Long-term readers of this blog will not be surprised to learn that I have, with many others, had some anxious moments fretting over the recent American election. When I woke up last Wednesday morning, it seemed that the fears of a re-election of President Trump might come to pass. Even after Joe Biden’s convincing win and his four million majority in the popular vote, there are still anomalies to be faced. One glaring fact puts a dampener on the temptation to celebrate too extravagantly. President Trump was the recipient of 70 million votes from his fellow countrymen. This statistic is remarkable, and it requires an explanation, or at least some degree of inquiry. For four years Trump has been exhibiting a combination of petulance, prejudice, gross lack of empathy, dishonesty and lying, coupled with rank incompetence in many of the tasks of government. In spite of all this, huge numbers of people wanted him to continue to be the president of their country. The other great conundrum, which is closer to home, is the fact that hordes of self-proclaimed Christian people also decided that he was able to represent them and be their leader. What can we say is going on when a man, totally absorbed with himself alone, appeals to so many people?
One of my friends in the cult world, Steven Hassan, has written a fascinating book with the title The Cult of Trump and this appeared at the end of 2019. He is able to account for Trump’s appeal to large numbers of people at a very visceral level. For example, Trump has been an arch-manipulator through the use of fear and hate speech. He tells people that hordes of Mexicans are waiting at the border, wanting to rob honest Americans of their property, endanger their wives and take their jobs. Such rhetoric can by-pass the normal critical thinking parts of the brain. When such language is constantly reinforced by broadcasters, such as Fox News, you have the recipe for keeping many people on tenterhooks. Fear-based thinking makes the individual open to consume the most extraordinary conspiracy theories and irrational thinking. Once a large swathe of the population begins to think in this way, they begin to become dependent on the source of this way of thinking. Trump is the provider of this information, but also he offers himself as a potential rescuer from all these terrible threats. This is a dynamic that also works well in a cultic context. Somehow Trump has managed to infect a large section of the American population with this fearful mentality.
The most interesting part of Hassan’s book are his accounts of several of the ultra-right/Christian groups that have helped to fire up Trump’s obsessions and distortions. The first of these organisations, we have time to look at, is called The Family. The history of this organisation goes back to 1935. A Norwegian, Abraham Vereide, had a vision when God spoke to him. ‘Christianity’, he was told, ‘has got it wrong for 2000 years in its focussing on the poor and the weak’.’ But’, the vision went on, ’it is only the big man who is capable of mending the world. But who would help the big man?’ In summary the Family was a kind of Christian fascism. By 1953 Vereide had organised the first National Prayer Breakfast, a meeting that attracted many of the wealthy and powerful Washington elite. The Family had a vision that was strongly militaristic and fiercely anti-Communist. It envisaged a ruling class of Christ-committed men (shades of Iwerne camps?!). These would be bound in a fellowship of anointed key men. In short, Vereide and the Family were looking for a kind of theocratic dictatorship. So the Family’s strategy is to recruit people with money, power and special skills and invite them to these National Prayer Breakfasts. The ideology of the Breakfasts is not exclusively Christian or even Republican, but it remains firmly right-wing and authoritarian. Christ’s message, as far as this group are concerned, was never really about love, mercy, justice or forgiveness. It was about power. Evidently the Family approved of Trump, even though the exact relationship with him is unclear. While Trump’s earlier relationship with the Family is not open for scrutiny, his vice-president Mike Pence has for some time been a key member. With Pence at the right hand of the President, the Family came very close to fulfilling their dream of a group of religiously inclined supermen at the heart of government. Nine individuals with strong evangelical credentials were appointed to Trump’s cabinet. When Jeff Sessions, linked to the Family, left the Cabinet and was replaced by William Barr, there were, through him, links with another secretive Christian organisation, Opus Dei.
Another religious network which has been discussed here in a blog post a couple of years ago is the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). This network peddles ideas within the evangelical/Pentecostal world similar to The Family. The recently disgraced leader of Hillsong New York, Carl Lentz, is deeply involved in this organisation. The key task of NAR is that of influencing and if possible, taking over every aspect of American culture (politics, business, education etc) with a well worked out Christian theocratic agenda. Trump has proved to be a useful tool in furthering some of these aims. One significant inroad into American institutions has been made by the appointment of 200 conservative federal judges in different part of the country. From NAR’s perspective, there is an ongoing struggle to restore God’s rule in a society which has become increasingly secular and anti-Christian. It remains to be seen how deep the damage to American society has been through the making of these judicial appointments as well as other concessions to the Christian Right.
