lot of rhetorical power. It tells people that Trump himself is a divine agent, right? In Christian mythology, you have a Messiah, you have someone who was sent by God specifically to redeem the human race, but you also have divine agents. You have flawed men who come onto earth and they're more than willing to carry out the violence that God wants them to carry out. Trump has been taught by the people around him who activate a lot of Christian nationalism as well as a lot of radical Catholicism.

He has been taught to use some of this rhetoric to paint himself as a divine agent. And the people who are at home listening to this who have the background such as mine, they hear it loud and clear. Well, let's talk a little bit about this then, because this sounds like from what you're saying, it's not really something that Trump is doing on his own. So is this part of wider messaging? Are there other examples that we can see from Republicans using similar language? Yeah. So Donald Trump's religious tradition is much more secular. He comes from the power of positive thinking. Norman Vincent Peale's like, think everything will be fine and you'll make a lot of money. That's not radical Christianity, right? That is not what we're talking about here.

This is very specifically Christian nationalism, which is the idea that America has a chosen fate by God. God has chosen America to carry out his will. And right now we are being occupied by satanic forces, which says that religion shouldn't take a passive role, but that evangelicals have a moral and supernatural responsibility to take over government and to reshape it. And unfortunately, this looks a lot like the authoritarian regimes that we see around the world now, which are powered by this same religious ideology. It's basically kind of the opposite of separation of church and state. This is a melding of the two then.

But what we're seeing now, they're trying to change history to say that America was chosen not just as a Judeo-Christian nation, but as a white Judeo-Christian nation. And all these things come together. And right now, we're actually watching a battle over the reality of not just the past, but the present and the future. So we've talked about Trump using this kind of language. Who else do we hear using similar rhetoric these days? What we actually see is it happens on the fringes. You can find this on online forums, messaging apps, all of that stuff.

And eventually it gets cribbed. And we've heard these sort of things. We were introduced to it largely in the 1980s, but then into the beginning of the 21st century with the George W. Bush presidency. We had a responsibility to fight the axis of evil, capital E evil. And whenever you're in America, and particularly you're from the evangelical community, and by the way, you've just suffered a terrorist attack that was carried out by Muslim radicals, you realize that you have a crusade that you have to carry out, which is what the war on terror was a secularized crusade in a lot of these people's minds. And then you have a presidency

with Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States, who in any time you listen to a Republican or one of these evangelicals, they all believe that he was a Muslim and that he was a secret puppet of a larger conspiracy. So within that framing, all of a sudden, all of these speeches and all of these remarks that are talking about the threat, the deep state, the new world order, whatever it is, they take on a very, very clear context, which is that you aren't just in a major supernatural battle, but you are inching up on the final battle. That is the Armageddon. And that's what we hear when we hear, oh, America is falling apart. It's being taken over. You know, this could very well be the end of America. It has a religious connotation and it's always being built on.

This idea of like the end of America. Yes, I think of, you know, the Republican rebuttal to the State of the Union this year, right? Katie Britt, a Republican senator. American Dream has turned into a nightmare for so many families. The true unvarnished state of our union begins and ends with this. And you don't have to look any further than the crisis at our southern border to see it. A lot of this kind of language is peppered through speeches like that. It absolutely is. And if you actually trace it, the beginnings of the evangelical right in American politics, particularly their reassertion in the 1970s and 1980s, it's all based on things from a guy named Francis Schaeffer,

which basically said, if we don't have a religious foundation for what is happening, everything's going to fall apart. We're going to watch disorder. We're going to watch crime. We're going to see, you know, everything in America is going to fall apart, much like the fall of Rome, which is another part of this larger story that the evangelicals are telling. What Britt says, what Republicans are saying is that we have reached a point of moral crisis because it's also a supernaturally evil crisis. What is actually being said is that something needs put to right, and we need a strong man to do it. Jared, can we kind of trace, I guess, how these messages proliferate? Because I think a lot of us think of these maybe on the fringe,

but when we're talking about mainstream political leaders actually saying these things, how does that process happen? Well, for a while, back in the 1980s, 1990s, you would see the Republican Party sort of dog whistle to larger extremist groups. This is how like patriot groups following Waco and Ruby Ridge, you start to see them sort of conversing with each other in order to sort of attack, you know, the presidency of Bill Clinton. And that was sort of a back and forth, a feedback loop. What we've seen recently, though, going back into 2015 into 2016, is a lot of this is cooked up in places you would never expect it. Everywhere from 4chan to 8chan, a lot of these openly fascistic white supremacist groups, it goes from those forums into places like Alex Jones's Infowars. And he will sort of launder them, clean them up, make them,

quote unquote, more acceptable. And then they will make their way onto Fox News within a couple of days. And I understand there's, I guess, a consumer aspect to this too, Jared. Can we talk about that? You know, I have people ask me all the time, they say, is this an authoritarian movement or is it a grift? And the answer is it's both. Donald Trump's movement, MAGA, is not just about creating an authoritarian environment in the United States. It's also about selling people products. Everything from the Make America Great red hat to Trump NFTs to a Trumpy bear, which is a teddy bear that you can buy in order to show the president you support him, to Trump sneakers. You're actually affecting a consumer identity.