A further group, not especially religious in its inspiration, is found in the so-called libertarian movement. This network is inspired by the writings of the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand. This writer, in a book called Atlas Shrugged, promoted a rugged individualistic ideology. Government, taxes and support of the poor are all unnecessary. Naturally Rand’s philosophy has special appeal for the tiny section of the population who are extremely rich. Massive tax cuts for the rich seem to have come about, in part, through this influence of Rand on many Republican politicians. From the perspective of this wealthy privileged group, democracy and socialism are both negative words. They indicate a threat to wealthy privilege because the majority in society are being encouraged to gang up on the rich to carry out legalised theft. A great deal of energy has been expended by the Trump administration in trying to remove the medical insurance scheme of his predecessor, known as Obamacare. We in the UK find it hard to understand the way the argument is made against ‘socialist medicine’. Having a government in any way concerned with the needs of poor people, seems to be low on the agenda of many wealthy Trump supporters. They have been quietly seduced by the assumptions of these extraordinary right-wing/Christian elitist ideologies.
Donald Trump seems to be a phenomenon which has been created by a combination of extreme right-wing ideas, a corruption of Christian ideology and other ideas that serve the interests of the very rich. Paradoxically and unexpectedly, this phenomenon of Trumpism has also been made into a commodity to appeal to many of the poorest elements in American society. There is a striking parallel between the messages of prosperity preachers, aimed at the poor, and the appeal of Trump to the same group. Look at my wealth, my success and all the possessions that I enjoy. You too can enjoy all of it by proxy through identification with me. Trump’s self-presentation as a constant ‘winner’ is believed somehow to rub off on to all his followers. The reality is, of course, is that things don’t work like that. It is the same for followers of prosperity preachers. Both sets of promises are completely empty. As we now know, the successful businessman trope is also a complete myth as far as Trump is concerned. We suspect that it will all come tumbling down very quickly when the banks and other lenders realise that the Trump brand has been thoroughly trashed by all the reports of criminal behaviour. But, up to now, it has been possible for many to believe in and project on to this extraordinary larger-than-life figure. Like a worshipped and feared father figure, Trump has drawn the adoration of millions. We may not feel any of that attraction ourselves, but we need to feel some of its power as a way of understanding what is going on in this fascinating drama of American political life. For us, as people concerned with the intersection between religious ideology and the rest of life, it is particularly interesting.. Too many of the same political and religious currents swirl around our own country for us ever to be complacent about what could happen to our own society.
I never knew that was the origin of the National Prayer Breakfasts. Fascinating.
Many thanks for this. I suspect that Trump will spend the rest of his life in litigation. That is probably why he has not conceded, and also why he has (in a form of concession) suggested running in 2024. Another bankruptcy beckons. Most of his ‘assets’ are either heavily mortgaged or are really franchises. If he flees to Russia in order to escape plaintiffs and creditors, including the IRS – who went after Nixon in 1974 – then he still risks insolvency, since he probably has limited liquidity. The least worst option, with this Hobson’s choice, might be as a pensioner of Putin somewhere on the Black Sea (I note that Putin has, rather usefully, given himself immunity from prosecution for life).
However, as Gore Vidal used to tell us, let us look at what he has done, rather than what he has said he would do. Not much, to be honest. His domestic legislative achievement is largely a blank. In healthcare he simply enlarged the holes in the Swiss cheese that is Obamacare (the Mitt Romney plan). His tax cuts are merely part of the Reaganite continuum. Ditto his defunding of environmental programmes and opening protected federal lands to commercial exploitation (this has happened under previous administrations, going back to Harding). The promised infrastructure spending never materialised.
However, he has made a more significant difference in foreign policy. Whilst the current account deficit with China has never been greater (his tariffs have been an abject failure), and his rapprochement with North Korea was a charade, his policy of sanctions – an amplification of the status quo – has been very modestly successful, though at the cost of significant suffering in Iran and Venezuela. He could never prise Russia from China, and now I suspect no US administration ever will, since the former is too exposed to the latter to take that risk.
No, where he has scored has been in re-negotiating NAFTA: this appears to have had the effect of raising wages for the poorest on both sides of the Rio Grande, and it must account for the shift of some elements of the Latino vote from the Democrats to the GOP (in Texas, though not in Arizona); similarly, the hard line on immigration *might* also have had an effect on wages amongst the poorest (but he never came close to deporting as many migrants as Obama). In this, he has shown free trade deals for what they really are: only very modestly beneficial, with the gains being spent quite quickly.
His ‘animosity’ towards Europe was born of a frustration shared by all US presidents since Truman, only Trump was more candid.
Even allowing for COVID-19 deaths and the Yemen, he has been *arguably* less sanguinary than his immediate predecessors. What has riled has been his guileless and offensive tone: he has exposed too many home truths to make him acceptable. He has held up a mirror to his country and its elites, and they did not like what they saw.
That is why he has been the worst president.
Also, as to Trump’s prodigious mendacity, it is not without precedent. However, his abiding weakness has been his *apparent* tendency to believe his own deceptions; such is his egotism, he considers that something becomes true – or ought to be true – because *he* has said it.
This puts me in mind of the celebrated aphorism of I. F. Stone: “All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.” Unfortunately, this has been a besetting failing of certain American policymakers who believe that the myth of American exceptionalism somehow absolves them from the ‘sin’ of acting like other countries. The UK has often been guilty of the same moral confusion. Trump has been so artless in his dishonesty and violation of prevailing norms, that he has unwittingly exposed this hypocrisy for what it is. This, I feel, is why he is loathed so viscerally by so many ‘centrists’ within the American political and financial elite.
Also, Stephen connects Trump with Rand. It is true that she has had a great influence on the libertarian movement, but the first and best known instance of the phrase ‘rugged individualism’ was that of Herbert Hoover in his 1928 presidential campaign (and he had written a book on ‘American Individualism’ in 1922). The tradition of individualism in the US is far older than Rand and, indeed, Hoover. Trump cannot really be classed as a libertarian: many of his tropes (such as tariffs and infrastructure spending) fall into the category of ‘big government conservatism’, as per Bush II. I am no fan of Rand, but in ‘The Fountainhead’ (1943), a much better book than ‘Atlas Shrugged’ (and an even better film, of 1949, with Gary Cooper as Howard Roark) Rand wrote:
“It’s easy to run to others. It’s so hard to stand on one’s own record. You can fake virtue for an audience. You can’t fake it in your own eyes. Your ego is your strictest judge. They run from it. They spend their lives running. It’s easier to donate a few thousand to charity and think oneself noble than to base self-respect on personal standards of personal achievement. It’s simple to seek substitutes for competence – such easy substitutes: love, charm, kindness, charity. But there is no substitute for competence.”
Even if Trump has been influenced by Rand, it cannot be said that he or his administration have lived by her precepts.
However, since ‘white evangelicals’ have nailed their colours to the Trumpian mast, where else will they now go, politically?
As for ‘sanguinary’, there is the forcible separation of desperate migrating families and the separate internment, in squalid conditions, of adults and very young children. Many did not survive this harsh treatment; Trump has blood on his hands there.
That, to me, is one of the worst features of his presidency. Another is the constant undermining of the US Constitution. Having been educated in American schools, the sacredness of the Constitution and its provisions was constantly dinned into us. Trump has shown it no respect.
A third is the deliberate widening of divisions within the US population, fanning the flames of fear and hatred.
I fear it will be a long time before the US recovers from the damage Trump has done. Thank God that Joe Biden is a unifier who is prepared to work across parties.
Many thanks. I note this with respect to the forced separation of parents from children: https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/kids-in-cages-debate-trump-obama/2020/10/23/8ff96f3c-1532-11eb-82af-864652063d61_story.html, especially as this has been a matter of some recent and renewed controversy. It has been well-established that the Trump administration has deported rather fewer migrants than its predecessor, though at the cost of a high rate of incarceration (https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/the-trump-administrations-immigration-jails-are-packed-but-deportations-are-lower-than-in-obama-era/2019/11/17/27ad0e44-f057-11e9-89eb-ec56cd414732_story.html; I am citing the Washington Post deliberately). Trump, significantly, did not start new wars and attempted to scale back existing ones: that much is not true of his two immediate predecessors.
I agree with everything you write. Trump is sui generis (in a really bad way); he has been enormously divisive, and Biden will be a relief after the continual waves of toxicity.
However, Trump has widened fissures that were already very wide. Trump has scowled where other presidents have smiled. Really what I want to stress is that he has not been nearly as radical as many have suggested or as he *seems*. If US policymakers want a reversion to a dismal status quo ante, it will simply mean that the Biden administration will be much like Trump, but with a smiling face. The contest, therefore, between genuine progressives within the new administration (the Sanders/Warren faction) and the DNC will arguably be as, or more, decisive than that between the Democrats and the GNP.
Ultimately, all this sturm und drang was inevitable after the US decided to overturn the discrimination enshrined by Congress from 1882 (and especially the Johnson-Reid ‘national origins’ Act 1924) with the Hart-Celler Act 1965. The US would, in an age of cheap mass transit, become less white and, ultimately, mostly non-white. The most prescient remarks I know of this process were described in Gunnar Myrdal’s massive ‘American Dilemma: the Negro Problem and Modern Democracy’ (1944), in noting differential birth-rates between whites and non-whites:
“Particularly as Russia cannot be reckoned on to adhere to white supremacy, it is evident from these facts — though nobody in our countries seems to take it seriously — that within a short period the shrinking minority of white people in our Western lands will either have to succumb or to find ways of living on peaceful terms with colored people. If white people, for their own preservation, attempt to reach a state in which they will be tolerated by their colored neighbors, equality will be the most they will be strong enough to demand.” (1018)
Or, to put it another way, and in view of the history of the US, a peaceful transformation may be the most we can hope for. Let us pray that this is more likely under Biden and, perhaps in time, Harris.