And it turns into a quasi-politics. It turns into a pseudo-environment where you as a person are expressing who you are through your purchases. And weirdly enough, Trump, who has put his name on everything from vodka to steaks to water to- To the Bibles a few months ago, right? Trump Bibles. Right. We now have even gotten to the point where Christian nationalism is its own consumer identity, right? The quote unquote word of God has now been commodified. But it is a very weird cycle. But it isn't just within the purchases. It's in the worldview and the way that people are interacting with it, which actually contributes to radicalization. We'll be right back. Jared, let's talk about the timing of this, because, you know, as far as I remember, we didn't really see this kind of language with Trump in 2016, 2020 campaigns, at least not to the same extent. So what is it about this moment right now that makes this religious storytelling that you're talking about more appealing? Well, going back into 2016, Trump had a strange relationship with the evangelical community. Of course, he would do the things that most Republicans would do. They would go to the

churches, they would make the speeches talking about their faith, those types of things. Famously, he was asked what his favorite verse in the Bible was, and I believe he said all of them, which is just an incredible answer. But eventually what happened was the total support of him by the evangelical, white evangelical community, it came in handy in times of crisis, particularly around the 2020 election, where he lost, he wanted to hold on to power, and that apocalyptic rhetoric started really growing and growing. The problem here is that we're facing not just a political crisis, we're facing an existential crisis. I think in the Western democracies, a lot of people feel like something is wrong. And they're right, something has gone wrong in sort of

the fabric and the underpinnings of how life works. People can't necessarily get ahead the way that they used to. They're looking for something to belong to. They're looking for something to give them meaning. We have a loneliness epidemic in this country, the likes of which we've never seen. It brings people together in community. It gives them a shared purpose and it gives them a shared drive. And a lot of people are looking for that. It just so happens that Donald Trump has capitalized on that and he has created around him a faux movement.

So is this, I guess, kind of the point of some of this evangelical storytelling? Like, what are people getting specifically from this religious storytelling? Well, so right now it feels a lot like America, again, is in decline. Things have stalled. You know, depending upon who gets elected, it doesn't feel like all that much necessarily changes outside of some very key things. A lot of people feel powerless. They feel hopeless. They're starting to feel nihilistic and fatalistic. The other problem that we're seeing here is that nobody is really aware of what has happened, where these changes originate from, what they are, what they constitute, or even how you might begin to push back against them.

You don't see conversations about neoliberalism or globalism in our history textbooks that people are reading in their schools. You don't see a lot of discussion about alternatives. As a result, what happens is a process that's called mystification, which means that people, ordinary people, are pushed further and further away from the decision-making process. They don't really understand the forces at play. They don't even particularly understand the principles. Instead, everyone becomes good or evil, right? You have heroes, you have villains. This is one of the reasons why the conspiracy theories start to grow. This mystification process keeps people away from power and it pushes their faith and it pushes their reality

into more conspiratorial thinking, which makes sure that not only are they radicalized, but they're more and more vulnerable to radicalization by demagogues. Yeah. It sounds like what you're saying is that kind of with a lack of information, essentially, it's very easy to see things as black and white, a very clear, simplified version of what's actually happening. Yeah. And what's actually happening is that process of mystification is increasing and it's

gaining momentum. So what has happened is that evangelical message, that rhetoric, the idea that you are part of capital G good. And by the way, one of the great features of evangelicalism is not only are you on God's side, God's going to win. We've already read the book of Revelation. Like we understand that in the end, good is going to win no matter how bad things get. So what is being peddled, much like any cult that happens during times of economic and political crisis, what happens is you start looking for leaders who are going to tell you, hey, not only are you on the right side, but you're going to win. You said something really interesting a bit earlier, Jared, about how kind of, you know, you believe that these problems can be fixed, but in order to do so, they require

an authoritarian solution or a leader that represents that. Can you just talk a little bit more about that and how that connects to these ideas of evangelical storytelling? There are these very, very observable cycles. And you start to see the right wing, they make the same point over and over again, which is liberal democracy doesn't work. Look at it. Congress doesn't pass anything. Your lives aren't getting any better. You can feel that things are getting worse. You need someone to come in and put this thing to rights. Lucky for you, we've got somebody who's going to come in and put this thing to rights. And what you keep seeing now is this idea of, well, maybe Trump could just be president for life. You know, if we can just get him in power, if we can take over all the major

parts of government, don't worry, we're going to create a quote unquote Christian democracy that looks a lot like Hungary, or maybe in their wildest dreams, looks a lot like Putinist Russia. The inherent human desire for a strongman to take things over, it's understandable. You want somebody to go in and play hardball. You want somebody to handle it. For some, it's a Franklin Delano Roosevelt who will come in and do the New Deal and make things fair for people. For other people, it's Donald Trump. It just so happens where you lie on the political spectrum, and going back to the evangelical stuff, what it is you were taught when you were younger, what sort of prejudices you have, what sort of narratives you've been exposed to, that affects which way you're going to go sort of on the political spectrum when things start

reaching a point of crisis. I mean, some of these challenges are really not unique to America, right? Like extreme partisanship. We see these struggles really throughout the world. So I wonder, do we see similar language being used elsewhere by leaders in other parts of the world as well? You know what? Actually, we see the exact same language. The rhetoric of the Republican Party, everything from the New World Order to the deep state to transphobia, all of this, it's translated, but it's there in Vladimir Putin's speeches in Russia about why he invaded Ukraine. It's there when Viktor Orban addresses Hungary. India's Modi has also been compared to God, right? Oh, Modi absolutely uses the exact same thing as he's discriminating against Muslims.

Basically, the right wing around the world is on the same page because what has happened is that globalism, which was created through the neoliberal consensus, it's everywhere, right? It completely conquered the world. It put everybody in this economic system that wasn't fair, that it exploded people. It's now reaching its next step where everybody doubts its validity. They feel the pain from it and they're looking for answers. It just so happens that the right wing is always going to give the same answers. They help each other. They tutor each other. Viktor Orban has helped the Republicans. They look at Vladimir Putin with more respect and more reverence than they do, you know, a Democratic president. Like what we're actually seeing is the growth of an international authoritarian movement. In our last few minutes, Jared, let's bring it back to Trump.

We've talked about how this language is being used to sow distrust in the justice system and the current Biden administration. And of course, he also talks about the integrity of the 2020 election, right? So lots of Americans don't subscribe to what he says about that, but many do. So what happens as a result of this, I guess, you know, corrosion of respect of democratic institutions? Well, I want to say before I get into this, and I just want to make it very brief, I think there is an earned distrust of our institutions. We know that the legal system isn't fair. It's just not the way that the Republicans and Donald Trump are saying. What do you mean by that?

The legal system isn't corrupted because it's prosecuting Donald Trump for obvious crimes. It's corrupted because it's racist and sexist and classist. And we know that and we've seen it. It just so happens that in this case, they're using it for their own purposes. The problem here is it furthers the narrative you and I have been talking about, which is things are so broken. You can't elect people to solve it. You can't use traditional means to solve it. Checks and balances have failed. The only answer, according to Republicans and Donald Trump and authoritarians around the world, is you have to find somebody who has the will and the desire to use violence, to use anti-democratic means in order to push these things through in order to correct them. So it's capitalizing on earned mistrust, but it's also redirecting it in order to create a scenario that is beneficial for their

aims. I mean, that's a pretty scary thought, the things that you just laid out there. That's pretty scary for a lot of people to think about those options. It is. It is actually a really terrifying idea. But I do want to say, and I always try and bring this up, based on my studying and based on my research, these patterns I've been talking about, they always bring a clash between anti-democratic ideals and democratic ideals. As the strongman emerges and as the authoritarian movement gains power, you also see regular citizens who say, hey, something is wrong here. We're going to come together. We're going to build something better. We're starting to see the energy for that and the momentum for that. But I want to also go ahead and underscore this

again. It is a dangerous time. And if that threat isn't met, we are in for some really, really dangerous things. What are the possibilities isn't met, we are in for some really, really dangerous things. What are the possibilities that you're thinking about here? You know, it usually comes down to one of three scenarios or a mixture of it. One, the authoritarian wins and they completely co-opt the system. Again, all you have to do is look at Hungary or Russia. The second is that small d democratic movements push back. We've seen this with the progressive movement at the beginning of the 20th. We've seen this with the progressive movement at the beginning of the 20th century. We saw this with the New Deal consensus, you know, in the

mid-century. We've seen it with labor unions. We've seen it with student and youth protests. Those types of things eventually push back and they try and create something different. The third is a mixture. We don't know. We could arrive at a time in which we basically have a more extremist system that fights within itself and, you know, keeps kicking the can down the road and creates worsening conditions for all of this. We might become a little bit more authoritarian. You know, we could very well see the state multiply its power and start to use some of

these levers against democratic movements. And we might see democratic movements become more radical in the way that they participate. There are many instances of that. I remain optimistic that we're going to see small d democratic movements win this battle in the long run. But I also want to go ahead and underscore again that it is not going to be easy. We are in for some really, really turbulent years. And I think that people need to understand that there is a fight coming.

Jared, thank you for taking the time to be here today. Thank you so much. That's it for today. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms. Our interns are Aja Sauter and Kelsey Arnett. Our associate producer is Manjot Singh. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show.

Adrienne Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.