GOP – not GNP!
Also, I have been struck by how often in the history of the US, intense bitterness has been as much the exception as the rule. Trump’s current shenanigans are usually described as ‘unprecedented’. This is true, but only up to a point. Think, for instance, of the ‘stolen election’ of 1824, when Andrew Jackson – who had bested John Quincy Adams, William Crawford and Henry Clay; this resulted in the ‘corrupt bargain’ in which Jackson, who was well ahead of Adams in electoral college votes, was denied the presidency. Jackson had his revenge in 1828, and then proceeded to overthrow practically every established political convention over the next eight years (he is still – controversially – on the $20 bill, despite having had so much blood on his own hands). Think also of 1876-77, when Samuel Tilden beat Rutherford Hayes in the popular vote; there were intense controversies about alleged cheating in Florida, Louisiana (both states still occupied by the US Army) and Oregon, with accompanying threats of renewed civil war: the commission appointed by Congress to determine the outcome split along party lines, and Hayes won office courtesy of a morally repugnant deal in which the Army withdrew from the occupied states, leaving the way open for Jim Crow. Think also of 1888, when another Democrat – Grover Cleveland – won the popular vote but lost in the electoral college; Matt Quay, the corrupt boss of Pennsylvania, shook his head on being denied a cabinet position by Benjamin Harrison and wondered whether Harrison knew “how close a number of men were compelled to approach the penitentiary to make him president”.
There have been many protracted periods when strife has been the exception rather than the rule. I have recently been re-reading Henry Adam’s masterful ‘History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison’ (1889-91; Henry was John Quincy’s grandson): the period c. 1798-1816 was an epoch of intense political passion and much conspiracy, sometimes violent. For example, and taken at random, a letter from Timothy Pickering to Rufus King (4 March 1804), both Federalists and holders of high office, gives a flavour of the feelings of the time:
“I am disgusted with the men who now rule, and with their measures. At some manifestations of their malignancy I am shocked. The cowardly wretch [Jefferson!] at their head, while like a Parisian revolutionary monster prating about humanity, would feel an infernal pleasure in the utter destruction of his opponents.” (v. 2, 421-22, Library of America edition, 1986).
These two men, both members of the Continental Congress, with King a signatory of the Constitution, both felt deeply that Jefferson (also a ‘founder’) was throwing over every almost constitutional precept and was violating all of the norms on which they believed the country had been established.
There is ‘nothing new under the sun’.
Thanks, Froghole. Unfortunately, I can’t get past the paywall to read the Washington Post articles.
We are agreed re. Trump’s toxicity, and that Biden has his work cut out for him.
I do wonder what will happen to the Religious Right. Sadly, I don’t see the older generation changing, but there is evidence that younger Christians see things differently. I hope so.
For those with a Netflix account there is a 5 part documentary series of the same name investigating “The Family” and its role in American politics, National Prayer Breakfasts etc. Your suggestion of similarities to Iwerne is an interesting one that I had not thought of before.
Maurice. The possible link between Iwerne and the Family was very much an afterthought. I don’t want to push it too hard but the fact that both appeared in the 1930s has marked both of them with a distinct political flavour. The original thought that I had back in the 90s that Bash was inspired by Hitler Youth seemed too outrageous at the time, but it still seems plausible or at least worth discussing! A swathe of people in the upper classes (public school educated no doubt) thought Hitler was a good thing.
It is indeed worth discussing and is an interesting idea. The big difference I suppose is that The Family has both sought and exhibited political influence on a very prominent and national level. I really can’t imagine prayer breakfasts like that occurring in the UK, nor the photos of the President being prayed for with the laying on of hands etc. They also have enormous financial clout and effectively a lobbying industry.
Iwerne (and I admit most of my knowledge of it comes from this blog) does not appear to have looked to exert outside influence and has in fact done the exact opposite in remaining separate from the church and society at large. This entirely autonomous group outside all other structures is exactly what has led to the scandals and cover-ups that are now being revealed.
Does Iwerne/ReNew even have influence from its finances? It certainly has wealthy churches such as St Helen’s in The City, but I’m not sure that’s its real motivation and nor is it looking to expand and influence. It seems more like an old-boys club looking inwards and more interested in remaining a small (elite?) group.